Development of Parties and Party Systems in ... - lah@sam.sdu.dk

In the first stage we were mostly dealing with ”political clubs” and ”intellectual milieus”. At thattime party programmes and government responsibilities were not necessarily the most important.Thus opinion polls in January 2000 showed that 80 pct. of Czechs and Slovaks believed thatpolitical parties’ interest in the electorate was limited to the aim of winning their support inelections, and that this attitude was unlikely to change. Basically they shared the opinion ofpresident Vaclav Havel that the post-communist state effectively “belonged” to the political parties,as the state was perceived as their own property- a legacy of the communist past (Innes, 2001:208).The low priority given to peoples “day-to-day problems” had as a result that several identity basedparties suffered major elections defeats at elections in the beginning of the 1990s, thus paving theway for political “come-back’s” for the ”post-communist” parties. The post-communist partiesachieved electoral success primarily due to relatively strong party institutionalisation andprogramme-crystallization. As we shall see, that conclusion can also be drawn comparing the twoparty-alliances SLD and AWS in Poland.At an early point of time Vaclav Klaus in The Czech Republic took account of the fact that mostvoters preferred political parties with high institutionalization and clear-cut political programmesappealing to broad sections of the people. For that reason Klaus took the decision to use the label“Civic Democratic Party” (ODS). The position of Vaclav Klaus is one example of political craftingand “political entrepreneurship and the significance of the actor-level in the first stage of postcommunism.In established and consensual type democracies voters’ behaviour to a great extent reflected themost important social interests in society. If the political parties divide themselves differently fromthe societies that they represent, inevitably a crisis will develop, unless the parties involved are ableto attract the sufficient number of voters by using non-class symbolic political appeals in whichcase identity politics, not interest-based politics determine the voter behaviour at the elections.In the longer run most voters seemed to prefer parties with concrete forward-looking programmeswith a strong organization behind and a clear political profile. Programmatic characteristics becamemore striking, idenitty and moral politics receded, and a rutinization and erosion of charismaticbased politics took place. Identity parties with low institutionalization adhering to symbolic andidentity politics were simply not able to meet those challenges that are most significant whenmoving toward more “ordinary politics”. The experience from the first twelve years of postcommunismshowed us that instutionalization in fact does matter. Those parties which were wellorganized and had sufficient resources, may suffer election defeat and in spite of that obtain apolitical come-back at a later election. Opposite, badly institutionalized “forum parties” might winelections, but, on the other hand, they had a weak “immune defence” in case of internal crisis orincreased party competition. Moving to more “normal politics” democracy has been named “inputdemocracy” which as characterized by retrospective elections, neo-corporatism and interest basedpolitics.In conclusion, in spite of the rather weak the links to civil societies and socio-economic cleavagesand low institutionalisation the political parties came to play an important role. Unfortunately, dueto the party-ist characteristics and too weak civil societies misuse of new won political powerbecame a normal practice. Sometimes non-political actors becam functional equivalent and tookover the role of political parties (”shadow institutionalisation”). In specific situations, for instance inHungary in 1995 and in the Czech Republic in 1996-1997, de-democratisation, party-ism,13