The Evolution of the Party System and Cleavages in Post- Communist Hungary

Abstract

The post-Communist countries suffered many transformations in a short period of time; their political, economic and social system is in a continuous change. All the countries from Central and Eastern Europe try to cope with the Western political systems, try to avoid the third wave of authoritarianism, wave that usually comes after a democratization one. One country’s political system is impressing and interesting in many ways. We decided to approach and to analyze only a part of the political system in a country that relatively succeeded on its way towards democracy – Hungary. The evolution of Hungarian cleavages allows us to identify the emergence of parties and from that point on to deeply analyze the party system from 1990 until now. One main advantage of our study is that we make a dynamic evaluation of the party system, using some variables that were applied in the case of other party systems. The variables and indicators were used by well-known scholars to observe some variations in the Western party systems and to realize some categories. The conclusions obtained have a degree of specificity; they cannot be entirely applied to the countries in the region. The research can be improved by analyzing the electoral system and by searching new indicators for the already used variables.