Dysfunctional Democratization?: <i>Institutional Conflict in Post-Communist Slovakia</i>

Leff, Carol Skalnik

doi:10.1080/10758216.1996.11655696

Cited by 18 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Factor analysis of more detailed surveys conducted in Slovakia in 1994, by CEU and the survey firm FOCUS, reveal a fifth factor that groups together questions on pluralism and democracy, firm leadership and obedience to law by political leaders. These findings concur with other works that call attention to strong disagreements within the Slovak electorate about the appropriate behavior of elected institutions (Krause, 1996a;Leff, 1996;Meseinikov, 1997).…”

Section: The Factor Approachsupporting

confidence: 94%

“…Although it is becoming increasingly popular to express skepticism about the Czech 'miracle', the Czech political institutions did at least operate according to basic democratic principles. Slovakia's political institutions, by contrast, did not play by democratic rules (Leff, 1996;Krause, 1998a). Whereas the Czech Republic's governing coalition made only rare and indirect use of its power for political advantage, Slovakia's governing coalition intervened in the political contest at a more fundamental level, undercutting accountability mechanisms and making direct assaults on rival political institutions.…”

Section: Different Outcomes Similar Opinionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Public Opinion and Party Choice in Slovakia and the Czech Republic

Deegan‐Krause¹

2000

Party Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How do voters' political opinions shape the way they think about political parties? In the left-right socio-economic competition of advanced democracies the answer to this question is often taken for granted. For this reason many approaches to the study of parties are not easily applicable to countries where different issues dominate political debate. This paper offers an alternative. It provides a method for identifying differences in the weight that voters place on particular issues when they evaluate political parties, using the cases of Slovakia and the Czech Republic to show how these differences shape both electoral outcomes and the overall stability of democracy. The weight that Slovakia's voters place on national and democracy issues when evaluating parties contrasts sharply with the more familiar left-right socioeconomic judgements made by Czech voters. This difference helps to explain the weakness of democratic institutions in Slovakia in comparison to those of the Czech Republic. KEY WORDS _ ideological dimensions _ left-right ideology _ nationalism _ party preference _ spatial competitionThe very different paths taken by the governments of Slovakia and the Czech Republic after the two countries separated in 1993 might lead an observer to expect that Slovaks and Czechs held radically different sets of political opinions. This is not the case. Indeed, the political opinions of the average Slovak differed little from those of the average Czech. But political opinions cannot be written off altogether as formative influences on the politics of these two countries. A closer look at the Slovak and Czech voters shows that the similarity of their opinions actually conceals meaningful and significant differences in the weight that they gave to particular issues when making political decisions. These differences helped to cause different political outcomes.

show abstract

Section: The Factor Approachsupporting

confidence: 94%

Section: Different Outcomes Similar Opinionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public Opinion and Party Choice in Slovakia and the Czech Republic

Deegan‐Krause¹

2000

Party Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The expert consensus is that Mečiar constituted a serious threat to undo democracy (Deegan-Krause and Haughton 2009;Deegan-Krause 2006;O'Dwyer 2006, andLeff 1996). Levitsky and Way (2010, 91) go so far as to categorize the country as competitive authoritarian, though in the data we use, Slovakia does not experience a breakdown.…”

Section: Concrete Illustration: Slovakiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Independent media were harassed via bogus libel suits and the revocation of licenses for arbitrary reasons (Levitsky and Way 2010, 93). The security services were used to harass opponents via kidnapping, physical intimidation, and wiretapping (Bunce and Wolchik 2011, 62;Deegan-Krause 2006;Leff 1996). Mečiar ignored the results of a referendum on the direct election of the president and defied a Constitutional Court finding ordering him to comply (Haughton 2003, 276-277, 287-288).…”

Section: Concrete Illustration: Slovakiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The third wave of democratization has given way to a reverse wave of autocratization. A critical question is what can be done to prevent democratic breakdowns and make democracy endure. A large body of historical-narrative and small-N comparative scholarship has suggested that an active mobilized civil society and institutionalized political parties can be mobilized to protect democracy from authoritarian takeovers. We provide the first rigorous set of empirical analyses to test this argument using data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project for the period from 1900 to 2010. We find that both exert a robust, independent, and substantial effect on the survival of democracies. These findings have important policy implications for the international community.

show abstract

“…Slovakia represents yet another example of how "personalist politics" has marked democratic development and economic recovery after the collapse of the communist regime and the dissolution of the joint Czech-Slovak state in 1992. Making and breaking governmental coalitions based on personal sympathies worked as a common denominator for many post-communist countries, a feature that weakened party systems and frequently lead to the failure of Prime Minister and President cohabitation (Leff, 1996).While in Western Europe cohabitation was designed as a means for ensuring the smooth functioning of the government amid political competition between those in power (Knapp&Wright, 2006), the same mechanism proved to be less efficient in Eastern Europe, where power-sharing lead to the exacerbation of political hostility.…”

Section: The Refugee Crisis Reflected In Romaniamentioning

confidence: 99%