Post-communist Democracies Research Articles

The State of Political Participation in Post-Communist Democracies: Low but Surprisingly Little Biased Citizen Engagement

The article assesses the state of political participation in Central and East European post-communist democracies. Incorporating the most recent data, it compares the emerging trends in political participation to those observed in the established democracies of Western Europe. The findings reveal that post-communist citizens participate substantially less than their Western counterparts, and, contrary to some expectations, no convergence has been taking place. This is due to a host of factors, the importance of which seems to vary according to the type of political activity. It is subsequently shown that while political participation is lower than in Western Europe, it is not markedly more biased. The poor state of political participation therefore does not appear to seriously undermine the quality of the post-communist democratic process.

Compelling criteria? Human rights in the European Union

ABSTRACTThe European Union's (EU) ‘widening’ to post-communist democracies contributed to the ‘deepening’ of integration to human rights: protection of individual (and minority) rights first emerged as EU requirements of democratic consolidation. Here I explore whether the EU deserves its reputation for promoting democratic consolidation by assessing whether transitional democracies meet the ‘Copenhagen Criteria’ on human rights. I find that transitional democracies currently in or acceding to the EU progressed in respecting human rights, but conclude that EU human rights commitments remain shallow and transitions to rights-respecting democracies are reversible.

Revenge of the Radical Right

What explains the success and failure of radical right parties over time and across countries? This article presents a new theory of the radical right that emphasizes its reactive nature and views it as backlash against the political successes of minorities and concessions extracted on their behalf. Unlike approaches that focus on competition between the extreme and mainstream parties, the theory stresses the dynamics between radical right and non-proximate parties that promote minority rights. Most notably, it derives the salience of identity issues in party politics from the polarization of the party system. The theory is tested with a new party-election-level dataset covering all post-communist democracies over the past 20 years. The results provide strong support for the theory and show that the rise and fall of radical right parties is shaped by the politics of minority accommodation.

Old and New Oppositions in Contemporary Europe

Unity and peace in Europe, freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe: Government and Opposition's founding editor Ghiţă Ionescu – the centenary of whose birth this special issue commemorates – might have been contented to see that two of his main ideals have now by and large been realized. At the same time, in contemporary Europe we can observe a huge variety of forms of opposition to the conventional holders of power, who appear to have been unable to respond successfully to new and pressing societal and economic challenges. The old convictions that once characterized politics in the European liberal democracies are gradually eroding, while the volatile and fragmented polities of the new post-communist democracies in the East are only adding to the increased uncertainties. The ongoing financial and economic crises have exacerbated many of the existing tensions, between new and old generations, between groups with levels of educational attainment, and between the domestic and supra-national levels. European democracies in the twenty-first century are thus having to contend with various challenges that are aimed, directly or indirectly, at the core of the political system, including the populist disregard for some of the fundamental values of liberal democracy and the rule of law, the variety of anti-establishment parties and movements challenging the democratic legitimacy of a discredited financial and political class, and the unclear outcomes of further European integration. Taken together, the contributions to this special issue suggest, these developments may cast a different light on our empirical and normative understanding of the European models of liberal democracy and the welfare state

Can the Post-Communist Democracies Survive a Continuation of the Euro-Crisis?

The global financial crisis and its prolonged European aftermath have created a major stress test for democracy in the ten new post-communist members of the European Union. Although a majority of these transitional states have so far withstood the test reasonably well on the economic side, three have lost significant ground on the democracy front. There is also reason for concern that continued Euro-stagnation could lead to additional regression not only in the three countries that have been backsliding but possibly also in others. This could jeopardize the extraordinary progress in post-communist democratization and Western integration achieved with the help of U.S. and EU policy in the 1989-2004 period.

Party system determinants of electoral reform in post-communist states

The article examines how the structure of party systems, that is, effective number of political actors, electoral volatility, and shares of dominant party votes and seats, affect the initiation and direction of electoral reform in post-communist democracies. Based on a dataset of electoral rule changes in post-communist democracies from 1992 to 2008, we analyze the frequency and direction of reforms over time. The findings reveal that the frequency of reforms declines with successive electoral cycles but not to the degree suggested by theories of institutional inertia. Countries with high levels of voter volatility are more likely to engage in reforms; however, the findings in this article demonstrate that politicians react to volatility by inconsistently choosing between permissive and restrictive responses.

Trust in mature and postcommunist democracies

Trust in mature and postcommunist democracies

Daniel Bochsler, Territory and electoral rules in post-communist democracies, reviewed by Sarah Birch

Daniel Bochsler, Territory and electoral rules in post-communist democracies, reviewed by Sarah Birch

The Electoral Trade-Off: How Issues and Ideology Affect Party Preference Formation in Europe

Political science has shown increasing interest in cross-country differences in the extent of structural voting, ideological voting and issue voting. Several studies have identified how voting behaviour is structured in post-communist democracies of East-Central Europe and established democracies of Western Europe. This article looks beyond a simple East–West distinction by developing a more sophisticated general model to explain cross-country variations in the effects of issues and left–right on party support. We demonstrate that the more issues are related to left–right, the stronger is the effect of left–right on party preferences. This effect occurs at the expense of the effects of issues on party preferences, which become weaker. These general findings help explain why the effect of left–right on party preferences is weaker in post-communist democracies than in more established democracies. Our proposition is empirically substantiated in a two-stage analysis using the European Election Study 2009.

When Two of the Same Are Needed: A Multilevel Model of Intragroup Ethnic Party Competition

Parties of ethno-regional minorities have been created in a large number of ethnically diverse countries, but sometimes one such party is not enough. While previous work has investigated the consequences of intragroup party competition, this study looks at the causes of internal political diversification of minority groups. In states with multiple levels of governments, intra-ethnic rival parties emerge if minorities are local majorities in certain regions. Intra-ethnic party competition is limited, however, through the national electoral system, and especially high legal thresholds can restrict minority parties. This results in complex interaction terms of the territorial settlement structure of ethnic minorities and different types of electoral systems. The empirical analysis relies on Boolean Algebra (csQCA) and on a new cross-national dataset of 19 postcommunist democracies in Europe, counting 123 ethnic minorities.

Organizing for Success: Party Organizational Strength and Electoral Performance in Postcommunist Europe

This article explores the effects of party organizational strength on party success and survival in the new postcommunist democracies. Organizational strength is defined as extensive network of branch offices, large membership, and professional staff. Using quantitative information on parties in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland, the study shows that strong organization helps parties increase their vote share significantly and steadily. Focused comparisons of “most similar” parties with different electoral performance from Estonia and the Czech Republic further exemplify the significant independent role that organizational strength plays in helping parties succeed electorally.

Party organizational strength and party unity in post-communist Europe

The existing comparative literature focuses on political institutions to explain party unity in parliament, and largely ignores the role of party characteristics in this process. This study argues that the strength of political party organization directly and independently influences the level of party unity. Organizational strength makes the party a valuable asset to individual legislators, thus increasing their willingness to be disciplined. Therefore, parties with strong organizations are likely to be more unified in parliament than those with weak organizations. I find support for this argument with data from four post-communist democracies: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland. Narratives suggest that the proposed causal mechanism is plausible.

Moving West or Going South?: Economic Transformation and Institutionalization in Postcommunist Party Systems

Patterns of party system institutionalization have varied widely across regions. In postcommunist democracies, weak party system institutionalization exists at high levels along three dimensions—volatility of representation, party extinction, and incumbency disadvantage—despite sustained economic growth. In these cases, the effects of economic restructuring are critical to electoral outcomes. A sample of democratic elections from 1990 to 2006 shows that postcommunist countries whose reform strategies minimize increases in inequality have more institutionalized party systems.

Why there is (almost) no Christian Democracy in post-communist Europe

Compared to its West European counterparts, post-communist Christian Democracy is notable for its lack of success. Even in the most religious of post-communist democracies, no Christian Democratic (CD) party has claimed a plurality of the electorate. At the same time, there is a considerable range in average electoral support from 1990 to 2010, i.e. from 0.7 percent in Estonia to as high as 18.4 percent in Slovakia. The most successful CD parties have arisen in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Lithuania, and (with qualifications) in Macedonia. The reasons for this success lie not in popular religiosity, state–church conflict or alliances between CD parties and churches. Instead, where parties can point to a history of nation and state-building in the inter-war period, they receive an initial electoral boost from this historical legacy. Yet even these favourable historical reputations have transitory effects: by the second or third elections, the impact of inter-war support rapidly faded.

When Electoral Reform Fails: The Stability of Proportional Representation in Post-Communist Democracies

This article examines the failure of three attempts to replace proportional representation with a majoritarian alternative in post-communist Eastern Europe: Slovenia in 1996; the Czech Republic in 2000; and Romania in 2008. The central argument of the article is that majoritarian electoral reform is both incompatible with and prevented by the institutions of consensus democracy. The constitutional design of consensus democracy creates multiple veto points and veto players that limit major policy and legislative change, such as electoral reform. As such, they also provide for self-enforcing stability in the electoral system by making it very difficult for political actors to build a winning coalition to reform it.

Bochsler, Daniel. Territory and Electoral Rules in Post-Communist Democracies.

PVS Politische Vierteljahresschrift , Seite 574 - 576

The Meanings of Democracy: Introduction

The Meanings of Democracy:Introduction Larry Diamond (bio) Over the past two decades, public-opinion research has become increasingly prominent and widely used in efforts to assess and explain the progress of and prospects for democracy in Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and most recently the Middle East. By posing standardized questions to representative samples of voting-age people in various countries within a cultural or geographic zone, regional "barometer" surveys have become sources of revealing cross-country comparisons that shed light on how people view and support democracy. But how should one measure support for democracy? Early work on public opinion after democratic transitions in Europe presumed that one could measure such support merely by asking people questions such as the following (which has become one of the most widely used items in cross-national research): Can you tell us which one of the following three statements you agree with: 1) "Democracy is always preferable to any other form of government"; 2) "Under some circumstances an authoritarian government can be preferable to a democratic one"; or 3) "For people like me it does not matter whether we have a democratic or a nondemocratic regime." Similar items have been used across many countries to assess popular commitment to democracy as the best form of government. In the last fifteen years, adopting methods introduced by Doh C. Shin for the study of Korea, others have examined on a ten- or eleven-point scale the extent to which citizens say: 1) they desire democracy for their country; 2) they think that democracy is suitable for their country; 3) they think that democracy can work to solve the problems of their country; and 4) they [End Page 102] think that democracy is as important as or more important than other national goals, such as economic development. Comparative analysis of responses to these questions would seem to be fairly straightforward—if, that is, respondents across countries possess a clear and broadly shared understanding of what democracy is. But what if they do not? What if expressions of support for democracy represent nothing more than some vague acknowledgement of democracy's social desirability—the global equivalent of "motherhood and apple pie"? For the past two decades, this possibility has increasingly preoccupied and troubled researchers. In order to assuage their worries, scholars have come up with new means to measure underlying support for democracy without using the "D-word." One of the most seminal innovations in this regard builds explicitly on the "Churchill hypothesis"—named for the British prime minister's famous quip that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others—by measuring the extent to which respondents in the postcommunist democracies reject such plausible authoritarian options as military rule, one-party rule, and one-man rule. The presumption is that rejection of all three alternatives represents robust evidence of support for democracy.1 Since Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer introduced this method of gauging "authoritarian detachment" some two decades ago, use of the measure has spread around the world. But statistical analysis has shown that it measures something rather different than support for democracy. And so the search has continued on two fronts: first to assess what exactly people around the world understand by the word "democracy," and second to develop yet other ways of getting at people's understanding of and support for democracy that do not rely on the "D word." In developing new and innovative ways of meeting the second challenge (as the following articles do), we are also gaining more traction in addressing the first challenge as well. The four essays in our cluster on the meanings of democracy emerge from a larger cooperative effort to understand how citizens of emerging democracies (and some transitional or authoritarian countries) understand the "D-word." The Global Barometer—drawing together regional barometers from postcommunist Eurasia as well as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Arab world—is now trying to develop a common standardized approach to this and related questions. But because the effort is still young, we do not yet have a common, standardized set of questions—and data—that would, in Michael Bratton's useful...

The Nationalisation of Post-Communist Party Systems

Party nationalisation, defined as the homogeneity of party strength across a country, has recently become a major issue in research. Even though territory is a salient political question in the post-communist countries in Europe, party nationalisation in these countries has been neglected by the literature so far. This article presents data on party nationalisation for 20 countries over the period 1990–2007. It shows that the nationalisation of party systems in post-communist democracies is closely related to the territorial structure of social divisions, except for cases where the electoral systems provide for a high degree of nationalisation, or where super-presidentialism inhibits the creation of strong nationalised parties.

Electoral Rules and the Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Post-Communist Democracies

Electoral Rules and the Representation of Ethnic Minorities in Post-Communist Democracies

Consistent choice sets? The stances of political parties towards European integration in ten Central East European democracies, 2003–2007

Political representation in Western democracies is largely accomplished through and by parties. Surprisingly, however, few studies directly examine how well parties in post-communist democracies function as effective agents of representation. Furthermore, the few exceptions to this rule focus on one time point only even though the concept of representation contains a dynamic component: parties need to offer consistent choices in order to communicate with voters in ways that provide clear alternatives to voters, and that establish incentives for parties to follow through on election promises. We therefore examine party stances towards European integration between 2003 and 2007. Contrary to the predominantly negative assessments in the research literature, we find that parties’ policy stances establish several preconditions for political representation in new democracies in Central East Europe (CEE).