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

political messages and slogans. Thus, institutionally the parties reminds us about the US type catchallelite or cadre parties.The heavy law making burden moved parties towards post-communist type cartel parties. Withhigher institutionalisation more power was left over to the party apparatus, in this case smallprofessional elite groups. Also political strategies and policy-making were decided top-down.Unlike in the first stage, the parliamentary groups were not longer the most crucial decision makingand agenda-setting institutions. Under changing elite-voter linkages institutionalisation tends to beweak and most non-communist parties aimed to appear as broadly based catch-all parties. Oppositeon the postcommunist Left. Thus after the departure of the “beton communists” the Polish left wingalliance SLD gained a more functional organisation and at the same time a broader voter profile.Like in western countries most parties preferred to appeal directly to the voters via the media andtherby overlook the party structures and the party members 33 . The party congresses seemed toconcentrate the efforts on the internal elections to leading posts and personal matters, and the localparti organisations mostly constituted passive tools for top down decisions. However, the localparty organisations tended to gain a certain authonomy at least in local affairs, especially after theadministrative reforms and direct elections to local assemblies. In several countries, e.g. “localbarons” emerged. However, the central party apparatus were in possition of some means ofintervention, e.g. at appointment of candidates at elections and “screening” of the party members.Normally the organisational structure was at the same time vertical and horizontal with a three orfour levels of party organisation (municpial, district, regional and national). Unfortunately the wishto be a party member was modest, so most political parties did not constitute functional linkagesbetween the political and the civil society arenas.The impact of low party institutionalization to some extent was reduced by polical learning. Mostparties established some special commitees or party annexes dealing with subjects such as youthquestions, women and environment. Such as in most mass partiets. The Polish, Slovak andHungarian political Right recognized that election could not be won primarily by use of symbolicpolitics and fragmentation. At the 1997 and 1998 parliamentary elections party alliances andembrella party constructions (AWS, SDK and FIDESZ-MDF) was set up in order to unite the forcesand minimize waste of votes. Most anticommunist alliances, e.g. AWS and SDK constitutednegative alliances without sufficient unity on policy and programme level and the necessarycohesion and loyalty on elite level.The low number of party members was not caused by the lack of incentives to become a partymember, the political parties themselves were not always intested in maximizing the number ofparty members. In addition, the parties secured for themselves favourable financial ressources dueto increasing subsidies from the state, thereby at least to some extent making fees from partymembers insignificant. Many members may also mean more conflicts inside the parties, which werenot kept together thanks to a common party history and common ideologies and party programmes.In a new TV and IT world party members do not longer play a crucial role as the mean ofcommunication with the voters (Wightman, in White, Batt and Lewis (eds), 1998:163) in electioncampaigns.33 Miroslawa Grabowska, “Political Parties: Social Representative or Agent of Change”, Polish Sociological Review 4(116), 1996:307-322.40