Testing Party Models in East-Central Europe

Abstract

This article seeks to relate hypotheses about how party structure and organization will develop in postcommunist East-Central Europe to empirical research conducted at the local level in Poland. The parties' membership bases and degree of local implantation are examined, together with their local organizational infrastructure and the pattern of local-national relations, particularly in the case of local parliamentary candidate selection. The research confirms a pattern of weak grounding in civil society and dependence on the state for financial and material resources (with the partial exceptions of the two `successor' parties with their roots in the communist regime), together with centralized decision-making combined with sectoral local autonomy. Of the `new' parties, only Solidarity Electoral Action has been able to match the `successor' parties' dominance by utilizing the Solidarity trade union's local organizational network.