Tavits, Margit. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization (review)

Abstract

SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 580 people believed, others colluded, and still others resisted, but this is true, he argues, of ‘any power regime’. In order to understand the specificities of state socialism, it is necessary to explore ‘people’s various interactions, and their unexpected, surprising, and often contradictory outcomes, unfolding within the various social contexts organized, accepted, or even encouraged by the regime itself’ (p. 248). The strongest chapters in this collection take up Poenaru’s challenge to resist dichotomy. Socialist Escapes is a very welcome addition to a growing literature on tourism, leisure and the pleasures and challenges of daily life under Communism. Department of History Anne E. Gorsuch University of British Columbia Tavits, Margit. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2013. viii + 289 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £19.99: $32.99 (paperback). Scholars of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe have tended to downplay the importance of party organization. Members and an extensive network of party branches seemed so passé, so twentieth-century. Not only did notable authorities such as Attila Ágh, Petr Kopecký, Paul Lewis, Peter Mair and Ingrid van Biezen argue that new parties in the region were unlikely to build organizational structures, but they tapped into the conventional wisdom that parties in the new democracies did not need them. In her pioneering and path-breaking study Margit Tavits argues cogently against this view, showing that strong party organization really does matter for party success, longevity and durability. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization focuses on three components of party organization: organizational extensiveness (i.e. the number of local branches), membership size and activism and the professionalization of the central organization (i.e. the size of the central-office paid staff). Tavits employs a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods to great effect: there is hard core number-crunching using some sophisticated statistical approaches, but this is combined with detailed studies of parties in the four countries at the heart of her study: Estonia, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. By looking in detail at the contrasting fortunes of parties through paired comparisons and narratives, she shows that organizational strength enhances parties’ chances of electoral success and survival. She not only highlights the relationship, but seeks to tease out the mechanisms which make this happen. Tavits points out that if a member of parliament belongs to a party with a strong organization not only can he/she rely on the party’s REVIEWS 581 reputation and resources to get reelected, but also the stronger the party the more ‘credible and effective is its threat to withdraw the electoral benefits (i.e. expel or demote the legislator) if a legislator undermines party unity’ (p. 10). Tavits takes the study of party organization one step further by then asking, given the positive effects of party organizational strength, why do only some parties build strong organizations? She notes that ‘[p]arty leaders face a nontrivial dilemma: by strengthening their party organization on the ground in different electoral districts, they potentially improve its electability, and possible survival chances. However, they simultaneously risk losing intraparty power to the organizationally strong subunits’ (p. 151). Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization is an outstanding book, but two criticisms deserve to be levelled. Tavits is making a case for the importance of party organization across Central and Eastern Europe, but are her four cases the best to explore the hypotheses and illustrate the arguments? A case could be made that Bulgaria might have been worth looking at because of the striking variation between one side of the spectrum dominated by one party since 1989 and the other side which has shown significant churn. Equally, the case of Slovakia illustrates that even with well-developed party organizations some parties like the Communist-successor Party of the Democratic Left and Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia have perished. In neither case does Tavits’s distinction between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ leadership style help explain the life-cycles of these parties, although to be fair, her overall stress on the role of agency does seem to hold the key to the fate of these...