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

democracies known in the West. The political debate has been polemic and personal, nonethelsessantisystem parties i general did not well at the elections. Thus parties which aimed at destroying thenew postcommunist system did not necessarily have a great electoral support. Adversary politics onthe actor level sometimes took place between parties ideologically and programmatically close toeach other.In the later stage of post-communism, moving from extraordinary to more ordinary politics, partiesand party systems can to a great extent be studied by using concepts and cognitive instrumentsknown from studies of the more well institutionalised parties and party systems in the West, e.g. byincluding the well known distinctions between types of political parties and party systems, putforward by Duverger, Sartori, Kirchheimer, Mair etc., e.g. as mass parties, catch-all parties andcartel parties, the different types and forms of polarization and changes over time of the partysystem format.1.3. The formation of political partiesAs noted above, can political parties be considered as a necessary, but not as a sufficient conditionfor consolidation of democracy. That argument can also be used as regards the Central Europeancountries. Most of the new political parties in the CEEC’s were established top-down, suppliedfrom above more than demanded from below and established almost over night as ”sofa-parties andmostly by intellectuals. Some parties - like historic parties - were ”re-invented” or “reborn”. Somewere post-communist, wehich aimed to find a new post-communist identity, some were authentichistorical parties, e.g. social democratic and agrarian parties, other new parties were anticommunistcatch-all movement-parties, i.e. negative alliances appealing to all anti-communist minded sectionsof society.Parties and politicians, pretending to be “above politics”, were successful at the first elections butmostly due to the wide spread resistance against party politics. In the first phase the prevailingpolitical culture was not favourable for the development of functional and standard type politicalparties and party federations and the emergence of professional and responsive politicians.Characteristics from the former system such as extrication, total articulation, output-articulation,anti-politics, overparliamentarization and adversary politics turned out to be be impossible toeliminate over night.Furthermore, several country specific features have been observed. Some have mostly been due tostructural factors, including the legacy of the past, some to the country specific circumstances at thetime of the demise of the old systems and some to the chosen strategies for transformation, i.e. thesubjective factors. Like in Western countries studies of the internal party dynamics has been ratherlimited and difficult to carry through 3 .As noted above the development of political parties and party systems in the CEECs has beenclosely connected with the questions about consolidation of democracy and can therefore beexplained on the same levels, i.e. the actor, structural, institutional and policy-programmatic.Country wide democratic polities cannot be sustained without the organizing and mediating role ofpolitical parties. Parties reinforce identification with the democratic process by taking account of,aggregating the different interests in society and counteracting an excessive particularism (Brown,ed.:211, 213). Actor type explanations have been prominent in case of transitions by emphasizing3 More about that subject, see Szczerbiak, 2001:94.9