The stabilization of party systems in new democracies is commonly assumed to be a lengthy process. Applying Peter Mair's government-formation-based model of party system development to the three young East Central European democracies of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, the article shows that party systems can stabilize much more quickly than expected. In an analysis of emerging party system patterns, the Hungarian and Czech party systems are found to be far more stable than the Polish, and already nearly as stable as more mature party systems. Examining differences in the three cases, the article makes two primary conclusions about the process of stabilization in new party systems. First, it suggests that stabilization is the product of both electoral system design and consequent patterns of elite behavior. Second, it argues that stabilization not only occurs in spite of on-going volatility in party-voter alignments, but actually serves to reduce it.
Since the end of Communist rule, the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have been forced to restructure their formerly centrally planned economies. Among the dilemmas they have faced is how open they should be to international trade. Using multiple regression, the openness of these economies to trade is empirically determined while controlling for the effects of both population and wealth. Residuals from the regression equations are then examined in order to identify how much more or less open to trade each country has been. Analysis of the residuals for six distinct regions of the former Communist world presents no definitive answers but does suggest some preliminary conclusions. A country’s degree of political openness is found to be most important in determining relative openness to trade; close behind that are its geographic proximity to important world markets and its prospects for future accession to the European Union.
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