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

In the late 1990’s elections mostly expressed ”politically motivated government blame”, no longerthey were referenda for or against the old systems, more expressing ”politically motivated systemblame”.In the second stage, moving to more ”ordinary politics”, the political parties acquired more powerwithout necessarily becoming more legitimate. The elections in the late 1990s evidenced thatinstitutional design, campaign strategies, organizational resources, and the mood of the electoratesubstantially matter regarding the final outcome of national electionsA relatively unimportant rolewas played by party membership. Instead, the crucial role has been played by party leaders. Thusthe new parties were more likely to resemble Kirchheimer’s catch-all, Panebianco’s electoralprofessionaland Katz and Mair’s cartel party than Duverger’s mass party model (Szczerbiak,2001:101).In the third and fourth stage the political parties were forced to pay more attention to the externalframes focusing more on long-term policies and strategies. A polical learning took place and moreattention had to be paid to formulation of the rigt strategies and programmatic work. The freedomof maneuvre in the economic and social policy was still limited, but the politicians seemed to havelearned how to compete over operating styles, tactically modulated principles, postmodern issuesrather than programmatic substance (Innes, 2002:88). The true constraints, under which the partieshad to operate, became more apparent. If that happens, separation of parties from civil societiesmight be less striking. However, not all the political parties were able to move that optimal laterstage.The parties and party systems were still marked by transition anomie, too weak partyinstitutionalization and lack of a system opholding and a stabilizing middle class (“the missingmiddle”), but the attention of most voters moved more explicitly from the political to the economicsphere. The freedom of manoeuvre in the economic policy was narrow due to externalconditionalities and lack of economic ressources. Also misuse of political power (“party-ism”) wasstriking due to short-term political horizons and path-dependency. In the third and fourth stage thepolitical parties might become better institutionalised, but in most cases in the shape of theestablishment of centralised top-down led professional electoral cartel parties and fragile electionalliances forced upon the parties due to high thesholds for getting seats in parliament. This suggeststhat the changes over time have been non-linear, at different times signifying unification of forces,fragmentarisation, in some cases formation of a common identity and in several cases “wars in thetop”.In most cases the party-coalitions, e.g. AWS in Poland and SDK in Slovakia were fragileconstructions, neither sufficiently institutionalised nor based on a common identity and partyculturebecause each party inside the alliance cared about its own identity. Thus we were mostlydealing with negative election alliances, only kept together by the common enemy (i.e.”postcommunists”).In some cases party alliances were purely tactical aiming at minimizing the waste ofvotes at the elections. The ultimate goal was to establish a new common right wing governmentafter election victory and transform the election alliances to new standard parties or functionalparty-federations. Opposite the Polish Right, after 10 years the left wing party alliance SLD inPoland succeeded in transforming itself into a disciplined standard party having until thenconstituted an alliance of 20-30 different groups on the left side of the political spectrum. As weshall see in the following, the right wing election alliance AWS in Poland was not able to solve the16