Government Formation and Party System Stabilization in East Central Europe

Abstract

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.

Party Organization and the Political Success of the Communist Successor Parties

“…In addition, average seat shares also do not take into account extreme fluctuations in electoral performance (such as what happened to the LDLP, PSDR, and SPA), a situation that illustrates far less political success than parties that have maintained fairly large seat shares consistently across elections (such as with the HSP, DLA, and CPRF). Thus to take these characteristics into account, I employ a measure of average party seat turnover (Toole, 2000). This measure is based on the following formula:…”

Poland's Quasi-Institutionalized Party System: The Importance of Elites and Institutions

“…The degree of party system institutionalization is a critical dimension for understanding party systems (Mainwaring & Scully, 1995;Mainwaring, 1999;Toole, 2000;Sikk, 2005;Wolinetz, 2006;Thames, 2007). In general, institutionalization refers to 'a process by which a practice or organization becomes well established and widely known, if not universally accepted' (Mainwaring & Scully, 1995, p. 5).…”

“…However, using electoral volatility as the only index of party system institutionalization is questionable and doubtful especially in the Eastern European context where volatility is relatively high (Toole, 2000;Wolinetz, 2006;Thames, 2007;Sikk, 2005). Studies of party system institutionalization examine other factors such as partisan commitments (Shabad & Slomczynski, 2004), party age (Mainwaring & Scully, 1995), party strategy (Bakke & Sitter, 2005) and party turnover (Toole, 2000). This study integrates different factors such as volatility, party discipline, fragmentation, party strength and party replacement.…”

“…Fractionalization is closely related to the electoral system, being the political institution most likely to affect party system development (Lijphart, 1994;Rae, 1967;Mair, 2006;Toole, 2000) because it is the 'set of laws and party rules that regulate electoral competition between and within parties' (Lijphart, 1994, pp.10-94). In Poland's first fully democratic parliamentary election in 1991, almost a pure proportional representation (PR) system was applied.…”

“…Political elites politicize cleavages (Zielinski, 2002;Enyedi, 2005). Political elites decide on the establishment of new parties, which leads to high party system turnover (Toole, 2000;Powell & Tucker, 2008). Political elites partake in scandals (Gosselin & To´ka, 2007).…”