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The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond
 2020945981, 9780198812920

Table of contents :
Cover
The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Contents
1: Puzzles of Party Politics: How Central Europe Challenges What We Know about Continuity and Change?
The New Party Challenge
Institutional Frameworks
Cleavages
Economic Policy and Performance
Legacies and the Inheritance of the Past
European Union Accession and Membership
Populism and Populist Appeals
New Party Formation and Breakthrough
Party Survival
Incorporating the Dimension of Time
Exploring and Explaining the New Party Challenge
2: What’s New? How to Refine our Assessments of Party Novelty
Why New is Complicated
Newness and Change
Origins
Attributes
Origins, Attributes, and the Extent of Change
Fissions
Fusions
Fission–Fusion Combinations
Attribute Change without an Obvious Origin Point
Inceptions
From Change to Newness
Appendix About the Cases
3: Maps and Measures: Assessing Changes in the Composition of Central European Party Systems
Mapping Party Continuity and Change in Each Country
How to Map Party Change
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
The Czech Republic
Slovakia
Hungary
Slovenia
Croatia
Romania
Bulgaria
Mapping the Big Picture
Time Period and Cohort
Standards for Newness
Comparison Sets
Volatility
New Party Entry
New Party Trajectories
Patterns of Party Support Over Time
Weighted Party System Age
Party Age Distribution
Conclusion
4: The Old and the New: How Parties Differ with Age and Time
Organization
Programmatic Appeals
Leadership
Conclusion
5: The Living and the Dead: Why Some Parties Fail and Others Survive
Accounting for Party Survival
Organization
Appeals
The Impact of Government Participation
Leadership
The Ones That Stay Up: How New Parties Endure
Conclusion
6: Cycles and Subsystems: Why New Parties Give Way to Even Newer Parties
The Theory and Practice of New Party Formation
Tracking the Movement of Voters
Movement of Voters under the Microscope: Slovenia and the Czech Republic
Movement of Voters in the Abstract: Simulating the Process
The Party Subsystem Model
Temporal Dynamics and the Cycles of Birth and Death
Conclusion
7: Slovenia Is Everywhere? How New Party Subsystems and Cycles Extend Worldwide
Beyond Central Europe
Elsewhere in Europe
The Americas
East Asia
Africa
Conclusion
8: Neither Older nor Wiser? What Continual Party Change Means for the Quality of Democracy
New Parties: To Be Welcomed?
New Parties: To Be Feared?
Impact of New Parties on Politics in Central and Eastern Europe
New Parties and the Quality of Democracy
Representative, Responsive, and Responsible Government
Time, Time Horizons, and Party Cycles
New and Newer Parties: A Call to Arms?
References
Index

Citation preview

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The New Party Challenge

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COMPARATIVE POLITICS Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit www.ecprnet.eu The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor of Political Institutions and European Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.      Multi-Level Democracy Integration and Independence Among Party Systems, Parties, and Voters in Seven Federal Systems Lori Thorlakson Citizen Support for Democratic and Autocratic Regimes Marlene Mauk Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis Reassessing the Interwar Period Agnes Cornell, Jørgen Møller, and Svend-Erik Skaaning Coalition Governance in Central Eastern Europe Torbjörn Bergman, Gabriella Ilonszki, and Wolfgang C. Müller The Reshaping of West European Party Politics Agenda-Setting and Party Competition in Comparative Perspective Christoffer Green-Pedersen Parliaments in Time The Evolution of Legislative Democracy in Western Europe, 1866–2015 Michael Koß Inequality After the Transition Political Parties, Party Systems, and Social Policy in Southern and Postcommunist Europe Ekrem Karakoç Democracy and the Cartelization of Political Parties Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair From Party Politics to Personalized Politics? Party Change and Political Personalization in Democracies Gideon Rahat and Ofer Kenig

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The New Party Challenge Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond TIM HAUGHTON AND KEVIN DEEGAN-KRAUSE

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause 2020 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945981 ISBN 978–0–19–881292–0 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198812920.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To friends old and new and newer still

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Preface ‘I believe’ (‘Verjamem’). This simple declaration of faith was not just Slovenia’s 2012 entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, but also the name of a Slovenian political party that appeared two years later. During a whistle-stop tour of Central Europe in May in the run-up to the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections, we spent a few days in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana, observing the campaign and speaking to politicians, activists, and campaigners. A friend and fellow political scientist from Slovenia, Alenka Krašovec, kindly helped arrange an interview with a leading figure responsible for Verjamem (the party, not the song) which had burst suddenly onto the political scene. The politician vented his frustration with all the existing parties in Slovenia and the venal corruption of many in politics. He told us that he had been inspired to quit his job and join the nascent party because he had grown to admire its founder, Igor Šoltes, while working for him in his role as the chair of Slovenia’s Court of Auditors. The party official informed us that the vision of the party was to make Slovenia ‘the leading country for the quality of life in the world’, although he struggled to specify any clear policies to achieve that goal. This lack of detail, however, was perhaps forgivable for a brand new party still in the process of organizing itself. Knowing that there was a strong chance that early parliament elections were around the corner, we asked Alenka after the interview whether there were any other new parties on the horizon. She mentioned that the rumour mill in Ljubljana was full of speculation about the possible launch of another new party, centred around Miro Cerar, a law professor, constitutional expert, and son of a famous Olympic gymnast. Šoltes’s party performed reasonably well in the EP elections winning over 10 per cent of the vote and one of the country’s eight seats. But by the time parliamentary elections were held two months later, Verjamem had slumped to under 1 per cent of the votes and Miro Cerar had proven the rumour mill right and created a new party. Drawing on an appeal for newness tied to his expertise in the rule of law, Cerar’s party garnered over 34 per cent of the vote, becoming the main party of government and catapulting him into the position of prime minister. Having been observers of the politics of Central Europe since the early 1990s the striking thing to us about the electoral churn in Slovenia in 2014 was not how surprising this was, but how unsurprising. As we talked about our nonchalance, however, we faced a different kind of shock: somehow we had come to regard repeated cycles of sudden, massive change in party systems as entirely normal.

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Our interest in the new party phenomenon had begun in the late 1990s when both of us were conducting doctoral research on the politics of Slovakia. Between 1998 and 2002 we observed both the steady decline of the once mighty Movement for a Democratic Slovakia and the more rapid drop in support for the communistsuccessor Party of the Democratic Left, but also the rise of a new party around the young, charismatic politician Robert Fico. With a set of appeals around novelty and anti-corruption it seemed to chime a chord with dissatisfied voters, and even its name, ‘Smer’ (‘Direction’), seemed to indicate that party politics was embarking on a new course. In some ways Fico’s new creation resembled others that came soon thereafter in Bulgaria (2001), Latvia (2002), and Estonia (2003), and prefigured many others that followed. In 2010, we observed closely not just the Slovak elections, but also those in the Czech Republic and Hungary, where seemingly stable party systems experienced what was frequently dubbed by commentators as ‘earthquake elections’. In the Czech Republic not only did the elections yield major losses for well-established parties, but also the breakthrough of two new parties, one with a clarion call demanding the ‘end of the political dinosaurs’. In Hungary, we witnessed not just the triumph of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, but an almost fatal drop in support for what had been electorally the most successful party in the country since 1989 (the country’s once-dominant Socialist Party), and the electoral success of a new party named Politics Can Be Different. These rapid changes provoked us to ask a series of questions. Why were new parties popping up across the region? Why did so many of these parties live fast and die young, but a few others managed to endure and even become dominant parties in their systems? Why were some well-established parties experiencing declining support, but others were able to endure, riding the waves and surviving the storms of politics? But what was especially interesting was not only the fate of individual parties, but also developments and variations at the country level. Why did some countries have much more stable party systems than others and why did systems experience these ‘earthquake’ elections? Having written separately and together on party politics in individual countries, therefore, we decided that a book-length study was needed to address these questions. Having embarked on the research for the book we were struck not simply by the continuing rollercoaster of politics in the region, but also by developments elsewhere that seemed to be following similar patterns, most notably in Spain, Italy, Greece, Iceland, and the Netherlands, but also in Latin America and East Asia. Our study focuses primarily on eleven states: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. As collective shorthand for this group of countries we use the phrase ‘Central Europe’. This is not an ideal choice, but there is no ideal choice. The alternatives of Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe or East-Central Europe each have their own drawbacks and would be legitimately contested.

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We have settled on Central Europe mainly out of simplicity, but it does not hurt our case that Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovakia all claim to be the home of the exact geographical centre of Europe. Central Europe is also an appropriate label to the extent that in recent times party politics in countries such as Austria, which many would put into a definition of Central Europe, resembles the dynamics in our eleven cases. By choosing the Central European label, we also stress that the dynamics we identify and explain in our eleven cases are similar to those in countries to the West and in their own way they are very much central to the experiences of European politics. While on the subject of naming conventions, we also acknowledge that in a region with a complicated linguistic landscape and at a time of rapid party changes, we have had to make limiting choices about what common identifier we will use to describe a party whose name has changed or which bears different names in different domestic languages. Except when noted, we use the English-language translations for full party names, so as to express their semantic meanings, but we also follow standard practice in deriving acronyms from domestic languages, usually the language spoken by the largest share of the country’s inhabitants (a practice which is admittedly questionable in the case of parties that represent linguistic minorities). We are indebted to those who have provided the time and space to conduct the research and write in an age of austerity. We are grateful to the Fulbright Commission for financial support for Kevin’s research stay at Comenius University in Bratislava in 2008 and to Södertörn University for hosting him and his family in 2009, and to the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation for funding Tim’s fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 2011–12. These periods of research led directly to several conference papers and articles where we began to explore the themes in this book including Deegan-Krause and Haughton (2011), Haughton (2014b), Haughton and Deegan-Krause (2015), and Deegan-Krause and Haughton (2018). In addition, we extend our thanks to our home institutions, the University of Birmingham and Wayne State University, for according us the time and some of the funds we needed to visit national, regional, and local party offices of over a hundred parties in eleven Central European countries and to conduct a series of additional interviews with leaders and activists of corresponding parties in Western European countries. Moreover, the granting of a sabbatical to Kevin for Fall semester 2017 was extremely beneficial in allowing us to build up the momentum to make substantial progress on the book and Tim benefited from the granting of study leave in autumn 2019 which enabled us to finish the manuscript. It is no small irony for us that the writing of this book has taken considerably longer than the lifespans of most of the parties we discuss, but the extra time has allowed us to witness in person the rise and fall of many cohorts of new parties. During the course of researching and writing the book we have incurred many debts. We are very grateful to the many elected politicians who were willing to discuss with us their triumphs and tragedies and their rides on the rollercoaster of

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politics. Moreover, we are deeply thankful to the hundreds of political party staff members and local activists who were unstintingly generous with their precious time, sharing their experiences and building the network of connections that helped us learn about their parties at work. In those instances where they shared information that did not always reflect well on their own parties, we have opted to omit their names from the references, though those readers interested in the circumstances and context of the interviews should feel free to contact the authors with enquiries. Furthermore, we would like to put on record our thanks to many members of the diplomatic corps of several countries (a number of whom are still serving), especially from the US State Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office who, for professional reasons, remain anonymous here. We are particularly grateful to several scholars who generously shared their own research and their specialized talents: Sarah Engler, Robert Rohrschneider, Marek Rybář, and Stephen Whitefield who advised us in our research and allowed us to use their own datasets; Jakub Stauber with his help in writing simulation code; Bela Kesegh for his work on updating and simplifying the party diagrams; and Fernando Casal Bértoa for all his contributions to the overlapping ‘splitting’ project measuring electoral volatility and party system change. In places in this book, we draw on the insights in a collective article from that project (Casal Bértoa et al., 2017). Indeed, we are grateful to all colleagues with whom we have collaborated over the course of the past couple of decades on various papers and articles. We are also grateful to other colleagues, such as David Cutts and Paris Aslanidis, who generously allowed us to prioritize finishing this book before embarking on other projects with them. Scholarship is a collective not an individual enterprise. Not only do we stand on the shoulders of scholarly giants who went before us, but we stand shoulder-toshoulder with our contemporary colleagues who helped bring this book to life. We have benefited from the feedback and comments from attendees at a wide variety of conferences including those of the American Political Science Association, the Council for European Studies, the European Consortium for Political Research, the Midwest Political Science Association, the International Political Science Association, and the Political Studies Association’s Elections, Parties and Public Opinion annual conference. In addition, we are grateful to audiences at a wide variety of talks, seminars, and workshops at many institutions on both sides of the Atlantic including Comenius University, Masaryk University, the University of Florida, the European University Institute, the University of Michigan, and various events at the University of Birmingham. The danger of providing a list of names of people to thank is inadvertently omitting someone. As this book builds on work we have undertaken since we started our PhDs we should probably just thank everyone with whom we have ever discussed politics. Nonetheless, some scholars deserve a mention by name for fruitful conversations, probing questions, challenging insights, or all three. We are

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grateful to Daniele Albertazzi, Hilary Appel, Daunis Auers, David Bailey, Tim Bale, Agnes Batory, Michael Bernhard, Vladimír Bilčík, Nicole Bolleyer, Endre Borbáth, Karin Bottom, Marko Bucik, Dominic Chaloner, Nic Cheeseman, Blagovesta Cholova, Zsuzsa Csergő, Goran Čular, David Cutts, Sarah De Lange, Catherine De Vries, Anna Grzymała-Busse, Zsolt Enyedi, Andrej Findor, Sharon Fisher, Zsolt Gál, Julie Gilson, John Gould, Seán Hanley, Vlastimil Havlík, Karen Henderson, Reinhard Heinisch, Andrija Henjak, Isabelle Hertner, Airo Hino, Vít Hloušek, Raimondas Ibenskas, Jānis Ikstens, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Jim Ji, AnnCatherine Jungar, Marko Klašnja, Alenka Krašovec, Lubomír Kopeček, Petr Kopecký, Erik Láštic, Carol Skalnik Leff, Kristin Lewis, Simona Kustec Lipicer, Darina Malová, Zdenka Mansfeldová, Radosław Markowski, Nadejda Marinova, Frances Millard, Michael Minkenberg, Alisa Moldavanova, Martin Mölder, Tom Mustillo, Natascha Neudorfer, Dario Nikić Čakar, Tereza Novotná, Conor O’Dwyer, Julian Pänke, Takis Pappas, Paula Pickering, Bartek Pytlas, Rahvit Reichmann, Aaron Retish, Marta Robertson, Graeme Robertson, Brad Roth, Jan Rovny, Marek Rybář, George Schöpflin, Allan Sikk, Asaf Siniver, Maria Spirova, Lavinia Stan, Ben Stanley, Marek Stolárik, Dragomir Stoyanov, John Strate, Sherrill Stroschein, Aleks Szczerbiak, Soňa Szomolányi, Margit Tavits, Lori Thorlakson, Joshua Tucker, Peter Učeň, Joya Uraizee, Milada Anna Vachudova, Guillem Vidal, Ramūnas Vilpišauskas, Jeff White, Matthew Whiting, Sarah Whitmore, Sharon Wolchik, and Emilia Zankina. We thank Dominic Byatt, Olivia Wells, and others at Oxford University Press, and Susan Scarrow and other editors of the Comparative Politics series, not just for responding positively to the original proposal and offering periodic words of encouragement, but for goading us towards submission with the assistance of a hard deadline, and seeing the book smoothly through the production process. This book went into production in early 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic. We are very grateful to Olivia, the copy editor Elizabeth Stone, and Saranya Chandrasekar and the production team at OUP for keeping everything on track and schedule during a period of significant disruption. As friends and co-authors, each of us is especially thankful to the other for complementary skills, words of encouragement, expressions of quizzical surprise and vague ideas that the other could turn into polished prose. This is a much better book than either of us could have written alone. Above all, we are grateful to the web of family and friends that has surrounded and supported us while we worked on this project. In a book that shines a spotlight on the short lives of new political parties, we are acutely conscious that the most important work in scholarship emerges from the kinds of long-term relationships of which we have been privileged to have been part. Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause Birmingham and Detroit January 2020

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Contents 1. Puzzles of Party Politics: How Central Europe Challenges What We Know about Continuity and Change?

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2. What’s New? How to Refine our Assessments of Party Novelty

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3. Maps and Measures: Assessing Changes in the Composition of Central European Party Systems

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4. The Old and the New: How Parties Differ with Age and Time

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5. The Living and the Dead: Why Some Parties Fail and Others Survive

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6. Cycles and Subsystems: Why New Parties Give Way to Even Newer Parties

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7. Slovenia Is Everywhere? How New Party Subsystems and Cycles Extend Worldwide

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8. Neither Older nor Wiser? What Continual Party Change Means for the Quality of Democracy

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References Index

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1 Puzzles of Party Politics How Central Europe Challenges What We Know about Continuity and Change?

Once upon a time, there was a king who created a new political party, which he named after himself. He promised to clean up the country’s politics, won more votes than anyone else, and became prime minister. But politics did not get much cleaner, and he did not win as many votes the next time. Almost no one lived happily ever after except for his bodyguard, who created his own new party, promised to clean up the country’s politics, won a lot of votes, and became prime minister. In a nearby country, there was a game-show host who created a new political party. He dressed in funny outfits in campaign advertisements (as a convict, a madman, a vampire, and a courtesan) in which he promised to clean up the country’s politics. He won a large number of votes and became speaker of Parliament. But politics did not get much cleaner, and his party fell apart when he was photographed drinking happily with a local mob boss. In a third country not far away, there was a supermarket-chain manager who became a big-city mayor and created a new political party named after himself. He promised to clean up the country’s politics and got more votes than anyone else. But politics did not get much cleaner, and his party fell apart when he was accused of corruption, and he did not win many votes the next time. One person who did was a prominent yet apolitical magistrate, who created a new political party called ‘I Believe’ and promised to clean up the country’s politics. But he was soon supplanted by a different prominent yet apolitical magistrate who formed a new political party named after himself, promised to clean up the country’s politics, won more votes than anyone else, and became prime minister. But that apolitical magistrate saw his popularity fall, and at the next election a comedian turned mayor, who formed a new party named after himself, promised to clean up the country’s politics and became prime minister.

The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond. Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause, Oxford University Press (2020). © Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198812920.003.0001

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    Finally, in yet another country located in between the three others, there was a fresh-faced politician from an established party who did not get a position he thought he deserved. He created a new party, promised to clean up the country’s politics, and won a large number of votes. But when did not get to be prime minister, he reorganized his party, built a strong organization, and promised to help those who were struggling economically. The next time he got more votes than anyone else and became prime minister, and his party remained strong and powerful for a long, long time until voters started to notice how corrupt it had become and started to look around for a different fresh-faced politician who could clean up the country’s politics.

As fairy tales go, these stories are closer to Grimm than Disney. They also happen to be real, albeit slightly simplified accounts of politics in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia during the 2000 and 2010s. The experience of new party breakthroughs such as the National Movement of Simeon II in Bulgaria, the Party of National Resurrection in Lithuania, Zoran Janković’s Positive Slovenia, and Slovakia’s Smer, however, are not unique to Central Europe, let alone their countries. Similar stories could be told across the region and further afield, including places as disparate as the Netherlands (popular sociologist creates a new party named after himself ), Greece (journalist creates a new party called ‘The River’), Italy (comedian creates a new party), France (investment banker and minister leaves an established party to found a new one and becomes president), Guatemala (television comedian takes over small new party and becomes president), and Korea (technology entrepreneur co-creates a new party, then leaves to create his own, newer party); and even, without too much of a stretch, the United States (no new party emerges, but an established party’s presidential nomination is taken by an outsider, real estate developer, personal brand manager, and reality TV star).

The New Party Challenge Simeon II’s party in Bulgaria achieved a stunning 41 per cent of the vote in 2001 even though it had been formed just a couple of months before. In a similar vein, Positive Slovenia achieved 28 per cent in 2011 just a handful of weeks after its creation. At the subsequent election in 2014, another new party, the Party of Miro Cerar (subsequently renamed the Party of the Modern Centre), won over 30 per cent of the vote, again having been formed just a few weeks before polling day. And at the next election in 2018, yet another new party named after its founder, the List of Marjan Šarec, performed well, propelling its leader into the post of prime minister. Indeed, these new parties and others from across the region were

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not just minor and marginal players in their political systems. In the two decades from January 2000, more than 20 per cent of all cabinets in Central Europe included new parties, and these governed for 24 per cent of the total time period. In Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Bulgaria, more than onethird of the total time in government included new parties, while in Latvia and Romania it was more than one-fifth. There were, however, striking variations across the region. Estonia, Croatia, and Poland, for instance, spent little time in the twenty-first century under governments with new parties and Hungary spent none, but even when they did not actually govern, new parties such as Hungary’s Jobbik played critical roles in shaping the political interplay among other parties. Nor have these new parties been bit players in parliaments and governments. More than 9 per cent of the total time in office of the region’s prime ministers in the two decades since January 2000 has been in the hands of leaders from parties that had just achieved their first election to parliament. On the roster of Central European prime ministers, one in ten came from parties that had never previously been elected, a list that includes significant figures such as Einars Repše in Latvia, Mikuláš Dzurinda in Slovakia, Miro Cerar and Marjan Šarec in Slovenia, Tihomir Orešković in Croatia, and Simeon II (Sakskoburgotski) and Boyko Borissov in Bulgaria. If we extend this definition slightly to include new party politicians who gained executive leadership in their new party’s second election (such as Lech Kaczyński in Poland, Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic, and Robert Fico in Slovakia) or who extended their governments into second terms (such as Dzurinda and Borissov), the share of prime ministerial days in the hands of new party leaders rises to 14 per cent. These new parties have another impact that is widespread but less obvious: just as they quickly appear, most quickly disappear. After an initial breakthrough, most of these parties suffered a precipitous fall in their popularity. Although this did not always condemn them to an early grave by the time of the next election, their success was fleeting. On some occasions, the impact of a new party has been ephemeral: the new party appears and disappears and things return (more or less) to normal, with the established parties resuming their original positions, but the more common pattern in Central Europe is one of enduring disruption. Given the context the parties have had to endure since 1989, involving democratization, marketization, (nation-)state-building, accession into Western clubs such as the European Union (EU), the post-2008 Great Recession, and the eurozone and migration crises, it is perhaps no surprise that parties have not endured, but rather it is more of a puzzle that some of the new parties that have broken through have not gone the way of Simeon’s Movement, Positive Slovenia, or National Resurrection. Parties such as Smer in Slovakia not only survived but also thrived, even able to form a single party majority government in 2012—no mean feat in a proportional representation system. The experiences of Central Europe hence provoke a series of questions related to parties, party systems, and democracy. Why do new parties emerge and why are

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they able to achieve such striking electoral success? Why, however, do most of these new parties not endure? And in places where new parties achieve electoral success, how and why are some older parties able to hang on to voters and survive? Moreover, why has the impact of new party breakthrough led to patterns of enduring disruption? Furthermore, what does this (in)stability mean for the quality and health of democracy, and is there anything we can or should do about it? Should we welcome or fear the new party challenge? The New Party Challenge, therefore, looks for answers to a nested set of questions that are intra-country (why do some parties survive, but others do not?), but also intra-regional (e.g. why do countries in Central Europe differ in terms of party survival and party mortality?) and inter-regional (to what extent is Central Europe different from other regions?). In short, the breakthrough of new parties poses a threefold challenge. There is a challenge for new parties to persuade voters of their merits and to hold on to that support. But there is also a challenge these new parties pose to the established parties within a system. In addition, there is a challenge all parties face given the changing context of politics, technological developments, and the need to forge ties that bind between those who govern and those over whom they govern. We address these questions and seek to make a series of contributions to scholarship. The New Party Challenge examines political parties across Central Europe over the first three decades since the 1989 revolutions that brought down the communist regimes. We map and measure the development of the party systems across the region, offering not just new and improved data, but also new tools for analysing these systems that highlight and reveal the underlying patterns of politics. Moreover, based on our blend of data derived from qualitative and quantitative sources, we proffer some new conceptual frameworks for examining political parties. Furthermore, we argue that similar processes are at play on a far wider geographical canvas than Central Europe. Three decades after the end of communist regimes, the study of Central Europe remains a scholarly backwater. We maintain, however, that detailed insights from the study of party politics in the region can illuminate the dynamics of post-transition party systems, help the development of tools for the broader study of party politics, and contribute to debates concerning the quality of democracy and representation not just in the region, but on a wider canvas. Finally, we raise questions not just of causality, but of capacity and responsibility: in Chernashevky’s famous question (appropriated by Lenin), ‘What is to be done?’ There is no single silver bullet explanation for the patterns of party politics. Given that, the contents and structure of the book have been arranged not just to make a series of arguments, but also to offer detailed explorations for future scholars into a number of the key dimensions of continuity and change: what is novelty and how can we measure it? How and why do new parties contrast to older parties? Why do some parties endure, and what do the patterns we have

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discovered mean for the fate of democracy? Nonetheless, four key themes run through the book. First, we highlight the importance of agency and choice in explaining the fate of parties. Secondly, we emphasize the dimension of time and its role in shaping developments. Thirdly, we highlight the salience of the clean versus corrupt dimension of politics. And fourthly, we identify patterns that link party birth and death that have not yet attracted sufficient attention. Our study focuses primarily on eleven states (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Although there are differences between these countries, they shared a common experience of communism, followed by the post-communist challenges of political and economic transformation and integration into Western clubs. To borrow a phrase from Michael Reid’s (2017, p. 21) survey of Latin America, these countries are ‘far from being a monolith’, but are ‘built from many common materials’. The party politics of the region has hitherto generated a large body of literature. Most of the books on party systems in the Central European region, however, were published some time ago and do not account for recent developments (e.g. Hloušek and Kopeček 2010; Jungerstam-Mulders, 2006; Kitschelt et al., 1999; Kostelecký, 2002; Lewis, 2000; Millard, 2004). Other books have restricted their contributions to specific types of party, such as communist-successor parties (Bozóki and Ishiyama, 2002; Curry and Urban, 2003; Grzymała-Busse, 2002) or those of the centre-right (Szczerbiak and Hanley, 2006), to specific countries (Deegan-Krause, 2006; Spirova, 2007; Szczerbiak, 2001; Wittenberg, 2006), specific types of party institution (van Biezen, 2003; Gherghina, 2015) the regulation of parties (Casal Bértoa and van Biezen, 2018), or to the impact of factors such as EU accession (Haughton, 2011; Lewis and Mansfeldová, 2006; Lewis and Markowski, 2011) and state-building (Grzymała-Busse, 2007; Kopecký, 2008; O’Dwyer, 2006). Recent developments, however, particularly the rise of new parties fuelled by anticorruption and novelty appeals, have been explored, but in article form, producing focused analyses, but not permitting comprehensive analysis (e.g. Engler, 2016; Hanley and Sikk, 2016; Pop-Eleches, 2010; Sikk, 2012). Even Margit Tavits’ book Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization (2013), which offers the most significant recent contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of party politics in Central Europe, focuses on the organizational development of parties in four countries, Estonia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, in the 1990s and 2000s. Hence, it does not examine the causes and consequences of the ‘earthquake’ elections in Hungary and the Czech Republic in 2010 and 2013 and the tremors felt in Poland and Estonia in 2013 and 2015 respectively. The former Polish President Lech Wałęsa remarked that how you see things depends on where you sit,¹ but for an analysis of party politics in the region it

¹ Gazeta Wyborcza, 4 July 2008.

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mattered not just where you sat (some countries were more unstable than others and the region’s (in)stability compared favourably or unfavourably with other regions of the globe), but when you were looking. From a vantage point at the end of the first post-communist decade, electoral politics resembled a lottery (Innes, 2002), but on other occasions it appeared to be stabilizing, only then to be thrown back into another bout of instability (Bakke and Sitter, 2005; Dawisha and Deets, 2006; Lewis, 2000; Lewis and Markowski, 2011; Tavits, 2005, 2013; Toole, 2000). We acknowledge that any set of explanations drawn from recent and contemporary events runs the risk of being overtaken by unexpected events around the next corner.² Party politics in the region may crystallize into stable homogeneity as soon as this book goes to press, but we suggest that nearly three decades is a sufficiently long period of time to chart developments and provide not only explanations for these developments, but also measures and frameworks that can be of use to scholars of other regions of the globe. Moreover, by outlining explanatory frameworks and specifying key mechanisms, we provide explanations not just for the fluidity of party politics, but also for how and why that instability could be diminished. Implicit or explicit in much scholarship of political parties and electoral politics is a desire to understand and explain the rise and fall of particular parties, and also why some party systems are more unstable than others. We begin by looking at broad explanations of the dynamics of party systems and the frameworks that have been used to explain Central European party systems, before turning our attention to the literature that seeks to explain the rise and breakthrough of individual new parties. We find considerable overall value in the explanatory power of institutional frameworks, cleavages, legacies, economic conditions, EU accession and membership, and populism, which have been used to explain party politics in the region. They provide insights that enhance our understanding of party politics, particularly the structure of politics, and offer some reasons behind the levels of (in)stability. But they are less convincing in explaining new party emergence and the dynamics and patterns of politics generated by new party breakthrough. Moreover, the broader literature on new parties is helpful in explaining new party breakthrough, but offers less insight into why new parties keep appearing and tends to overlook the links between party death and party birth.

Institutional Frameworks Central to many explanations of party system development are institutional frameworks. Institutions matter (Lowdnes and Roberts, 2013; Przeworski, 2004). ² As this book was going into production in March 2020, the world was beginning to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, whose long-term impact on politics may (or may not) be profound.

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They shape, channel, and sometimes determine political behaviour. They lay out the parameters of the pitch on which politics is played and shape the rules by which the game is played. It is therefore not surprising that scholars seeking explanations for party system (in)stability have often placed great emphasis on the rules of the game (e.g. Bernhard and Karakoç, 2011; Carreras, 2012; Hino, 2012; Roberts and Wibbels, 1999). But how far do institutional frameworks impact on the patterns and dynamics of party politics? Scholars have long debated how to categorize variations in the executive system (Elgie, 2011; Tsebelis 2002, Wolczuk, 2007). The general rule is that the frameworks coded as having stronger presidencies can reduce the incentive to support minor parties, and hence fewer parties tend to populate those systems (Shugart and Carey, 1992; Lijphart, 1994). But Mainwaring and Bizzarro (2018, pp. 131–132) noted that outsiders can and do win office in systems with powerful presidencies, which can then reinforce and catalyse the destabilization of even institutionalized party systems. Casting an eye over the broader European and Eurasian post-communist world, the existence of strong presidents tends to go hand in hand with a particular type of party system and lower levels of volatility (Andrews and Bairett, 2014; Hale, 2006; Robinson, 2012). The countries at the heart of this study, by and large, had relatively weak presidencies, which may have contributed to the larger number of relevant parties than elsewhere in the post-communist world. Moreover, some scholars have argued that direct elections of presidents (even if their formal powers are limited) provide additional incentives for new parties (Sikk, 2006; Casal Bértoa, 2019). It is clear that the rise and fall of some political parties, such as the Party of Civic Understanding in Slovakia or the Party of the Rights of Citizens in the Czech Republic, were intimately linked to their respective association with presidential ambitions and elections. Nonetheless, while that choice of institutional framework may have contributed to the overall shaping of the political scene, it does not offer much analytical purchase when explaining both change over time and variations across the countries of Central Europe. Indeed, countries in the region with relatively stronger and directly elected presidents have been among those states with the most and the fewest new parties. With a nod back to one of the godfathers of political science, Duverger (1954) (and the work of other major scholars in the field such as Ljiphart (1994) and Cox (1997)), the choice of electoral system has been seen to be influential across the post-communist world (Birch, 2003; Nikolenyi, 2014). Majoritarian single member constituency systems, it is argued, provide very different institutional incentives to proportional representation (PR) systems that employ large multimember constituencies. There is little doubt that electoral systems matter in shaping the choices parties have to make, but do they determine outcomes and do they explain variation? Hungary’s mixed electoral system appears to have played a significant role in the more stable party system and the lack of newcomers

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in the system from the mid-1990s until 2010, and yet the Czech Republic, which uses a PR list-based system, showed a similar level of stability in the same period, and the other notable user of a mixed electoral system in the region, Lithuania, actually proved to have one of the more unstable systems in more recent times. Indeed, there was some evidence from Lithuania that majoritarian features may actually help new parties as it provides them with an ‘additional access point or window of opportunity’ (Sikk, 2006, p. 20). Moreover, if electoral systems were so decisive we would expect to see similar outcomes in all sections of the party system, but despite functioning under the same electoral system, half of the Bulgarian party political scene was remarkably stable and the other half was characterized by instability, suggesting at the very least the impact of an intervening variable. Even putting those reservations aside, it is worth noting that there is not enough variation in the choice of electoral systems across the region to help settle the question of whether a particular electoral system produces more or less variation/change, but the lack of much variation in electoral systems despite considerable variation in the outcomes means that the question is at best irrelevant. Recent scholarship has turned our attention towards the role of party regulation (e.g. Casal Bértoa and van Biezen 2018; Ferris and Voia, 2018). As Casal Bértoa and van Biezen (2018) note in the introduction to their landmark study, across Central Europe party regulation has had an uneven impact on party (system) development. Party regulation establishes the parameters for the functioning of political parties and thus contributes to the creation of the institutional context within which political parties operate. Ironically, some of the most permissive systems have proved to be a constraint on the emergence of new political parties (Haughton, 2014b). In short, party regulation does play a part in the rise and breakthrough of individual parties, but it does not offer a compelling systematic explanation for the development of party politics. Like other aspects of the institutional framework, party regulation offers hurdles and obstacles to new parties, but far from insuperable ones. As one of our interviewees in Lithuania was keen to stress when we discussed the barriers created by signature requirements for new parties, strategic actors can circumvent them and certain parties can sail over them.³ Clearly, one aspect where party regulation has had an important indirect effect is in terms of party financing (Casal Bértoa and Spirova, 2019). Scholars and politicians from different parties, for instance, argued that the stabilization of the Estonian party system after the earthquake election of 2003 owed a lot to the system of party financing (Auers, 2015).⁴ That raises the broader issue of money. ³ Ginataras Steponavičius, Liberal Movement, interviewed by the authors, Vilnius, 10 April 2015. ⁴ Kadri Simson, Centre Party, interviewed by the authors, Tallinn, 15 April 2015; Priit Kallakas, Reform Party, interviewed by the authors, Tallinn, 30 May 2014.

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United States Senator Mark Hanna bluntly noted at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘there are two things that are important in politics. The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.’⁵ While the importance of money does not appear to have diminished over time, it is necessary that we approach it with caution. Party financial regulation can change the calculus, but it does not per se determine the shape of party competition. Despite the system of public financing in Estonia, the country experienced some significant churn in the 2015 and 2019 elections. Systems of party financing do not deter new parties, but critically they make certain types of new parties more likely. In Latvia, for instance, where there was no direct funding of political parties for much of the period covered in this book, the new parties that did emerge were often seen as the ‘pocket parties’ of wealthy Latvian businessmen (Sikk, 2006, p. 78). Indeed, tying this argument to the discussion of time horizons we turn to at various points in this book, we would stress that the need to find sources of finance and the expectation of quick returns of some of those backers has helped to encourage the short-term agendas of a number of new parties in Central Europe. The broader scholarship on the role of money in politics in the region has pointed out some of the murky links between politics and business, particularly in terms of privatization processes and public procurement (Gould, 2011; Innes, 2016; Klíma, 2015). This body of literature, however, does not offer much per se to explain why new parties emerge. Indeed, business interests tend to prefer certainty and safer established options in politics, more reliable ‘brokers’ (Innes, 2016), to help deliver them the goods. Nonetheless, as we argue in later chapters (especially Chapters 4 and 6), parties need money to be launched and be successful, and it is no surprise that behind some of the most striking new party breakthroughs have been parties led by—or closely tied to—rich business people.

Cleavages Institutional frameworks may shape the parameters of politics, but they have less impact on the content of politics. While it is true that battles over institutional frameworks can be salient political themes, as a succession of struggles between Romanian presidents and prime ministers testifies (Borbáth, 2018), at the core of much political contestation is the representation of the interests and values of different groups in society. Given that, it is no surprise that many scholars have taken inspiration from the seminal work of Lipset and Rokkan (1967) on Western Europe and employed a cleavage-based approach to explain party politics in Central Europe (Casal Bértoa, 2014; Evans and Whitefield, 1993; Hloušek and

⁵ Newseum, Washington DC.

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Kopeček, 2008; Kitschelt et al., 1999; Kostelecký, 2002). Lipset and Rokkan’s work, and the further scholarship it spawned, highlights how the patterns of party politics mapped onto underlying social divisions. Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) freezing hypothesis underlined the stability of the structure of political contestation in Western Europe. Since the late 1960s, however, Western European societies have changed markedly, with what were strong underlying divisions such as class seemingly becoming less important. This development has led many scholars not to abandon the cleavage-based approach, but to show it can explain change as well as continuity, by identifying and discussing new cleavages linked to post-material values, the impact of globalization, or the crises confronting the EU (e.g. Kriesi et al., 2012; Inglehart, 1997; Hooghe and Marks, 2018). These new cleavages have been seen as providing new pools from which parties can fish for support. Further afield, Faguet’s (2018, p. 93) account of Bolivia, for example, uses a cleavage-based account to explain that tectonic shifts in the axes of political competition led to the disruption of party systems and the rise of new forces better aligned with the country’s ‘real’ fault lines. At a European Consortium for Political Research conference in 2018, a leading scholar of parties and electoral politics in the region, who is sympathetic to the insights that cleavage-based accounts can bring to the study of political parties, noted that he had looked hard for evidence of cleavages in Central Europe over the past thirty years, but despite several workshops, panels, and conferences devoted to the topic, he had yet to find them in a true Rokkanian sense.⁶ Even if we can identify such cleavages, there are the problems of operationalizing and measuring them (Stoll, 2008; Enyedi and Deegan-Krause, 2013), factors that are even more challenging in rapidly developing, dynamic polities such as those in Central Europe over the past three decades. Since cleavage itself is bound up with the existence of parties that represent competing sides, any use of the cleavage approach to account for new parties must pay close attention to party agency (Sikk, 2006, p. 25), which highlights that to become politically salient it is not enough to talk about cleavages per se; agency needs to be brought back into the equation. For the purposes of our study, which seeks to explain the rise, endurance, and fall of parties, analyses that draw attention to cleavages do offer something for our understanding, but the key here lies less in seeing these cleavages as shaping the contours of politics and more in observing that the underlying social divisions are fungible and manipulable by politicians (Enyedi, 2005; Enyedi and DeeganKrause, 2013). A common example in Central Europe involves ethnic minority communities which often exhibit the distinct demographic, attitudinal and voting characteristics implicit in a cleavage. The clarity of these cleavage lines, however, ⁶ Radosław Markowski’s contribution to a roundtable discussion, ECPR General Conference, Hamburg, 22–25 August 2018.

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depends heavily on the endurance of ethically based parties and their decisions about whether to focus on ethnic difference or employ cross-ethnic appeals. Therefore although our understanding of the patterns of party politics requires us to pay attention to cleavages, the actual outcomes depend heavily on how politicians and parties use the raw material those cleavages provide.

Economic Policy and Performance Bill Clinton’s campaign chief James Carville is famous for insisting that ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, but his catchphrase does not fit all circumstances. Although scholars disagree about how important economic factors are in determining electoral choice and debate the relative importance of sociotropic versus pocketbook economic effects (e.g. Arzheimer et al., 2017; Fisher et al., 2018), few deny that economic performance plays an important role in politics, the occurrence of party system crises, and the performance of individual parties. Much of the literature on party systems in Latin America, for instance, sees economic performance and the policy choices taken by politicians and those presented to the electorate as central to the fate of political parties (Cyr, 2017; Lupu, 2016b; Morgan, 2011; Roberts, 2014; Seawright, 2012). Casting an eye over developments in Western Europe, the turbulence of party politics in Spain with the emergence of Podemos and Ciudadanos and Greece with the success of Syriza, Golden Dawn, the Independent Greeks, and even ‘The River’ shattering what had been rather stable party systems, seems inextricably linked to the harsh economic winds blowing across the region and the tough austerity measures ordinary citizens had to endure. Central Europe has not been sheltered from the storms. Indeed, surveying the decade of developments since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 and observing the proliferation of new parties that have broken through and achieved success in the otherwise more stable systems of the region, such as Hungary, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic, it would be understandable to link the two phenomena. Economics rarely works directly and uniformly. Rather, it is mediated, shaped, enhanced, and diminished by other factors to the point that it loses some of (and occasionally much of) its analytical purchase. At times, Latin America has endured sharp recessions and hyperinflation without seeing major upheavals (Mainwaring and Bizzarro, 2018, p. 124). Indeed, Lupu (2016b) argues that in Latin America, bad performance is far more widespread than party breakdown. He notes that some established parties survived major economic crises. President Alan García in Peru, for instance, was presiding over an economy with an inflation rate of 12,378 per cent, yet his Popular American Revolutionary Alliance won nearly a quarter of the vote in 1990. Moreover, looking at the 2010 elections in Hungary and the Czech Republic and the election in Slovenia a year later, the new

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parties that broke through, winning at times a large slice of the vote (in the Slovenian case over 36 per cent of the vote), may have benefited from some economic discontent, but they were fuelled much more by an anti-corruption and anti-establishment appeal. Furthermore, casting an eye over developments over a much longer period of time, we see from Simeon II’s election in 2001 onwards that although economic woes have played a part in the drop in support for established parties in government, the reason why voters shifted to new parties owed much to anti-corruption, novelty, and competence appeals. Indeed, many of the starkest eruptions in the region occurred during times of economic stasis or improvement. Poor government performance—particularly in terms of key economic indicators—can harm incumbents and tends to provide fuel for challengers and newcomers. García, for instance, was replaced by newcomer Alberto Fujimori after the 1990 Peruvian presidential election. But the relationship is often not that simple. Mainwaring and Bizzarro’s (2018, p. 125) study of Latin America, suggests the differences in levels of party system institutionalization in countries with better and worse performance ‘tend to be small’ raising ‘doubts about theoretical accounts that focus on economic performance as a major driver of party system change’ in that region. Variations in the Latin American case can be partially explained by the importance of what Noam Lupu (2016b) sees as party branding. What matters is not just economic performance, but whether this is combined with parties abandoning stances associated with their brand. In Lupu’s schema, parties can survive presiding over economically challenging times and they can survive diluting their brand, but they cannot survive both. The importance of parties being standard-bearers on major issue divides and the ephemerality of some appeals are themes we return to in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. The volatility calculations of Scott Mainwaring, Carlos Gervasoni, and Annabella España-Najera (2017) see a statistically significant negative relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) growth and extra system volatility (the shift from parties already in the system to newcomers). They calculate that a 1 per cent increase in GDP decreases extra system volatility by 0.82 per cent. Central Europe, however, has experienced levels of extra system volatility that would require a 25-point drop in GDP. Latvia did experience a contraction of that magnitude in the first two years of the Great Recession, but its collapse was the starkest in the region and not a representative example. This does not mean economic conditions are irrelevant, but rather, as we note below and in Chapters 4 and 5, the impact of economic factors is intimately linked to the choices made by parties. Furthermore, as we chart in more detail in later chapters of the book (especially Chapter 6), the new parties that were formed tended to be replaced by an even newer set of parties, creating a dynamic that linked party birth and death.

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Legacies and the Inheritance of the Past Politics does not just happen. Events are not just drawn on an ever-renewing tabula rasa. While other explanations for developments provide more universal sets or frameworks of explanations, others are much more specific to the country or region under consideration. Many of these more specific sets of explanations tend to invoke history. Central Europe is no exception. Indeed, as one Latvian scholar of politics argues, ‘History lives, breathes, provokes and mobilises Baltic publics to an extent almost unimaginable in neighbouring Western European democracies’ (Auers, 2015, p. 7). In Latvia, for instance, the demonstrations in Riga every year on 16 March around the Freedom Monument and on 9 May at the Soviet-era Victory monument demonstrate the power of dates in the calendar from the 1940s to still mobilize different sections of the electorate in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Swain, 2014), intimately linked to the competing narratives of the Soviet era as one of occupation, colonialization, or voluntary incorporation (Auers, 2015, p. 28). As the historian Lajos Grendel (1998) wrote, history matters in Central Europe, perhaps too much. Much of the scholarship that invoked history in explaining political phenomena in Central Europe over the past thirty years, particularly to distinguish such developments from those in Western Europe and other advanced democracies, is wrapped up in discussion of communist legacies. Legacies have offered an appealing set of explanations partly because they mark out the region as different, and allow accumulated insights, experience, and expertise of the region to be deployed, and also because they draw on a combination of two broad categories of explanation used to show why there is variation, both in institutional and sociological terms. Although the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 swept much away, the region was not a blank canvas upon which anything could be drawn. Ken Jowitt (1992) encapsulates the role of legacies by remarking that during the Romanian revolution of 1989, the Leninist centre of the Romanian flag may have been removed, but much of the institutional and cultural inheritance remained still in place. Indeed, some institutions, practices, and mental maps from the communist period remained not just present but significant in shaping political behaviour and outcomes (Ekiert and Hanson, 2003; Haughton, 2014a). To deny that legacies have played a role would be to imply that four decades of communism—a system with a transformational role that both adherents and critics have been keen to underline—cast no shadow over subsequent developments. Indeed, based on their extensive set of statistical tests of citizens’ attitudes in states that had been behind the Iron Curtain, Pop-Eleches and Tucker (2017, p. 247) argue that ‘communism left a lasting legacy not only in institutional terms but also in the hearts and minds of its former subjects’.

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The question of legacies, therefore, is not so much if they matter, but how, or more precisely how they interact with other factors. It is difficult, for instance, to explain the fate of communist successor parties in the region post-1989 without reference to the communist period. As a close observer of Bulgarian party politics notes, the dominance of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in its country’s political system, for instance, can be attributed to ‘the nature of the old regime, the absence of any meaningful opposition before 1989 and its relative weakness during the transition period’ combined with the ‘crucial role’ the Bulgarian Communist Party played in the transition to democracy, and the ‘organizational continuity that the newly renamed BSP chose to maintain’ (Spirova, 2008, p. 482). The influence of the communist successor parties on the wider terrain of party politics, however, was linked as much to their decisions to exit, disperse or regenerate in the fluid early post-communist years than in the nature of the previous four decades of communist rule. Indeed, agency was key. Casting an eye over communist successor parties and the nature of party politics post-1989, Grzymała-Busse (2006, p. 432) argues that ‘[w]hile communist exit from power was less a choice than a necessary response, the decision to diffuse and to regenerate are attributable to individual elites’. The patterns of party politics in the subsequent three decades, however, were also shaped by other political parties. As we argue in Chapter 5, the choices of a number of parties other than the communist-successor parties have led them to achieve significant sustained success in the following three decades. Placing an emphasis on choice in the late 1980s and early 1990s underlines both the importance of agency, but also that legacy-based arguments are at their most persuasive in explaining developments in the early post-communist years if tied to accounts of the exit from communism (Grzymała-Busse, 2002; Rivera, 1996; PopEleches, 2015). Even focusing on the diverging fates of communist-successor parties over the subsequent three decades, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain developments by referring to a previous political system. Communism’s shadow (Pop-Eleches and Tucker, 2017) has become smaller and fainter. The fate of the communist-successor parties was impacted by their respective inheritance and their decisions when the regimes collapsed, but also, as highlighted in our broader discussion in Chapter 5 of parties that endure, by a series of subsequent choices linked to organizational development and their pitch to voters. The communist era provides raw materials out of which political actors could make something appealing. Commenting on the merger between the Lithuanian communist-successor party and the Social Democrats, for instance, a leading figure in the merged party commented to us that the merger was like fixing an old suit: the communists brought in their outfit but the Social Democrats fixed it up, cleaned it off and made it look more

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modern.⁷ Moreover, legacy and exit-based arguments tend to be rather path-dependent and are far less persuasive at explaining developments in the second post-communist decade and after. Indeed, exit explanations are stretched beyond breaking point if we try to use them to explain the electoral earthquake elections in Slovenia in 2011 or the Czech Republic in 2010; although in the latter case, the support for the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, which won 12.8 per cent of the vote, owes something to the party’s ability to tap into nostalgia for the simplicities and certainties of communist rule in Czechoslovakia. Apart from downplaying the role of choice, legacy-based arguments suffer from further weaknesses that reduce their explanatory traction or at least force us to amend and nuance our understanding of legacies. First, some legacy-based arguments are poorly defined, with outcomes seen as the ‘endpoint of a causal chain that began at some point in the past. Understood this way, all outcomes are historical legacies because any outcome can be conceived as the end of a causal chain beginning in the past’ (Wittenberg, 2015, p. 375). The mechanisms of transmission need to be clarified and often, as we see in the fate of many parties in Central Europe; these mechanisms have much more to do with contemporaneous factors rather than those that dominated before 1989. Secondly, even if we stress the role of the past, we have to acknowledge that there is not just one past (Haughton, 2013). Just as we should not ignore the impact of four decades of communism, so we should not imagine that these states were a tabula rasa in the 1940s. Indeed, rather than the impact of communism we could point to the redrawing of borders. Poland’s distinctive geographical voting patterns in the 2010s, for instance, appear to neatly reflect the division between those areas of the country that were part of Germany and those that were part of Poland prior to the Second World War (Zarycki, 2015), although more recent elections have challenged this assertion. Equally, one of the key and persistent dividing lines of politics in Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria is an ethnic one. The sizeable share of the population in Slovakia and Romania who are ethnic Hungarian is a direct demographic legacy of the borders created by the postFirst World War treaties, whereas the presence of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria is linked to the history of the Ottoman Empire. Thirdly, the legacies of the communist era are not necessarily simply linked to communism per se. In both Estonia and Latvia, one could argue that the most significant legacy from the communist period shaping party politics is not anything explicitly linked to the nature of one-party communist rule, but rather the large number of Russian-speaking individuals who moved to the Baltic states during the Soviet period and who have remained. In this regard, ethnicity rather ⁷ Gintautas Paluckas, Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, interviewed by the authors, Vilnius, 9 April 2015.

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than communism endures (Auers, 2015; Rovny, 2014). But it is worth also stressing that in the Baltic cases, communist legacies are inextricably linked not just to the demographic legacies of Russophones moving to those states from the 1940s onwards and remaining, but also the tumultuous events of the Second World War, making it difficult to suggest that even legacy politics is simply about the communist period.⁸ The interaction between ethnicity and communism was significant not just in the form and functioning of states during communist times (Bunce, 1999), but also in terms of the post-federal legacies (Haughton and Fisher, 2008; Rovny, 2014) linked to ethnicity and nationalism in the post-1989/1991 era. While some accounts of legacies seek to emphasize region-wide developments demarking them from other regions, a second set of accounts highlights variations within the East European communist bloc. Most notably, Kitschelt et al. (1999) explain the development of party systems in Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic with reference to the different types of communist regime, contrasting bureaucratic authoritarian with national and patrimonial communist regimes, distinctions that partly drew on the varied pre-communist traditions in each of the countries. Putting aside the criticism that these categories place insufficient weight on the changes experienced by the countries during four decades of communist rule, such as Czechoslovakia’s post-Prague Spring normalization that ushered in an era of hard-line communism in the 1970s and 1980s, it is difficult to draw direct, clear, and cogent explanations for the rise and fall of the Union of Democratic Forces in Bulgaria or Public Affairs in the Czech Republic, the emergence and electoral success of Civic Platform in Poland, or the durability and electoral triumphs of Fidesz in Hungary with reference to the nature of the communist regimes in those countries (Haughton, 2014a). As Rovny (2014, p. 700) argues, patterns of competition in Central Europe are more varied than often portrayed, and the variance ‘cannot be simply attributed to different communist regime types and transition legacies’.

European Union Accession and Membership While focus on legacies directed attention to the impacts and mechanisms of historical factors, a significant slice of literature on political developments in Central Europe has been linked to the impact of EU accession and membership (e.g. Grabbe, 2006; Jacoby, 2004; Malová et al., 2005; Vachudova, 2005). The impact of the EU on party politics across the European continent has generated a large body of literature, mostly but not exclusively wrapped up in debates about Europeanization (e.g. Ladrech, 2002; Lewis and Markowski, 2011). In a seminal

⁸ Mantas Adomėnas, Homeland Union, interviewed by the authors, Vilnius, 10 April 2015.

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study of Western Europe, however, Peter Mair (2000) finds that there was little evidence of direct impact, although indirect impact was discernible. Mair’s study, however focuses on member states, but for the states of Central Europe for a large slice of the post-1989 period they were aspirants and applicants on the road towards membership. Some scholars suggest significant EU influence during the process of accession. Vachudova and Hooghe (2009, p. 179), for instance, opine that the long and demanding process of getting into the club had a ‘profound impact on nascent party systems’ in the region, particularly in terms of structuring competition and affecting the policy platforms parties could present to the electorates. To which can be added the impact of transnational party groups, including the European Parliament groupings, which acted as a source of inspiration, support, and policy ideas (Spirova, 2008; Pridham, 2005; Holmes and Lightfoot, 2011). Indeed, there was a widely held expectation that the EU could be more influential in Central Europe because parties were less well developed and institutionalized than in Western Europe (Graziano and Vink, 2008). There is little doubt that the process of EU accession was part of the context of politics. ‘Active leverage’ was significant in the choice of particular packages of policies by governments wanting to get their countries into the EU (Vachudova, 2005, pp. 108–19), although even in cases where we might have expected the greatest impact of the ‘transformative power’ of the EU (Grabbe, 2006), there is some evidence of ‘Potemkin Europeanization’ (Mikulova, 2014) and of the weak vanquishing the strong (Gallagher, 2009). More specifically in terms of political parties, as many politicians in the region are happy to acknowledge, there was plenty of policy borrowing from their ideological sister parties in Western Europe,⁹ and encouragement from these same sources for politicians to bury the hatchets and work together with ideological similar politicians in the wider interests of promoting, for instance, Christian or social democracy (MikuckaWojtówicz, 2016, p. 241).¹⁰ EU accession was a valence issue in domestic politics in which parties agreed on the goal, but disagreed about who was best placed to achieve that goal, especially in the countries seen as laggards such as Slovakia and Bulgaria (e.g. Henderson, 2006; Stoyanov, 2006). Moreover, participating in transnational party groups became important ‘badges of approval’ (Haughton and Rybář, 2009, p. 128) used to signal acceptance and involvement at the European level. Nonetheless, it is hard to identify direct impact in terms of the entrants and exits from the party system. Even in the country often seen to have experienced the clearest ‘active leverage’ of the EU, Slovakia, there is little evidence of a direct

⁹ Ginataras Steponavičius, Liberal Movement, interviewed by the authors, Vilnius, 10 April 2015. ¹⁰ Mantas Adomėnas, Homeland Union, interviewed by the authors, Vilnius, 10 April 2015; Gintautas Paluckas, Lithuanian Social Democratic Party, interviewed by the authors, Vilnius, 9 April 2015.

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impact on new party formation or the death of established parties. At the height of active leverage in the country (1997–2002), the parties that were created owed much to domestic tinkering with electoral laws and politically ambitious politicians wanting new vehicles to fulfil their ambitions, and those established parties that bit the dust fell out of parliament owing to poor leadership choices (Haughton, 2003; Rybář, 2006). Fast forward to more contemporary times, and it is true to suggest that national politics in Europe ‘takes place within a European force field’ (Tooze, 2018, p. 23). After the EU accession of many of the states in 2004, initially at least, however, the EU was the ‘dog that did not bark’ (Batory, 2009, p. 427). Nonetheless, from 2008, the eurozone-induced crises and the migration crisis did raise EU issues and fuelled Euroscepticism. As we point out in Chapter 5 some parties threw a Eurosceptic appeal into the mix to aid their survival, but as we argue throughout the book, the point is not that Eurosceptic sentiments and policies drove changes in party politics, but that they offered raw material that parties could choose (or not) to incorporate into their pitch to voters. To put it another way, European integration provided politicians with ‘new sets of tools’ (Enyedi, 2006, p. 84). Politicians could choose to use them to construct new appeals and narratives for the electorate or simply to bash their opponents over the head.

Populism and Populist Appeals Much research on contemporary party politics makes significant use of the concept of populism and a large body of scholarship employing the concept of populism to Central Europe and the European continent more broadly (e.g. Akkerman et al., 2016; Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008, 2015; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Havlik and Hloušek, 2014; van Kessel, 2015; Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2012; Palonen, 2018; Pappas, 2019; Taggart, 2000; Wolinetz and Zaslove, 2018). This scholarship has offered up a rich set of insights and provided some of the best accounts of the dynamics of European politics. Many of the components of the new party challenge we discuss in this book might be placed under the label of populism depending on the definition used. Our reluctance to do so has several reasons. First, in much popular discourse almost anything that could be classified as non-traditional politics could be assembled under the umbrella of populism. While helpful for a news headline or a barb towards one’s political opponents, such all-embracing terms have little analytic purchase, especially when the term is laden with normative value judgements. In the European context at least, ‘populist’ is frequently a synonym for ‘bad guy’, and its use is often just a poorly disguised lament that an opponent has become inexplicably popular (DeeganKrause, 2007). A large slice of the bad guy image stems from the fact that in some popular discourse and academic scholarship, the word populist is used at times to

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describe nativist appeals and parties of the far/extreme right; a blurring that has led leading scholars of populism to clarify the differences between populism and the far right (Mudde, 2019). The nativist and exclusionary appeals at the heart of the radical right can undermine, weaken, and break democratic systems. But it is worth stressing that the relationship between national/ethnic appeals and democracy is complex. While exclusionary appeals do not sit comfortably with democratic values, national identity has been a key building block of democratic states, and appeals for reconfiguration of states such as secession are often driven by appeals to nations and ethnicity (Auer, 2004). What is striking in our analysis of the dynamics of party politics in Central Europe is that some parties that relied on national or ethnic appeals (particularly those that represented ethnic minorities, but also some that despised ethnic minorities) have had some of the most stable levels of support. Secondly, there are problems with populism even when it rests on a solid scholarly definition. The broad consensus among scholars who have studied populism over many years is that the term should refer to a thin-centred ideology with an antagonistic relationship between the people and the elite at its heart (e.g. Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008; c.f. Aslanidis, 2016, Pappas, 2019). Populist parties and populist politicians, in this view, stand with the ‘pure’ people against the soiled elite. This tighter definition offers a much more robust framework for scholars, but by itself we suggest it does not offer us significant analytical purchase in our endeavour. While we tend to accept this broad framework, we have long argued it is more helpful to think about populist appeals rather than populist politicians (Deegan-Krause and Haughton, 2009). Breaking populism down into a series of specific appeals, we observe in the case of Slovakia that all parties use to a greater or lesser extent appeals that can be labelled as populist. Indeed, the binary black or white distinction between populist and non-populist is probably best avoided, recognizing that in the messy real world of politics, politicians throw more or less of those populist appeals into their pitch to voters. When those labelled populists are defeated at the ballot box, it may be because voters have cast their votes for other parties who have sought to steal some of the populists’ clothes. The amount of populism in the system, therefore, has not diminished, it has just been redistributed. Even putting aside those concerns for one moment, while many of the characteristics of populism are also present in many of the parties we are studying, many of them arguably do not fit. If we look at many of the new parties we describe and analyse in subsequent chapters, they do not fit the tighter definition of populism. Many of these parties are not anti-elitist in the sense outlined by Stanley (2008) or Mudde (2004) where there are two homogeneous units of analysis, ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, which have a mutually antagonistic relationship. The pitch of parties such as the Party of Miro Cerar in Slovenia and Latvia from the Heart played on the notion of tainted elites, but critically their solution was to offer

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untainted elites drawn from the highest circles of business, law, academia, and policy-making to improve government and governance. For them, it was not simply an antagonistic people versus elite relationship, but a corrupt or incompetent part of the elite that needed to be replaced by the expert knowledge, insights, and experience of untainted individuals. Indeed, these parties have had no real vision of ‘the people’ in the populist sense.

New Party Formation and Breakthrough While institutional frameworks, cleavages, legacies, economic conditions, EU accession and membership, and populism can provide insights into the dynamics of politics in Central Europe, they do not alone provide compelling explanations for the patterns of party politics across the region. Any satisfactory account of new party breakthrough and party endurance needs to look at the level of individual parties, examining the choices those parties made within the context they found themselves and with the raw materials at their disposal. In the electoral marketplace, we need to examine both the demand and the supply side. The spread of new values, the rise of political distrust and disillusionment, or the simple desire for a change among the electorate that has been emphasized, for instance, by scholars of new party emergence (e.g. Conti and Memoli, 2015; Hug, 2001; Mair, 2013; Sikk, 2012), do not by themselves generate changes to the patterns of party politics. Rather, we need to incorporate supplyside factors such as the choices of party elites (Bolleyer, 2013). It is at this interaction between broader contextual factors and the (lack of) strategic choice where we find much of the explanation for the dynamics of party politics in Central Europe. There is a large body of literature explaining new party emergence and success (e.g. Bolleyer, 2013; De Vries and Hobolt, 2020; Deschouwer, 2008; Harmel and Robertson, 1985; Hino, 2012; Hug, 2001; Lucardie, 2000; Sikk, 2012), much of it began as a response to the Western European experience in the 1970s, which until recently was seen as the ‘heyday’ of electoral success of new parties in that region (Krouwel, 2012, p. 56). As Vidal (2018) argues, scholarly accounts of new parties have tended to fall into one of three broad categories of explanations: institutional, sociological, or spatial strategic. We return to these explanations in Chapter 6, but it is worth stressing here that our focus in this book is less about why new parties are created per se and more about why they keep emerging, why some new parties are successful in terms of electoral breakthrough, why that success has often been fleeting, and what their initial success and subsequent failure means for the health and well-being of democracy. Two aspects about new party formation and breakthrough are central to much of the discussion in this book. First, sometimes the analysis of new party

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formation tends to see the creation of new parties in episodic terms, focusing on the reasons why individual parties emerge, but that appears to neglect the linkage between the decline and death of new parties and the emergence of newer parties. The new party subsystem, which we outline in Chapter 6, provides an explanatory framework for how the birth and breakthrough of parties is intimately linked to the failure of parties that previously succeeded by using a new party appeal. Secondly, one of the key motors of change in party politics in Central Europe and across the globe is corruption (e.g. Bågenholm and Charron, 2014; Engler, 2016; Seawright, 2012). We argue in this book that in order to understand party competition in contemporary Central Europe (and beyond) it helps to think not just of the traditional left–right socio-economic dimension and the liberal versus socially conservative values dimension, but also a third ‘clean’ versus ‘corrupt’ dimension of politics to explain how new parties often project themselves. It is difficult, however, for parties to maintain that reputation for cleanliness, especially when they gain power. If a party does soil its clean reputation, then it can easily find itself portrayed as yet another corrupt party, which then frees up space for a newer party to project itself as the new clean party. The opportunities for corruption (and the public presumption that leaders will take advantage of those opportunities) means that while parties can rarely remain on the clean side of the divide, the dimension can endure from election to election, providing incentives for new parties to insert themselves into the vacated anti-corruption space. Corruption is a perennial theme of politics, but its role in contemporary party politics only makes sense when we see how the wider scale societal changes associated with a breakdown of traditional structures, the decline of deference, and the development of non-hierarchical and accessible media have all led to an environment in which anti-corruption appeals have resonance, reach, and potency. But critically, it still requires a political actor or party to use that raw material, package it, and present it in a way that is appealing to (a slice of) the electorate and reaps rewards at the ballot box.

Party Survival Many, but not all, new parties fail. Moreover, while some parties are just annuals which bloom and then perish soon afterwards, others have been perennials on the political scene and seem able to survive even the harshest of political winters (Deegan-Krause and Haughton, 2011). Any attempt to explain not just the fate of new parties, but also the overall patterns of party politics, therefore, needs to examine the causes of endurance. In seeking to explain individual party persistence, scholars looking at different geographical regions have tended to emphasize a variety of different factors. Although occasionally a party will come to an end

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owing to a stochastic and accidental event that is difficult to fit into a comparative framework, scholars have identified factors that tend to lead to a short existence and those that prolong life. Studies have suggested persistence is more likely if a party has developed a strong organizational structure (Cyr, 2017; Levitsky et al., 2016; Tavits, 2013; Ibenskas, 2014; Spirova, 2007; Van Dyck, 2016), has well developed linkages to societal groups (Bolleyer, 2013), has an identifiable brand that stands for something and is able to make that brand both relevant and theirs (Lupu, 2016b; Cyr, 2017; Meguid, 2007), has performed well in government, particularly on its core issues (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2015; Green and Jennings, 2017; Serra, 2013), and has demonstrated a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances (Mair, 1989). While there is compelling evidence that all these factors have mattered in specific cases, none by itself offers a comprehensive and compelling explanation. We take as our starting point Mair (1989, p. 336), who flags up the roles of particular party leaderships, specific policy appeals, and organizational strategy and style when discussing the vulnerabilities of parties. Incorporating some of the insights from the work of scholars mentioned in the previous paragraph, we argue in this book that party persistence lies in a combination of three factors. First, even in an era of social media and modern technology, which can propel a start-up party to breakthrough into a political system, parties survive when they develop a substantial organizational structure, which allows them to maintain institutional continuity, withstand the organizational burdens imposed by parliamentary and government participation, and build long-term relationships with voters. Secondly, some parties with well-developed organizational structures do not endure, suggesting organization per se is not enough. Parties also need to be identified in the eyes of voters with a durable appeal. Anti-corruption and novelty appeals may propel parties along the highway to initial success, but they survive longer when they instead become the standard-bearer of a position on enduring programmatic issue divides related to economics, cultural rights, or ethnic identity that are less sensitive to party performance and perception. Thirdly, engaging and charismatic individuals bathed in the glow of celebrity or with the business acumen to find solutions to a country’s woes may act as catalysts for new parties, and vibrant personalities can be pivotal at moments of crisis, but in the long run parties avoid electoral decline when their fates are not tied exclusively to a single individual. When tarnished leaders will not depart and cannot be removed, parties face the prospect of unpredictable sudden losses; when second-tier leaders see no opportunity for advancement into the top ranks, parties are more likely to split or splinter. All these factors highlight party choice, and not just a one-off choice when a party is formed, but also how it adapts to changing circumstances. While the rise and fall of parties can be explained to a significant degree by their own choices and how they adapt to the context in which they find themselves, there is one aspect of

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the context that needs to be incorporated more systematically into the analysis, not least because it helps explain the broader systemic development of politics: time.

Incorporating the Dimension of Time Central to our analysis of the development of party politics since 1989 is a dimension that has been surprisingly overlooked in studies of party politics, or at least treated implicitly rather than explicitly: time. We have a lot to learn from disciplines such as physics, where the study of time is central. Not only have Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein contributed to debates about absolute and relative notions of time, but also various arrows of time have been identified, one of which, the thermodynamic arrow of time, sees the dispersal of energy as always having been on the increase since the Big Bang (Hawking, 1988). Whilst the 1989 revolutions that brought down the communist regimes in Central Europe are not quite on the same scale as the universe’s Big Bang, we suggest time is a critical component for understanding party politics in the region. Time has been rather neglected, in part because the region that has been the comparative starting point for Central Europe—indeed of most studies of political parties—is Western Europe and, with the occasional exception, parties in Western Europe have been—at least until very recently—relatively fixed or with only gradually changing qualities. In the archetypal West European system, all parties have roughly the same amount of experience and all parties began at roughly the same time. The Central European picture, however, is characterized by a heterogeneous party scene with some new parties and some old, some parties formed in the past and others forming in the present. This distinction matters, we contend, because it lowers the amount of experience and brings the moment of origin closer to the present. More specifically, we see two elements of time worthy of particular attention: age and timing. In terms of the former, we suggest that there is a difference if a party is young or old. That simple distinction is understood by many authors, albeit sometimes more implicitly than explicitly. Studies of institutionalization (e.g. Mainwairing, 2018b; Casal Bértoa, 2018) underline that instant institutionalization is impossible, because an ‘institutionalized party system is one in which a stable set of parties interact regularly in stable ways. Actors develop expectations and behaviour based on the premise that the fundamental contours of party competition will prevail into the foreseeable future’ (Mainwaring, 2018a, p. 4) In other words, the regularized interactions and well-worn patterns that are the hallmarks of institutionalized systems are contingent on the ages of the parties within the system. Party age is more explicitly at the heart of some studies of volatility, albeit often without explicit discussion of the reasons why we should study changes in party

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institutions. Recent scholarship designed to improve our measurements of volatility (Powell and Tucker, 2014; Mainwaring et al., 2017) calls specific attention to the role of newcomers in party systems, suggesting that the shift in voters from one party to another means something different if they shift to a new party. Powell and Tucker (2014, p. 124) argue that new parties are different from existing ones because of the change in ‘the relevant political actors’ and the potential for the ‘coming of new issue areas’, while Mainwaring et al. (2017, pp. 624, 632) call attention to the ‘membership’ of the party system and suggest that the change reflects ‘dissatisfaction’ and ‘voters’ willingness to flee from all parties’. One of the limitations, however, of even the newer, more sophisticated, and more nuanced measures of volatility is that they tend to fall into a binary distinction between old and new when arguably what really matters is the degree of newness. Should we think, for example, of an old party formed in 1991 as the same as one founded in 2009? Volatility calculations of an election in 2017 would put those both into the category of old/established parties, but we may learn more about the sources of stability if we know the party has been around for nearly three decades rather than just a couple of electoral terms. In politics, as in comedy, timing matters. The existing literature on new party emergence—both region-specific and generic—acknowledges this fact in terms of the types of appeals that are likely to have resonance (Bolleyer, 2013; Lucardie, 2000). We would expect a strong anti-communist appeal would have more impact in the 1990s than in the late 2010s, an anti-immigration appeal would have more resonance at the height of a migration crisis than soon after a closed society opened itself to the outside world, and an anti-establishment appeal of the new would have greater resonance after the roster of old parties have all had a chance to demonstrate their incompetence in power. While the content of the appeal is important, it is also important to look at the type of party, its organizational structure, and the way in which it projects itself to the electorate. The time at which a party is formed can arguably be more important than the pitch of the party to voters. In other words, there are generational factors. The formative years of parties, their coming of age, can shape the way in which they organize and behave. Not all the youth of today behave in the same way, but they have a different relationship to modern technology than those of an older generation who grew up employing different ways of doing things. Linking this back to questions of timing, we suggest that young parties of today are not (necessarily) the same as young parties of a generation ago and that old parties of today are not (necessarily) the same as the young parties of a generation ago. Integrating age with timing helps to highlight the unfolding processes at work. The work of two scholars is illuminating in this regard. First, taking her cue from Pierson’s (2004) argument that politics unfolds in time, in her study of post-communist transitions, Grzymała-Busse (2011) underlines multiple

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dimensions at play when considering the role of time: timing (when something happens), duration (how long something takes), tempo (how fast), and acceleration (change in how fast). These are helpful categories when thinking about the dynamics of party politics in the region, and feed into our discussion throughout the book, especially in Chapter 4 when looking at parties that live fast and die young. Secondly, in her study of new parties, van Biezen (2005) highlights generation effects dependent on the answer to the question ‘when you were born?’, period effects, which depend on the answer to the question ‘what year is it?’ and life-cycle effects, which depend on the answer to the question ‘how long have you lived?’. Van Biezen’s account is extremely important because it deals with key aspects of time: the importance of the past, the present, and path configuration. Van Biezen’s notions of generation and life-cycle effects are central to this book, since each is a different aspect of why new parties are intriguing. They are important because, on the one hand, new parties emerged at different times belonging to a particular generation or cohort, having their origins in the world of the past as opposed to the present, and, on the other hand, because some of these parties have lived longer than others and are hence at different stages of their life cycles. If neither of these really matters, then we fall back on the ‘what’s happening now’ aspect of parties, which would make ‘newness’ rather irrelevant. Time also matters when considering stability, not just because that is the way in which we measure endurance, but because affiliations and attachments to parties can grow and entrench as they get older, and because parties forged at particular moments may develop similar characteristics. In Chapter 2, for instance, we show how parties formed in the early 1990s have had greater staying power than those born in the latter half of that decade. We suggest this may owe something to the context and choices available at that time. It is worth stressing, though, that time in both synchronic (what is also happening now) and diachronic (what happened before and after) forms are integral to our analysis. Both dimensions are important because the formation and duration of individual parties can only be understood by looking at their contemporary context. In addition, as we argue throughout the book, it is helpful to think not just about parties in isolation at one moment in time, but also as part of a larger system (and smaller subsystems), which is dynamic. We have to understand how and when parties are born and how and when parties die, and also examine how party death is related to the birth of other parties.

Exploring and Explaining the New Party Challenge Throughout the book, we draw on a variety of different data sources and use mixed methods. Political phenomena can be complicated. Indeed, the complexity

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of political reality cannot be grasped fully by use of one methodological tool, and benefits from a blend of large ‘n’ and ‘direct observation’ (Brady et al., 2006; Mead, 2010, p. 454). Just as a golfer would not expect to be able to play with only one type of club, so a political scientist cannot rely on one method or type of method. Large ‘n’ studies are akin to drivers or irons, which can hit the ball a long way, but these need to be complemented by close observation and an on-the-ground fieldwork putter, which can deal with the undulations of a variety of tricky greens. We know from our experience that quantitative measures on things we study may sometimes be accurate, but they are also sometimes lacking in a sensitivity to the specifics. Therefore, although we make use of a number of databases, including expert surveys and polling data, we blend these data with the findings from our own semi-structured interviews. There are very few parties we mention in the book with which we have not had a conversation, ranging from, and often involving a combination of, leading party officials, activists, and ordinary party workers. Before we begin to develop our arguments about the rise and fall of new parties, and the persistence (or not) of others in Central Europe, however, we need to define newness and map and measure the development of party politics in Central Europe. Chapter 2, therefore, examines novelty. We explore the different ways in which political scientists have understood newness when studying political parties and offer new standards for measuring the extent and degree of newness in a political system. Any explanatory joining of the dots and detailed analysis of how and when parties are born and die requires a notable degree of data gathering. We need to pin down how and when parties are actually created and burst onto the scene, distinguishing between any new party and those that make it big. Moreover, we also need to identify how and when parties die, distinguishing between collapse and just shrinking into oblivion. Chapter 3, therefore, not only seeks to chart the twists and turns of party politics in individual countries, but also uses existing measures and develops new methods to depict and explore the development of party systems. In particular, we show how analyses based on party age help to reveal underlying patterns and dynamics. One of the limitations of a significant portion of the existing scholarship of party politics is its focus either on the party level or on the party system level. Not only is there a need to integrate analysis of parties with the party system, in order to understand the dynamics of party systems, but there is also a need for a temporal component at the core of the analysis. Indeed, the fate of parties can only be properly understood by understanding interactions both synchronic (developments happening at the same time) and diachronic (the sequencing of developments). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on individual parties. Drawing on the findings of our own fieldwork, but blended with the results of our analyses of others’ datasets, in Chapter 4 we highlight how new parties differ in terms of their

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appeals and organization. In Chapter 5, we show the importance of organizational structures, developing an identifiable brand linked to taking positions as a standard-bearer on a major issue dimension and developing leadership structures that permit adaptability. Such attributes allow parties to endure, and these are precisely the characteristics that many of the new parties do not have. Nonetheless, there are exceptions to the trend. A few new parties have made choices that aid their longevity. Chapter 6 turns attention from the fate of individual parties to the links between the birth and death of new parties. We forward the idea of a new party subsystem both in theoretical terms, and by analysing data of voter movements, we show how the new party subsystem has played out in Central Europe. We argue that most voters who give up on new parties do not return to the more established parties; rather, they move instead to other new alternatives, causing a self-reinforcing cycle of ever newer parties, except in those rare cases where the new parties succeed in adopting stabilizing mechanisms. The final third of the book seeks to draw out the wider lessons from Central Europe. Chapter 7 draws on examples from Western Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa to show the dynamics we identify in Central Europe and the explanatory frameworks we outline can travel widely. We show that this is not a phenomenon exclusive to a specific region but rather a development that is happening in democracies across the globe, and we devote Chapter 8 to addressing the positive and negative implications of new party subsystems and exploring the consequences that might result if these cycles and subsystems endure, not just in terms of party politics, but for accountability mechanisms, the quality of public policy, and the strength and endurance of democracy. The final chapter brings together the main findings of the book and reflects on what could and should be done in the face of the new party challenge.

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2 What’s New? How to Refine our Assessments of Party Novelty Ever since deciding to write a book on party politics in Central Europe, on our separate visits to the region we made a point of seeking meetings with politicians from the nascent, new, and nearly new parties on the political scene. In Slovakia in 2012, for instance, Kevin arranged an interview with a leading representative of Freedom and Solidarity, which had gained parliamentary representation two years previously. On another trip to Slovakia in 2014, we were keen to know more about a new party with a name that suggested novelty: Nova. Kevin was invited to the parliamentary offices and directed to meet one of the party’s officials. And in February 2015, we wanted to know more about yet another nascent party, Skok. Tim arranged an interview with the new party’s leader. Unfortunately, on the day of the interview the leader cancelled but kindly arranged an hour-long meeting with another of the party’s founders. All three of these interviews were interesting and informative on the trials and tribulations of setting up new political parties and the tough decisions individuals faced when weighing up whether to hop aboard or not. But the most striking aspect of all three interviews was that they occurred with the same person: Martin Chren. The many parties of Martin Chren reflect a personal journey that is by no means unique in Slovakia or anywhere in Central Europe. Nor are the comings and goings limited to individual party members. Parties themselves have come and gone, joined together, and come apart with great rapidity. And just as we can follow the shifting party affiliations of individuals, so we can also trace the origins and destinations of parties. We can, for example, follow a clear path of institutional change that links Slovakia’s newest parties with the anti-Communist umbrella movement in 1989. In 1991, Public Against Violence fell apart, spawning a variety of parties. These included a major contender led by former prime minister Vladimír Mečiar, called the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia. Mečiar’s illiberal leadership style provoked two distinct splinters in 1993, which later merged with splinters from other parties to form The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond. Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause, Oxford University Press (2020). © Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198812920.003.0002

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 ’   ? 29 the Democratic Union. In 1998, the Democratic Union formed an anti-Mečiar electoral coalition with four other parties, which soon— because of changes in the electoral law—became a single party, the Slovak Democratic Coalition. This diverse party won the election, but having achieved its goal began to fracture into a mix of its original constituent parties and a new formation called the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union. In 2005, that party merged with the much smaller Democratic Party and joined the party names with a hyphen to mark the change. As the party declined under the weight of corruption scandals, a significant group of its most prominent younger elites left the party, first becoming political independents and then joining with dissidents from the Christian Democratic Movement to form a party called #Network (hashtag included in the name). When this party collapsed almost immediately after going into government in 2016, many again became independent and some decided to form yet another party in the chain, naming it, without apparent irony, Together.

Before we can understand the new party challenge, we need to decide what we mean by new. This is hard because parties are not static. They change constantly and their changes take many forms. Every step in the path from Public Against Violence to Together—major splinter, minor splinter, broad-based merger, coalition, absorption of a smaller party, renaming, leadership jumping, and formation of a new party by actors within the political system—represents a change that might be considered a new party according to some standards but not according to others. So when does it make sense to refer to a party as new? Like many simplesounding goals, this one turns out to be complicated. The goal of this book is to understand the constant flow of new parties: where it comes from, why it keeps going, and how it creates a new kind of political landscape. The goal in this chapter is to narrow the universe of ‘new’ to a bounded realm both meaningful and manageable. Unfortunately, the stuff of newness—the change in organizational development and party self-presentation—is difficult to pin down and requires a substantial amount of clarification in its own right to separate into distinct categories. It is important to make these distinctions carefully, because the cascade of calculations about new parties depends heavily on the initial choice of which parties are included in which categories, and so early misclassification can lead to significant later misunderstandings and distortions. We must therefore build some scaffolding of core categories to explore alternatives and extensions that can show the reader how small upstream changes in criteria do not lead to major differences in findings, even if we were to use standards that were a little looser, a little tighter, or a little different.

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Fortunately, assessment of the novelty of political parties is nothing new, and therefore much of the preparatory work has already been done. By standing on the shoulders of our predecessors and joining in the efforts of our contemporaries, we can see quite far into the murk. As this chapter illustrates, contemporary scholarship has identified the key questions—sometimes implicitly, often explicitly— and provided insightful answers. The variety of questions and answers has fragmented the field, but it ultimately helps rather than hinders the effort to create a framework that is resilient enough to deal with blurry lines, conflicting priorities, and limited data. In order to do this, we develop a multilevel classification of party change with internal gradations and guidelines for difficult circumstances, which can in turn be evaluated according to higher or lower standards for newness. In this way, we hope not only to minimize disagreement about the evaluations themselves, but also to shed light on the way those decisions impact our overall calculations. Even if readers do not agree with us on our choices about where to draw the line, the method itself encourages further comparison and evaluation of these choices. This chapter aims not only to explain what we mean by ‘new’ and how we apply it in this book, but also to reflect on the broader question of novelty in party politics and how to measure it. After examining the current state of the art in studies of newness, we propose a scale of party change and offer guidelines for assessing the levels of change in various kinds of party transitions. We then provide options for linking change with newness and apply these to the parties of Central Europe in the three decades between 1989 and 2020.

Why New is Complicated Newness is a surprisingly ambiguous concept. When political parties, soap manufacturers, and music critics throw the term around with abandon, they usually do not stop to ponder the idea’s roots in metaphysical debates over identity and difference, stasis, and change. Use of the question ‘What’s new?’ as more than just a conversation starter dates at least to Plutarch (see Perrin, 1914), whose account of ‘The Ship of Theseus’ recounts the piecemeal replacement of each one of the vessel’s weakened timbers over time until not a single original board remained. Is it still the same vessel or is it something new? And how should we think about the novelty of a second ship that might be created using all the materials discarded from the original? Terrone (2017) brings Plutarch’s question into the modern era, with a discussion of how nearly identical debates continue in realms such as the world of rock and pop music, where fans argue over the authenticity of rival lineups for Pink Floyd, and lawyers fight over who can make the rightful claim to the name Bucks Fizz. Terrone’s analysis of the band Quiet Riot applies the challenge posed by Plutarch to rock bands that endure despite having lost all their original members. Like many attempts to resolve Plutarch’s question, Terrone seeks to

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 ’   ? 31 shift the question into the empirical realm, treating it less as a philosophical paradox and more as a question related to the inherent but often unnoticed complexity of ‘social individuals’ such as bands, sports teams, and (implicitly) political parties. This chapter seeks the grounds for just such an empirical resolution by looking at the conventions that currently define novelty in political parties. In one of the earliest political science treatments on the topic of new parties, Harmel (1985, p. 406) expected that a contest over definitions of ‘party’ would ‘evoke stronger feelings’, than definitions of ‘new’, since ‘a student of parties may be willing to accept another’s operationalization of “new” graciously’. Times have changed. Without losing any of their graciousness, scholars do actively debate the question of where to draw the border between established and new parties, precisely because they know that the results have significant implications for their own research and for wider debates in the field (Litton, 2013). One of the most powerful driving forces behind the need for definitions of newness is the role that party novelty plays in other commonly used calculations. Central to many discussions of (in)stability of party politics is Pedersen’s (1979) index of electoral volatility, which has been used as a proxy for many other concepts, including party and party system institutionalization (Weghorst and Bernhard, 2014; Chiaramonte and Emanuele, 2017), and even overall political stability (Bielasiak, 2001). Pedersen’s index measures differences in the share of votes of parties at different time periods, and works well for analyses of longestablished parties and for parties that emerge from nowhere or shut up shop, but in cases of splits, mergers, and some other forms of party change, it requires accounting rules for assessing whether a party at time t+1 is the same as a party present at time t or different—new—and therefore whether the calculation should show low volatility or high (Casal Bértoa et al., 2017). Pedersen never intended his article as a treatise on newness, but it has become extremely influential in encouraging scholars to think about continuity and novelty. Pedersen himself understood the complexity. His initial article clearly recognizes that the results produced by the formula depend on how the relationship between a party at time t and at time t+1 would be affected by ‘splinterings’ and mergers of ‘various kinds’ as well as the possibility of simultaneous splits and mergers and the emergence of ‘electoral alliance[s]’ (1979, p. 5), but he offers little guidance about the threshold that separated continuity from discontinuity. Over the subsequent four decades the many scholars who have followed in Pedersen’s footsteps have developed their own standards for novelty, especially in relation to party splits, party mergers, and party coalitions (see Mainwaring et al., 2017; Powell and Tucker, 2014; Sikk, 2005). To the extent there is a problem with these standards, it lies not in the lack of quality (all emerged from careful study by major scholars in the field) as from the raw difficulty of drawing straight lines across the uneven and changing terrain of

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human institutions and often doing it from quite far away. Any analytical distinctions that attempt to approximate the reality of party politics need to do many things at the same time. As the cottage industry in volatility created by Pederson demonstrates, macro-level quantitative comparisons of political parties and party systems require some degree of categorization. Nor is volatility the only characteristic of parties that depends on measures of change: calculations of party mortality rates and party age (Kreuzer and Pettai, 2011) also need clear starting and ending points. But binary decisions about whether a political party belongs in one category or another must integrate several dimensions of difference, each of which has its own subtle gradations and many measurement tools. Such decisions must also deal with the fact that for some parties even the best measurement tools will fail, either because there is too little reliable and consistent information about what goes on inside political parties or their electorates to make a decision, or because there are too many conflicting views. Thus, while our analysis of parties needs to produce crisp outcomes, it must also have a way to degrade gracefully to accommodate an often soggy world. On the specific question of party newness, these challenges become even more difficult because the question ‘is a party new?’ actually involves at least two decisions at once. The first decision depends on empirical evidence: how distinct a party is from others to which it may be connected. The second decision depends on an author’s conceptual framework: what level of distinction is necessary for a party to be considered new? Using Terrone’s musical analogy, the first question involves an evaluation of how much a band’s line-up (perhaps along with its image and playlist) has shifted over time, while the second question employs a standard for how much change a band must undergo before severing continuity with the past. Fortunately, the task depends less on Plutarch’s metaphysics and more on the social norms for assessing the continuity of social individuals that occupy the attention of Terrone (and music industry lawyers). In our experience, if scholars of political parties try to answer these two distinct questions together, they can muddle the answer to both, and we believe that it is possible to reduce the difficulties by actually making two distinct sets of evaluations separately. In the first of these, we look closely at the amount of change a party has experienced. In the second, we apply the term ‘new’ to those parties that rise above a certain (and contingent) threshold of change.

Newness and Change The evaluation of a party’s newness is less fraught and more accurate when we can start with multiple categories of change rather than the less immediate concern about whether that level crosses the threshold of ‘new’. There is no intrinsic ideal number of categories we should use to make these distinctions, but a strong

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 ’   ? 33 argument can be made that between the extremes of ‘no change at all’ and ‘no continuity at all’ there are two important in-between categories: one that corresponds to ‘more change than stability (but not something completely different)’ and another that corresponds to ‘more stability than change (but not the same as before)’. When applied to parties, the framework leaves us with an array of four categories: • Inception (Level 3): parties without formal origins within any other party and (at most) minimal informal connection. This strictest level excludes any party other than what Litton refers to as a ‘startup’ (2015) and comes closest to Sikk’s (2005) category of ‘genuinely new’. • Transformation (Level 2): parties with strong relationships to previous party institutions but that have experienced a fundamental disruption and in important ways no longer resemble any party or parties from which they originated. This corresponds roughly to Bleck and van de Walle’s (2019) categorization of ‘recycled parties’. • Alteration (Level 1): parties that have experienced a meaningful change in party operation but without a fundamental disruption, a situation where a party begins to operate in a different manner but without affecting its core. • Continuation (Level 0): parties that have not experienced any of the changes specified above. This is essentially a residual category, but it has substance of its own. These are parties that keep the same basic programmatic identity and electoral name, experience only gradual membership turnover and organization, and keep the same leader or elect a new one through established mechanisms. This typology of change lets us put off for the moment (but not forever) the more sensitive question of what it means to be new, and it gives us a reasonable number of fairly solid and recognizable categories for drawing lines between different degrees of change. We also realize that these four categories are not quite enough for the task. There are circumstances where scholars simply disagree about the facts on the ground, and there are other circumstances where the facts on the ground are so unclear that scholars are themselves uncertain. We therefore find it useful to recognize intermediate spaces and uncertain characterizations so we can accommodate parties that may be somewhere between two levels or instances where we lack the data to make a clear determination about where they belong. For this reason, we believe that it is useful for each category (except the lowest) to include a relaxed subset, including cases that do not strictly fit the criteria but might qualify depending on changing circumstances or an appropriate shift in an observer’s perspective.

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These four levels of change—with three intermediate steps—can provide the basis for evaluations of newness, but they are not levels of newness in themselves. Once we sort parties according to these levels of change, we can then make separate decisions about whether any particular level of change should be considered as a binary threshold for newness. The etymologies of words associated with party change tend to emphasize the binary nature—disruption (breaking apart), discontinuity (no longer hanging together)—or emphasize sharp distinction (marking off or pushing apart) and clear separation (forcing apart). But while such words involve clarity about the breaking point and the dividing line, the actual circumstances often do not lend themselves to easy discernment. Exactly where a threshold lies is often far from obvious. How do we discern whether the change that we may see in a party crosses a line from one of those levels to another? For guidance, we can return to the many standards proposed by scholars for newness, though we deal with them instead as suggested thresholds for various levels of change. Each of the many existing standards reflects a particular principle or set of principles and none is intrinsically right or wrong, as long as the standards allow the authors to draw useful conclusions. Nor is it not surprising that there are so many different classifications, because different authors are interested in different kinds of questions and face different limits in the availability of data. The lines they draw often respond to those pressures. As the starting point for our own standards for where to draw the line, we begin with two particularly insightful analyses of newness that offer different—but not entirely inconsistent—perspectives about how to identify points of change and evaluate their significance. One of these is Barnea and Rahat’s (2011) effort to develop better indicators of newness that overcome the limits of previous approaches. They identify three sets of standards that shape how scholars mark the difference between old and new. The first approach, they note, is simply to ‘assume newness’ albeit ‘with reservations’ (Barnea and Rahat, 2011, p. 309), which is not so much an approach to our first question of party change as it is an inclusive guideline for our second question—dealt with later—of how much change counts as new. More useful in a discussion of change are their other two approaches: ‘define “new” by a party’s origin’; and ‘apply a threshold-based definition’ (Barnea and Rahat, 2011, p. 309), where ‘origin’ refers to how a party came into existence and ‘threshold’ to how different it was from some baseline. A subsequent analysis by Litton (2013, p. 3) uses a quite similar set of concepts, and places them in relationship in a two-dimensional matrix that arrays a vertical list of origin points, which she calls ‘changes in structural affiliation’, against a horizontal list of changes in internal party characteristics, which she describes in terms of ‘attribute change’. We use a similar combination of markers for evaluating where parties fall on our range of party change. For the sake of brevity and clarity, we borrow Barnea

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 ’   ? 35 and Rahat’s notion of ‘origins’ (instead of Litton’s more specific but cumbersome category of ‘structural affiliation’) to refer to institutional junctures that call our attention to the possibility of significant change, and we borrow Litton’s notion of ‘attributes’ to refer to the kinds of change (as a more descriptive alternative to Barnea and Rahat’s ‘thresholds’).

Origins Given the need for yes-or-no decisions for calculating volatility and other characteristics, it is not surprising that scholars tend toward the relatively clear junctures that characterize the origins approach. Linking change to specific origins, however, merely begs the question of what types of origin points we should look for, and raises further questions about how much change is involved in each type. Emanuele and Chiaramonte (2018) perform an invaluable service by offering a list of the most common origin points and identifying how many scholars regard them as critical thresholds. Their analysis finds near unanimous agreement that some types of origin signify new parties, but they find significant disagreement surrounding other types of origin. Emanuele and Chiaramonte’s list of origin points, furthermore, corresponds closely to Litton’s list of changes in structural affiliation, though Litton includes additional origin categories that contrast ‘new from dissolution’ against ‘new from split’ and contrast ‘suffered a split’, and ‘new from merger’ against ‘expanded by merger’, and distinguish between ‘joined electoral list’ and ‘abandoned electoral list’ (Litton, 2013, p. 3). Despite these minor differences, there is an important degree of consistency between placement of origin types on Litton’s scale of change and the share of scholars cited by Emanuele and Chiaramonte who consider those same origin points as a sign of newness. At one end of Emanuele and Chiaramonte’s range of party change are new names, which only Harmel and Robertson (1985) consider sufficient to indicate a new party and which Litton does not even include among her list of structural affiliations. Harmel and Robertson are also the only authors in the list who consider participation in joint electoral lists as significant enough to indicate novelty. At the other extreme, Sikk’s (2005) standard for ‘genuinely new parties’ is so high that it does not accept change of an existing party and instead requires both a completely new organization as well as leaders without previous party experience. Between these extremes of name change and completely new leaders lies a far more contested realm of origin points that deal with what happens when parties come apart or come together. Even the terminology related to these origin points involves a degree of controversy, since scholars frequently use not-quitesynonyms such as ‘splits’ and ‘splinters’ or ‘mergers’ and ‘takeovers’, and because many of those terms make assumptions about which, if any, offspring or precursor

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should be considered as the source or repository of continuity. When Barnea and Rahat apply their standards for newness to the Israeli party Kadima, and not to the Likud party from which Kadima’s leaders defected, the choice reflects a conscious methodological decision, but the asymmetry is problematic in scholarly works that follow conventional wisdom in regarding only splinters as having experienced change. Because of the potential for inconsistency and presumption implicit in these other terms, we opt where possible to use the broader categories of fission and fusion. On the assessment of fissions and fusions there is far less scholarly consensus. The authors cited by Emanuele and Chiaramonte (2018) divide into two camps about whether to accept mergers as new: five say yes without hesitation, while four others impose additional conditions, and four say no. The question of splits also produces disagreement in the opposite direction, with one accepting their newness unconditionally, three others imposing conditions, and nine disagreeing. A secondary but not insignificant disagreement emerges with the question of ‘start-up organization’ and ‘new personnel’, with Bartolini and Mair (1990) and Chiaramonte and Emanuele (2018, p. 477) granting newcomer status ‘to those parties formed by existing politicians who have previously left their former parties’, while Sikk (2005) and Marinova (2016) insist on a higher standard of elite separation.

Attributes Origin points such as split and merger are essential markers for major changes in parties, but they are not a sufficient basis on which to judge the degree to which a party has changed. The fact that so many authors impose additional conditions on the newness of mergers and splits suggests that we need additional grounds for making decisions about the degree of party change above and beyond the origin point that brought the changes to light. Barnea and Rahat (2011) offer eight nondichotomous criteria for establishing a party’s newness based on Key’s (1942) three faces of a party: in-the-electorate, party-as-organization, and party-ingovernment. The eight criteria involve changes in party name, ideology, voters, legal status, institutions, activists, elected representatives, and policies. In applying these standards to their test case, the Israeli party Kadima, they obtain ‘mixed findings, reflecting certain levels of “newness” ’ and they document ‘aspects of the party that are new and those that are not’ (Barnea and Rahat, 2011, p. 313). Beyens et al. (2017, p. 398) use the same standards to analyse the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) in the Netherlands, and likewise find a mixture of old and new. Applying those standards over time, they find that the party actually became ‘more of a new party than at the time of its creation’. On the basis of this exploration, Beyens et al. (2017, p. 309) seem to reject an origin-based account on the grounds that

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 ’   ? 37 ‘the extent of differences . . . cannot be deduced’ from ‘the origin of the organization and the process out of which it has emerged’. They therefore do not explicitly address the type of origin in their standards, and when they offer a dichotomous threshold for newness, it is only to correct other thresholds that they find insufficient. After introducing eight dimensions, their threshold-based standard is surprisingly spare: a new party name and a share of less than 50 per cent of parliamentary candidates from any single previous party. In this approach, their standard echoes the first systematic work in the field, Janda’s Political Parties, which includes a flowchart based on the relative size and position of the original cadre of party activists. Janda (1980, p. 20) looks at the population of party activists and asks whether they are the same as the previous election, similar in number, larger or smaller, and only then looks for origin points related to the shift. Litton likewise distinguishes between substantive indicators of party change— which she calls attributes—and new party origins—which she calls structural affiliations. Her three attributes—name, leader, and program[me]—loosely parallel Barnea and Rahat’s criteria of party label, representatives, and ideology/policies. She does not deal directly with indicators related to voters, but she includes these implicitly by suggesting that changes in attributes ‘potentially should make a party more or less recognizable to the ordinary voters’ (Litton, 2015 p. 714, emphasis in original). Although Litton does not join Barnea and Rahat in rejecting the origins approach, she shares their reluctance to accept it as the sole indicator of novelty. She argues that ‘it would be difficult to claim that parties that suffered a split have necessarily more novelty than the parties that have expanded by merger without knowing if those parties changed any of their attributes in the process. And vice versa: the notion of party novelty would be incomplete if we looked only at the attribute change, say the change of party leader and programme versus the change of party name only, without considering changes in structural affiliation’ (Litton, 2015, pp. 714–15). Since Litton’s concern is the ability of voters to recognize party continuity, she is less concerned than Barnea and Rahat in organizational questions of activists, institutions, or formal legal status.

Origins, Attributes, and the Extent of Change The most practical method for making judgements about the categories of change is to begin with an origins approach, and then, since the same origins are not all alike, refine the initial origin-based assessment with closer attention to attributes. For each type of origin marker, there are particular attributes that are more likely than others to affect the degree of change. Beginning with the origins approach offers no magic bullet. It makes use of the most easily available evidence, and it deals with parties as institutions. But origins are sometimes ambiguous, and they can be obscured even further by the deliberate

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efforts of parties to boast of a change (or hide from it). Fortunately, however, these limitations can usually be overcome by turning to the attributes approach and its attention to substantive difference rather than events. Litton’s analysis, discussed earlier, attempts to bring the two modes together, but her two-dimensional matrix does not provide an easy way to assess the degree of change in one party compared with another. A necessary supplement for Litton’s framework (and to an even greater extent for the many others who use the origin method alone without looking at attributes), therefore, is to assess the way in which each particular kind of origin might affect the kind of change and the setting of different kinds of thresholds for each one. A key element in determining continuity or change is the way a party’s circumstances change after any given point of origin and the degree to which it faces fundamentally different challenges with fundamentally different resources.

Fissions Although more than half of the authors examined by Emanuele and Chiramonte see party fission as a source of newness, they do not do so without hesitation. Nearly half qualify their decision with caveats. These caveats give us insight into the areas of greatest sensitivity. Bolleyer (2013) excludes any party other than a ‘minor’ split, while Powell and Tucker (2014) exclude ‘clear successors’ from consideration as new parties, and Mainwaring et al. (2017) exclude the ‘largest successor’ on the basis of electoral support. Barnea and Rahat (2011) add a different kind of condition, one that is unrelated to the relative size of the entities or the circumstances of their formation, when they insist the product of fission can only be considered new if it has also taken on a degree of newness in its upper echelons. In this, they seem to be requiring that even the result of a fission must share some of the qualities of a fusion, but there is an underlying rationale that is consistent with the others: some fission products face more constraints than others. This same rationale is also reflected in the fact that almost all these authors automatically exclude at least one fission product from the ‘new’ category. Furthermore, in most cases there is a presumption of clarity about which of the results of fission is the original entity, whether determined by name or size or other factors. A comprehensive analysis of party change must recognize that all the products of fission are altered at least to some degree by the separation. It is necessary to look at the products of that fission in a systematic way that does not at first presume either continuity or novelty, and to look at each of the fission products in terms of the degree to which they possess the key characteristics of the original. After every fission, every resulting party faces the loss of some resource from the original, usually some combination of institutional framework, the party elites, or the voter base, but some may receive a greater inheritance than others.

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 ’   ? 39 It is appropriate to consider the product of fission as experiencing transformation if it must substantially alter its mode of operation as a result. Fissions produce this change in several ways. First, there is in almost every case some kind of systematic difference between products of fission—if only in the roots of their antipathy toward the other—which will produce new internal dynamics among elites and members when the original differences connected with the fission are resolved by the fission itself. In such cases, the way a party sees itself and what it fights about internally will take on a new shape, even in parties with the greater inheritance. Secondly, in most circumstances the products of party fission face the challenge of reduced circumstances. The smaller a role the fission product played in the original party, the more jarring will be this difference and the more likely it is that the party will experience transformative change. For products of party fission that take the major share of the inheritance, the transition may not be particularly painful or even particularly noticeable, and the degree of change may be extremely small. For those taking much smaller shares, some circumstances may buffer the impact. A regional party organization that splits from a nationwide entity may find its own local position is relatively unchanged (resembling in this case the decoupling of an electoral alliance), but even in these best-case-scenarios the party will have to adjust to its relative loss of overall national political power or attempt to build itself back to its previous size. In some cases, the fission product takes such a small share of the original party’s resources and so few of its members that the resulting party in all practical senses begins anew and more closely resembles parties that emerge without ties to other parties.

Fusions The change produced by fusion is more difficult to assess. Many of the origins-based approaches simply do not count fusions as producing newness. Although this is a common choice, on closer consideration it is difficult to justify a blanket exclusion. Insights into why and when fusion can yield fundamental change can be found in the conditions placed on the inclusion of mergers as new by three authors reported in Emanuele and Chiaramonte (2018). These caveats all depend on attributes that clarify the circumstances of the fusion. Birch (2003) insists that the fusion product must have a new name to be considered as new, while Powell and Tucker (2014) require that a new fusion includes at least two parties with at least 5 per cent of votes in the previous election, and Bolleyer (2013) counts the fusion product as new only if it still needs to build a viable infrastructure. These caveats help us to understand what kinds of change are involved in fusions and in what circumstances that change might become transformative. The discontinuities of fusion involve both institutions (the party-as-organization) and public identity (the party-in-the-electorate),

Party must repair damage, fill gaps; Party experiences some homogenization

Party encounters few new challenges and continues mostly as before

Alteration (strict or relaxed)

Asymmetrical Fission: Donor

Level of change

Label

Alteration or Transformation (relaxed)

Experiences a splinter

Stays intact

Most (Dominant Share)

Common description Challenges faced by entity

All or Almost All

Symmetrical Fission

Party faces every major task anew. Party must build new structures or face political marginalization. Party differs significantly from previous entity. Transformation or Inception (relaxed)

Party must substantially rebuild or accommodate to a smaller role. Party experiences significant homogenization. Transformation (strict or relaxed)

Asymmetrical Fission: Recipient

Inception (relaxed)

Leaves, restarts

None or Almost None

Becomes a splinter

Not Much (Subordinate Share)

Experiences a split

Some (Moderate Share)

Concentration of inheritance How much of the antecedent party transferred to the fission product?

Table 2.1. Guidelines for evaluating the conditions in which party fission yields a new party

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 ’   ? 41 and the degree of discontinuity is increased by both the initial difference between the fusing parties and the degree to which there is a symmetry between them that allows neither to get its way. The greater the asymmetry between the fusing parties, the more one can dominate the other, resulting in a final state that may differ little from the stronger of the original parties. But the greater the symmetry, the more the two must actively negotiate and build a new organization that at some level differs fundamentally from either original. More equality between fusing parties at the electoral level also increases the number of voters who need to shift to a new institutional allegiance. In such cases, however, other similarities between the two partners may play a mitigating role in the degree of change. Fusing parties face smaller challenges when they hold more ideological tenets in common or share past members, something that is not uncommon in rapidly shifting party systems and is especially important in the case of party reunions. Finally, there are also occasional cases of a more established party fusing with another that had a very recent inception. Where the two parties are relatively symmetrical, the result will still be transformative change, but where there is asymmetry the judgement will depend on the relative weight of the recently established party. An asymmetrical fusion between a dominant established party and a small inception will not usually rise above the level of alteration, but a small established party fusing with a large, recent inception, which is still itself creating its own structures, is likely to cross the threshold into transformation.

Fission–Fusion Combinations Combinations of fission and fusion tend to compound the impact of the change by producing multiple new challenges at the same time. Many products of fission, finding themselves smaller than they might like and fearing for their sustainability, turn to fusion with another party to make up the perceived deficiencies. What happens, then, when both fission and fusion are present simultaneously? The combination in most cases produces something more closely akin to transformation, since such parties face the challenge of developing a full structure while at the same time combining with another party that may be doing the same thing. The only circumstances in which this combination of fission and fusion is not likely to produce transformation are those in which one of the parties has lost a small part of itself and then takes on an equally subordinate partner. In such cases—when a larger party in an asymmetrical fusion was previously also the larger party in an asymmetrical fission—the party may not experience a change that rises even to the level of transformation. Since the level of change tends to reflect the changes in the larger party, however, even this combination may be considered to be a transformation if the dominant party in the pair is still experiencing its own birth pangs.

Category

Challenges faced by entity Level of change

Common description Experiences an acquisition; takes over a party Must accommodate incoming organization

Most (Dominant Share)

Alteration Transformation (strict or relaxed) (strict or relaxed) Special case (if dominant antecedent party is itself a recent Inception): Transformation (strict) Asymmetrical Fusion: Recipient

Remains unaffected; absorbs fragments Must absorb individual elements

All or Almost All

Symmetrical Fusion

Must unify multiple organizations with no clear default option Transformation (strict)

Merger of equals

Some (Moderate Share)

Dominance of inheritance (How much of the new entity comes from a specified antecedent party)

Table 2.2. Guidelines for evaluating the conditions in which party fusion yields a new party

Must find individual role in larger party Alteration (strict or relaxed)

Absorbed, digested

None or Almost None

Asymmetrical Fusion: Donor

Becomes an acquisition, is taken over Must find organizational role in larger party Transformation (strict or relaxed)

Not Much (Subordinate Share)

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 ’   ? 43

Coalitions Parties come together in electoral alliances and other formal relationships, and these coalitions, too, can change their constituent parties, but only in a few circumstances does the impact rise toward the higher levels of change. In part, the coalition question depends on the external perspective—whether voters perceive the change in electoral name or pairing as new. Cases of simple combinations of names do not suggest change as much as aggregation. The decision to form a coalition may affect how voters think of a party, but the decision to join forces with others will rarely cause them to think of it as a different party. Likewise, most electoral coalitions place few demands on the party organization in excess of the kind that also normally affect governing coalitions, either in terms of personnel or organizational framework. The question of coalitions and change becomes more complicated in instances where coalitions prove in retrospect to have been precursors of other kinds of change or where the coalitions result from other kinds of change. In some cases, parties merge after having worked together in an electoral coalition; in others, the products of party fission stay in the coalition even after parting ways, often because they realize that they cannot now make it into parliament on their own. How do these count as change? The individual stages of a gradual progression from distinct parties to long-term coalition partners to party fusion are certainly less jarring than an outright fusion itself, and the amount of change at any juncture may remain small even though the cumulative shift represents a transformative change. It may be necessary to think of such interim coalitions as halfway houses between two states and to understand the changes as a long-duration fusion, but since the time increment in most calculations is the period between two elections, deciding when to score the change is an open question. In this case, there is no good answer except a closer examination of the details to determine which period produced most change.

Attribute Change without an Obvious Origin Point It is worth noting the possibility that shifts in party attributes that rise above the level of alteration may occur without any specific origin points that would trigger the method we have introduced here. Parties may theoretically become new within their old skins, like the butterfly larvae in cocoons that literally liquify their bodies to ease recombination into the adult form; but just as larva end up as visibly different creatures (and do not simply reorganize into just another larva),¹ so parties that ¹ It is perhaps not surprising that the field of lepidopterology is actually another realm in which scholars disagree about the definition of newness, with some arguing that the ‘radical change’ that occurs in the metamorphosis stages of moths and butterflies does indeed arguably involve ‘death followed by reincarnation’, and that so much reconstruction goes on during the metamorphosis that the ‘adult forms of these insects are actually new organisms’ (Krulwich, 2012, n.p.).

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have undergone fundamental reorganizations cannot easily conceal them and usually do not wish to. Indeed, the relatively few parties that have changed internally frequently cap the process with public origin milestones such as refounding and at least a partial name change. In our sample of eleven countries, however, we do not find any substantial case of change that is sufficiently extensive to qualify as transformation without least one of the origin markers.

Inceptions The last major category of potential party change that can be eased by combining origin points and attributes involves the level of what we have labelled here as inception. In theory, parties that come into being on their own without a fission or a fusion would necessarily fall into that highest level of change, but ‘on their own’ has its own ambiguity. Although some parties may indeed start from entirely outside the political system, many apparent inceptions emerge to some limited degree out of previous political party efforts. Whether these count as inception is important because for some scholars, especially Sikk and Marinova, a pure inception is the necessary requirement for being considered (genuinely) new. As with other origin points, the attributes of the new entity play a critical role in determining the degree of change. For a new party to be considered as an inception rather than merely a transformative fission or fusion, it must face not only the challenge of building new structures and electorates without the underlying support of a recent, direct connection to more established parties. A relaxed standard for inception could extend to include more distant chronological or personnel links such as the disaffected mid-level activists from one or more parties, who later reassemble to create an organization of their own, the popular judicial and bureaucratic appointees who jump into politics, the non-party expresidents who later return to electoral competition at parliamentary level, and the mayors who transform their local associations into organizations that compete nationwide. A stricter standard for inception requires a longer gap and fewer connections, avoiding anything that could characterize the emerging party as the product of a more established one.

From Change to Newness Given the complexity of novelty, what do we need in a standard for assessing it? The task is not only to make a definition but to create a system for gathering and assessing information that can meet multiple different needs. A close look at the strengths and weaknesses of other standards provides a basis for our own effort to assess newness and explore its consequences. The principles for an assessment

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 ’   ? 45 should tell us what to include, how to deal with it, and what kinds of subsequent analysis it should be able to support. Scholars no longer accept Harmel’s assumption that their standards for newness will slide by without comment. Too much is at stake. Scholars rely on assessments of newness for too many other purposes, and have responded by looking for areas of potential disagreement and making their own choices explicit in elaborate frameworks clarified further by footnotes and appendixes. The rest of this book applies these standards to the party systems of Central Europe, in a way that allows us to identify which parties should be considered new and during what time period, and then to show how the initial characteristics and subsequent development of new parties differed from that of other, more established parties. We began this classification by first evaluating levels of change in every significant party during every election cycle. As a standard for party significance, we chose to cast a wide net and to include all parties that attracted at least 1 per cent of the vote in a major parliamentary election as well as those in coalitions that might be reasonably guessed to have done so (because of past or subsequent independent performance or position within the coalition). To determine the levels of change of the parties in our dataset, we then followed a series of steps for each party. First, we gathered all national election data and traced connections between electoral entities across each pair of successive elections using a combination of databases (narrative and data from the Political Data Yearbook, Parlgov.org, and the Political Handbook of the World), along with domestic political news reports and party histories in secondary sources and on parties’ own websites. When an entity showed signs of experiencing any of the origin markers addressed earlier in this chapter, we looked more closely to assess the attributes of the change, particularly the degree of symmetry in the case of fissions and fusions and the personnel overlap and time distance in the case of inceptions. For the purpose of inclusion in our calculations, we regard fusions and fissions as origin points for every party, including those that might commonly be called predecessor or successor parties. On the basis of more extensive research into the party’s documents and our interviews, we then made a preliminary judgement about the level of change and asked country experts to evaluate this assessment. After assessing a level of change for every party at every election ranging from Continuation (level 0) to Inception (level 3) we could then apply any of the levels above zero as a potential minimum standard for newness and produce a roster of new parties, each of which had a corresponding birth year. As the baseline for most calculations in this book, we use the standard of transformative change in the strict sense (level 2), which also by default includes the more substantial changes represented by inception in both its relaxed (level 2.5) and strict (level 3) interpretations. The transformation in its strict sense includes many mergers and most splits (as long as they involve a fundamental reconfiguration of the party). As such, it is a somewhat broader standard than is used in the field overall,

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   

but in light of the change we have frequently seen experienced by the smaller products of asymmetrical fissions and by the participants in symmetrical fusions, we believe it is the most sensible place to begin. Excluding transformative fissions and fusions by default would exclude important examples of major agents of change in party systems such as Unity in Latvia, TOP ’09 in the Czech Republic, Zares and the Party of Alenka Bratušek in Slovenia, the Pro Patria and Res Publica Union in Estonia, Ordinary People and Independent Personalities and the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union in Slovakia, the Liberal Democratic Party/Order and Justice in Lithuania, and many others. We do not expect that all scholars will agree with this choice of threshold, but one of the key advantages of the framework developed in this chapter and its separation of change and newness, is that the initial choice of threshold is only a starting point and our overall conclusions do not need to depend on that specific threshold choice. Using our framework, we can quickly recalculate our findings for alternative understandings of newness that demand more (or allow less) change, and we explore at every point how any given standard for newness itself affects our understanding of the dynamics of the party system. In this way, we can demonstrate the extent to which definitions of ‘new’ affect our quantitative findings and more easily demonstrate that the results do not just depend on careful selection of a specific definition. As an added precaution, we try to be attentive in the text to cases where evaluation of change for a specific party may be ambiguous or where the opinion of observers is ambivalent. Overall, this schema thus allows multiple measures of the same information depending on the nature of the definition, which in turn allows both absolute measurements according to particular definitions and relative measurements, which reveal whether overall patterns hold constant regardless across multiple conceptions of ‘new’. In Chapter 3, we use this framework to map and measure the fissions, fusions, start-ups, and failures in Central European political party systems, not only to reveal the texture of change and novelty in the region, but also to untangle the complexity. By assessing the degree of party change and then assessing the kinds of change that can be regarded as new, we are better able to draw apart the interwoven threads of parties in the region, and in so doing, we can show that the superficially messy outcomes conceal several strong and stable patterns of electoral and organizational flow from party birth to death and back again to birth.

Appendix About the Cases While the scope of this study is straightforward, a few questions occur at the boundaries of the universe of parties and elections dealt with in this book, so it is important to point out the areas of ambiguity and by doing so to acknowledge that some of our choices have plausible alternatives that might make a difference to results.

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 ’   ? 47 Not all elections in the region since the end of communism provide useful information. While the Polish elections of 1989 were spirited and competitive, restrictions placed on them by Poland’s communist government have led most scholars to describe them as semifree and suggest that our dataset should begin instead with the elections of 1991. The same principles underlie our decision to begin with the Lithuanian and Estonian elections of 1992 and the Latvian elections of 1993 rather than the Supreme Soviet elections that occurred in 1990, when those three entities were still republics of the USSR and without the rules that would allow an independent party system. The restrictions imposed in Croatia during the 1990s offer more pause for thought, as does the increasingly tilted playing field of Hungary’s 2018 election, but we include these because they took place in the context of an already-developed party system, and because doing so will not exaggerate the claims of the book about the significance of new parties; on the contrary, the role of state power in both of those cases tended to limit the role of new parties. All the election results used here derive from the elections to the lower house of the national level parliament, but there are just a few quasi-exceptions that require clarification. Since nearly all elections in nearly all countries in the region used proportional representation, we have opted in the mixed electoral systems of Lithuania and Hungary to use only the results from the share of the lower house elected by proportional representation. Since the country of Czechoslovakia dissolved at the end of 1992, we have opted for the sake of continuity to set aside the federal-level electoral results and instead to use the extremely similar results of elections held at the same time for the republic-level parliaments of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, both of which subsequently transformed into country-level legislatures when the two countries became independent. In deciding which parties to include, we have settled on a 1 per cent threshold as the result of our previous research into volatility, which shows that going deeper produces little difference in overall results (Casal Bértoa et al., 2017). This is not a standard for inclusion of individual data points but rather a blanket standard for the inclusion of parties. Parties may move above or below a given threshold during their political lifetimes, and in this study we also measure parties not only when they exceed 1 per cent but also in the election immediately before their first 1 per cent breakthrough in any elections, and all elections between the first and last score of 1 per cent, as well as in the election immediately after the last result above 1 per cent. Just over 3 per cent of the qualifying parties rose from below the 1 per cent threshold in their first election, while 14 per cent slipped below 1 per cent in the middle of their careers or end of their lives. We include all those results in our analysis. With regard to the tables included in this appendix, we offer two additional notes. First, we proceed through the countries of the region from north to south by latitude of the country’s capital city (as we do later within tables and figures). This order respects geographical contiguity, and we believe that it holds more potential to reveal spatial patterns than does the arbitrary order of the alphabet. Secondly, although a 1 per cent threshold forms the basis of all our calculations in the chapters that follow, a list of every party we used is not conducive to the space constraints of a printed book. The tables in this appendix therefore only show parties that crossed a 3 per cent threshold. The columns list the most commonly used name of the party, the prevailing acronym or short name, the first election in which the party participated, the level of change that led to the party’s origin (we do not include as new those parties experiencing a change below level 2, strict transformation), and the most recent recorded election in which a party participated as a recognizable entity. Given the need for brevity on a long list of frequently changing parties, we have had to make a few difficult choices about which party name, short form, and language to use. We apologize for any unintended implications of these choices.

1992

1992

EPL ERP ERSP

Estonian Pensioners’ Union/Eesti Pensionäride Liit

Eesti Rojalistlik Partei/Estonian Royalist Party

Estonian National Independence Party/Eesti Rahvusliku Sõltumatuse Partei

SDE VK EME ER EÜRP RKEI

Social Democratic Party/Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond

Republican Conservative Party/Vabariiklaste Koonderakond

Estonian Country People’s Party/Eesti Maarahva Erakond

Estonian Reform Party/Eesti Reformierakond

Estonian United People’s Party/Eestimaa Ühendatud Rahvapartei

Pro Patria National Coalition/Rahvuslik Koonderakond Isamaaliit

PK

EM

Estonian Rural Union/Eesti Maaliit

PK-EK

ELDP

Estonian Liberal Democratic Party/Eesti Liberaaldemokraatlik Partei

Farmers’ Assembly/Põllumeeste Kogu

EKRE

Conservative People’s Party/Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond

Better Estonia/Estonian Citizen (Parem Eesti ja Eesti Kodanik)

1992

EKE

Estonian Centre Party/Eesti Keskerakond

1992

1995

1995

1995

1995

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

EKDE EKDL

1992

Estonian Christian Democratic Union/Eesti Kristlik Demokraatlik Liit

Estonian Coalition Party/Eesti Koonderakond

Origin Election

Estonian Christian Democratic Party/Eesti Kristlik-Demokraatliku Erakonna

EDÕL EK

Estonian Democratic Law Union/Eesti Demokraatlik Õigusliit

Short Form

Estonia Political Parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.1. Political parties in Estonia

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

3

2

2.5

Change Level

1995

2007

2019

2011

1992

2019

1995

1999

1995

1995

1992

1999

1992

1992

2019

1992

1992

1999

1999

Most Recent Election

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VKR-P IL UVERP EER2 IRL EKRE2 EV EE200

Republican and Conservatives People’s Party/Vabariiklaste ja Konservatiivide Rahvaerakond-Parempoolsed

Pro Patria Union/Isamaaliit

Union for the Republic-Res Publica/Ühendus Vabariigi Eest—Res Publica

Estonian Green Party/Erakond Eestima Rohelise

Union of Pro Patria and Res Publica/Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit

Conservative People’s Party/Eesti Konservatiivne Rahvaerakond

Estonian Free Party/Eesti Vabaerakond

Estonia 200 Party/Erakond Eesti 200

2019

2015

2015

2007

2007

2003

1999

1995

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

3

2.5

2.5

2

3

3

2

2

2019

2019

2019

2019

2019

2003

2003

1999

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LSDSP LVP LZP LZS SL-AT TB LSP TKL(ZP) TSP JP TB-LNNK

Latvian Social Democratic Workers’ Party/Latvijas Socialdemokratu Stradnieku Partija

Latvian Unity Party/Latvijas Vienibas Partija

Latvian Green Party/Latvijas Zala Partija

Latvian Farmers’ Union/Latvijas Zemnieku Savienîba

Harmony for Latvia-Revival for the Economy/Saskana Latvijai-atdzimšana tautsaimniecibai

‘For Homeland and Freedom’ Coalition/Apvieníba ‘Tevzemei un Brîvîbai’

Latvian Socialist Party/Latvijas Socialistiska Partija

People’s Movement for Latvia (Ziegerist Party)/Tautas Kustiba Latvijai (Ziegerist Partija)

National Harmony Party/Tautas saskanas partija

New Party; New Christian Party; First Party/Jauna partija; Jauna Kristiga Partija; Pirma Partija

Coalition ‘For Homeland and Freedom’ and LNNK/Apvienība ‘Tēvzemei un Brīvībai’–LNNK

LDDP

Latvian Democratic Labour Party/Latvijas Demokratiska Darba Partija LKDS

LC

Alliance ‘Latvia’s Way’/Savieniba ‘Latvijas cels’

LNNK

L

Latvian National Independence Movement/Latvijas Nacionalas Neatkarîbas Kustîba

DPS

Democratic Party ‘Saimnieks’/Demokrátiská partija ‘Saimnieks’

Equal Rights Movement/Lidztiesîba

Latvian Christian Democratic Union/Latvijas Kristîgi Demokratu Savienîba

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.2. Political parties in Latvia

1998

1998

1995

1995

1995

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

1993

Origin Election

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

2.5

2

2

2

Change Level

2010

1998

2018

1998

2014

1995

1993

2018

2018

1998

2006

1995

2002

1998

2006

2006

1998

Most Recent Election

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NSL KP KPV LV

Who Owns the State?/Kam pieder valsts?

V

Unity/Vienotība

Movement For!/Kustība Par!

NA-VL-TBLNNK

Union of National Alliance ‘All for Latvia’–‘Homeland and Freedom/ LNNK’/Nacionālā apvienība ‘Visu Latvijai!’–‘Tēvzemei un Brīvībai/LNNK’

For Latvia From the Heart/No sirds Latvija!

SCP

Society for Other Politics/Sabiedrība Citai Politikai

LRA

PS

Civic Union/Pilsoniskā savienība

Latvian Association of Regions/Latvijas Reģionu Apvienība

2011

PCTVL

For Human Rights in a United Latvia/Par cilvçka tiesîbâm vienotâ Latvijâ

ZRP

LPP+LC

Union of Latvia First Party and ‘Latvian Way’ Party/Latvijas Pirmās partijas un partijas ‘Latvijas Ceļš’ apvienība

JKP

PVL

Party ‘All For Latvia’/Partija ‘Visu Latvijai!’

Zatlers’ Reform Party/Zatlera reformu partija

BITE

Brīvā izvēle tautu Eiropā/Brīvā izvēle tautu Eiropā

New Conservative Party/Jaunā konservatīvā partija

2011

LPP

Latvia First Party/Latvijas Pirmās partijas

2018

2018

2014

2014

2014

2011

2010

2010

2010

2010

2006

2006

2002

2002

JL

New Era/Jaunais laiks

1998

TP

Popular Party/Tautas partija

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

2.5

3

3

2.5

3

2.5

2

2

2018

2018

2018

2018

2018

2014

2018

2018

2010

2010

2 2

2018

2011

2010

2006

2006

2010

2010

2

2

3

2

2

2.5

2.5

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

Short Form LCS LDDP LKDP LKDS LLRAKŠS LLS LNP-JL LSDP2 LVZS TS(LK) LMP LRS NS(SL) DP LCP

Political parties exceeding 3%

Lithuanian Centre Union/Lietuvos centro sajunga

Lithuanian Democratic Labour Party/Lietuvos demokratine darbo partija

Lithuanian Christian Democratic Party/Lietuvos krikščionių demokratų partija

Lithuanian Christian Democratic Union/Lietuvos krikščionių demokratų sąjunga

Electoral Action of Lithuanian Poles/Akcja Wyborcza Polaków na LitwieZwiązek Chrześcijańskich Rodzin/Lietuvos lenkų rinkimų akcijaKrikščioniškų šeimų sąjunga

Lithuanian Liberal Union/Lietuvos liberalu sajunga

Lithuanian National Party ‘Young Lithuania’/Lietuviu nacionaline partija Jaunoji Lietuva

Lithuanian Social Democratic Party/Lietuvos socialdemokratu partija

Lithuanian Peasants and Greens Union/Lietuvos valstiečių ir žaliųjų sąjunga

Homeland Union (Lithuanian Conservatives)/Tėvynės sąjunga (Lietuvos Konservatoriai))

Lithuanian Women’s Party/Lietuvos moteru partija

Union of Russians in Lithuania/Lietuvos rusu sajunga

New Union (Social Liberals)/Naujoji sąjunga (socialliberalai)

Labour Party/Darbo partija

Lithuanian Center Party/Lieutvos Centro Partija

Table A2.3. Political parties in Lithuania

2004

2004

2000

1996

1996

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

Origin Election

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

3

3

3

3

Change Level

2016

2016

2008

2008

2000

2016

2016

2016

2012

2016

2016

2000

2000

2000

2000

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

TT F LRLS TPP DK

Party Order and Justice/Partija tvarka ir teisingumas

Front/Frontas

Liberal Movement of Lithuanian Republic/Lietuvos Respublikos liberalų sąjūdis

Nation’s Resurrection Party/Tautos prisikėlimo partija

Political Party ‘Way of Courage’/Politinė partija ‘Drąsos kelias’ 2012

2008

2008

2008

2004

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

3

3

2

2

2

2016

2008

2016

2012

2016

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

BBWR

Non-party Bloc in Support of Reforms/Bezpartyjny Blok Wspierania Reform

SKL

ZCHN

National-Christian Union/Zjednoczenie Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe

Conservative People’s Party/Stronnictwo Konserwatywno-Ludowe

UPR

Union of Real Politics/Unia Polityki Realnej

ROP

UD

Democratic Union/Unia Demokratyczna

Movement for the Rebirth of Poland/Ruch Odbudowy Polski

SLD

Alliance of Democratic Left/Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej

SRP

PSL-PL

Polish People’s Party-People’s Agreement/Polskie Stronnictwo LudowePorozumienie Ludowe

UP

PSL

Polish People’s Party/Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe

Labour Union/Unia Pracy

PPPP

Polish Beer-Lovers Party/Polska Partia Przyjaciół Piwa

Self-Defence of the Republic of Poland/Samoobrona Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej

PC PCHD

Independent Self-governed Trade Union ‘Solidarity’/Niezależny Samorządny Związek Zawodowy-Solidarność

Party of Christian Democrats/Partia Chrześcijańskich Demokratów

NZSS-S

Confederation for an Independent Poland

Porozumienie Centrum/Center Agreement/Porozumienie Centrum

KLD KPN

Liberal-Democratic Congress/Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny

Short Form

Poland Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.4. Political parties in Poland

1997

1997

1993

1993

1993

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

1991

Origin Election

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

2

2

3

2.5

Change Level

2001

2007

2015

2011

1997

2001

2015

1993

2019

1997

2019

1993

1997

1997

1997

2001

1993

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

2011 2015

PIS PO RP2 K15 KORWIN N R RN SP2 W

Law and Justice/Prawo i Sprawiedliwość

Civic Platform/Platforma Obywatelska

Palikot’s Movement/Ruch Palikota

Kukiz ’15/Kukiz’15

KORWiN/KORWiN

.Modern/.Nowoczesna

Left Together/Lewica Razem

National Movement/Ruch Narodowy

United Poland/Solidarna Polska

Spring/Wiosna

2019

2015

2015

2015

2015

2015

2001

2001

2001

LPR

League of Polish Families/Liga Polskich Rodzin

1997

UW

Freedom Union/Unia Wolności

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

2.5

2

2.5

3

3

2

3

2.5

2

2

2

2

2019

2019

2019

2019

2019

2019

2019

2015

2019

2019

2011

2001

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

OF SPRRSČ

Civic Forum/Občanské forum

Sdružení pro republiku—Republikánská strana Československa

DZŽJ ODA ODSKDS OH SČPŽR US

Pensioners for Life Security/Důchodci za životní jistoty

Civic Democratic Alliance/Občanská demokratická aliance

Civic Democratic Party/Občanská demokratická strana

Civic Movement/Občanské hnutí

Party of Czechoslovak Entrepreneurs, Tradespeople and Farmers/Strana československých podnikatelů, živnostníků a rolníků

Freedom Union/Unie svobody

SZ

KSČM

Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia/Komunistická strana Čech a Moravy

SZV

1990

KDUČSL

Christian Democratic Union–Czech People’s Party/Křesťanská a demokratická unie–Československá strana lidová

Alliance of Farmers and the Countryside/Spojenectví zemědělců a venkova

1990

HSDSMS

Movement for Self-Governing Democracy–Society for Moravia and Silesia/ Hnutí za samosprávnou demokracii–Společnost pro Moravu a Slezsko

Party of the Greens/Strana zelených

1990

ČSSD

Czech Party of Social Democracy/Česká strana sociálně demokratická

1998

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

Origin Election

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.5. Political parties in the Czech Republic

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

3

2

2

2

3

Change Level

2006

1992

1992

2017

1996

2002

1992

2017

1998

1990

2017

2017

1992

2017

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

S-BJB PS SPOZ STAN TOP09 VV ANO Úsvit SPD

Sovereignty Bloc of Jana Bobošíková/Suverenita-blok Jany Bobošíkové

Czech Pirate Party/Česká pirátská strana

Party of the Rights of Citizens-Zemanites/Strana práv občanů-Zemanovci

Mayors and Independents/Starostové a nezávislí

Tradition Responsibility Prosperity 09/Tradice Odpovědnost Prosperita 09

Public Affairs/Věci veřejné

Action of Dissatisfied Citizens/Akce nespokojených občanů

Dawn of Direct Democracy of Tomio Okamura/Úsvit přímé demokracie Tomia Okamury

Freedom and Direct Democracy/Svoboda a přímá demokracie

2017

2013

2013

2010

2010

2010

2010

2010

2006

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

2.5

3

3

2.5

2.5

2.5

2.5

3

2.5

2017

2013

2017

2010

2017

2017

2017

2017

2013

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

Short Form DS E/S KDH MKDM/ MKDH SDĽ SDSS SNS SZ VPN HZDS KSS ODÚ SKDH DU

Political parties exceeding 3%

Democratic Party/Demokratická strana

Coexistence/Együttélés/Spolužitie

Christian Democratic Movement/Kresťanskodemokratické hnutie

Hungarian Christian Democratic Movement/Magyar Kereszténydemokrata Mozgalom/Maďarské kresťanskodemokratické hnutie

Party of the Democratic Left/Strana Demokratickej Ľavice

Social Democratic Party of Slovakia/Sociálnodemokratická strana Slovenska

Slovak National Party/Slovenská národná strana

Party of Greens/Strana zelených

Public Against Violence/Verejnosť proti násiliu

Movement for a Democratic Slovakia/Hnutie za demokratické Slovensko

Communist Party of Slovakia/Komunistická strana Slovenska

Civic Democratic Union/Občianska demokratická únia

Slovak Christian Democratic Movement/Slovenské kresťanskodemokratické hnutie

Democratic Union/Demokratická únia

Table A2.6 . Political parties in Slovakia

1994

1992

1992

1992

1992

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

Origin Election

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

2

2

2

2

Change Level

1998

1994

1992

2010

2012

1990

1992

2016

1998

2002

1994

2016

1994

1998

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

2006 2010

SOP ANO HZD PSNS SDKÚ-DS Smer-SD SF ĽS-NS Most-Híd SaS OĽaNO #SIEŤ SR-BK

Party of Civic Understanding/Strana občianskeho porozumenia

Alliance of the New Citizen/Aliancia nového občana

Movement for Democracy/Hnutie za Demokraciu

Real Slovak National Party/Pravá Slovenská Národná Strana

Slovak Democratic and Christian Union/Slovenská demokratická a kresťanská únia

Direction–Social Democracy/Smer–sociálna demokracia

Free Forum/Slobodné forum

People’s Party–Our Slovakia/Ľudová strana Naše Slovensko

Bridge/Most-Híd

Freedom and Solidarity/Sloboda a Solidarita

Ordinary People and Independent Personalities/Obyčajní Ľudia a Nezávislé Osobnosti

#NETWORK/#SIEŤ

We Are Family–Boris Kolár/Sme Rodina–Boris Kollár

2016

2016

2012

2010

2010

2002

2002

2002

2002

2002

1998

1998

MKP/SMK

Party of the Hungarian Coalition/Magyar Koalíció Pártja/Strana maďarskej koalície

1994

ZRS

Association of Workers of Slovakia/Združenie robotníkov Slovenska

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

3

2.5

2

3

2

2.5

2

2.5

2

2

2

3

3

2

2

2016

2016

2016

2016

2016

2016

2006

2016

2016

2002

2006

2006

1998

2016

2002

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

DK MM

MIÉP

Party of Hungarian Justice and Life/Magyar Igazságés Élet Párt

Momentum Movement/Momentum Mozgalom

SZDSZ

Alliance of Free Democrats/Szabad Demokraták Szövetsége

Democratic Coalition/Demokratikus Koalíció

MSZP

Hungarian Socialist Party/Magyar Szocialista Párt

Jobbik

MSzMP

Workers Party/Munkáspárt

LMP

MSZDP

Social Democratic Party (Magyarországi Szociáldemokrata Párt)

Politics Can Be Different/Lehet Más a Politika

MDF

Hungarian Democratic Forum/Magyar Demokrata Fórum

Movement for a Better Hungary/Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom

FKgP KDNP

FIDESZ

Alliance of Young Democrats/Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége

Christian Democratic People’s Party/Kereszténydemokrata Néppárt

ASZ

Agrarian Alliance/Agrárszövetség

Independent Smallholders Party/Független Kisgazdapárt

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.7. Political parties in Hungary

2018

2014

2010

2006

1994

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

Origin Election

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

3

2.5

3

3

2.5

Change Level

2018

2018

2018

2018

2006

2006

2018

2006

1994

2010

2018

2002

2018

1994

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

1990

ZLSD ZS DeSUS DSS SNS N.Si SMS Zares DLGV

United List of Social Democrats/Združena lista socialnih demokratov

Greens of Slovenia/Zeleni Slovenije

Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia/Demokratična stranka upokojencev Slovenije

Democratic Party of Slovenia/Demokratska stranka Slovenije

Slovenian National Party/Slovenska Nacionalna Stranka

New Slovenia/Nova Slovenija

Party of Youth of Slovenia/Stranka mladih Slovenije

For Real-New Politics/Zares-nova politika

Civic List of Gregor Virant/Državljanska lista Gregorja Viranta

SOS SZDL

Slovenian Craftspeople’s Party/Slovenska obrtniska stranka

Slovenian People’s Party/Slovenska ljudska stranka

Socialist Alliance of Working People of Slovenia/Socialistična zveza delovnega ljudstva Slovenije

1990

SKD SLS

Slovenian Christian Democrats/Slovenski kresanski demokrati

1990

2011

2008

2000

2000

1992

1992

1992

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

SDSS SDZ

1990

Slovene Democratic Party/Slovenska demokratična zveza

LDS

Liberal Democracy of Slovenia/Liberalna demokracija Slovenije

Origin Election

Social Democratic Party of Slovenia/Socialdemokratska stranka Slovenije

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.8. Political parties in Slovenia

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

3

2

3

2

3

2

3

Change Level

(Continued)

2014

2011

2011

2018

2018

1992

2018

2000

2018

1990

1990

2018

1996

1990

2018

2011

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

PS SMC ZAAB L LMŠ

Positive Slovenia/Pozitivna Slovenija

Party of Miro Cerar/Stranka Mira Cerarja

Alliance of Alenka Bratušek/Zavezništvo Alenke Bratušek

The Left/Levica

List of Marjan Šarec/Lista Marjana Šarca

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.8. Continued

2018

2018

2014

2014

2011

Origin Election

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Change at Origin

3

2

2

3

3

Change Level

2018

2018

2018

2018

2014

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

SDP SSH HNS HSP SDU HSU HLSR NL-MB MOST ZZ

Social Democratic Party of Croatia/Socijaldemokratska partija Hrvatske

Socialist Party of Croatia/Socijalistička stranka Hrvatske

Croatian People’s Party/Hrvatska narodna stranka

Croatian Party of Rights/Hrvatska stranka prava

Social Democratic Union/Socijalnodemokratska unija

Croatian Party of Pensioners/Hrvatska stranka umirovljenika

Croatian Labourists–Labour Party/Hrvatski laburisti Stranka rada

Independent List of Milan Bandić/Neovisna Lista Milan Bandić

Bridge of Independent Lists/Most nezavisnih lista

Human Shield/Živi zid

HSLS HSS

Croatian Peasant Party/Hrvatska seljačka stranka

HDZ

Croatian Democratic Union/Hrvatska demokratska zajednica

Croatian Social Liberal Party/Hrvatska socijalno liberalna stranka

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.9. Political parties in Croatia

2015

2015

2011

2011

2000

1992

1992

1992

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

Origin Election

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

3

3

3

2.5

3

3

3

2

Change Level

2016

2016

2016

2016

2016

1995

2015

2016

1992

2016

2016

2016

2016

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

ALDE PMP USR

Save Romania Union/Uniunea Salvați România

People’s Party–Dan Diaconescu/Partidul Poporului-Dan Diaconescu

People’s Movement Party/Partidul Micarea Populară

PP-DD

Alliance for Romania/Alianta pentru Romania

Alliance of Liberals and Democrats/Alianța Liberalilor i Democraților

PUR ApR

Romanian Humanist Party/Partidul Umanist Român

PSD

PRM

Greater Romania Party/Partidul Romania Mare PSM

PNL-CD

National Liberal Party/Partidul National Liberal-Democratic Convention/Partidul Național Liberal-Convenția Democrată

Socialist Party of Labour/Partidul Socialist al Muncii

PD

Democratic Party/Partidul Democrat

Social Democratic Party/Partidul Social Democrat

RMDSz/ UDMR

Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania/Romániai Magyar Demokrata Szövetség/Uniunea Democrata a Maghiarilor din Romania

PNTCD

National Peasants Party-Christian Democrat/Partidul National Taranesc Crestin Democrat PSDR

PNL

National Liberal Party/Partidul National Liberal

PUNR

PER

Ecological Party of Romania/Partidul Ecologist Roman

Party of Romanian National Unity/Partidul Unitatii Nati

FSN

National Salvation Front/Frontul Salvarii Nationale

Romanian Social Democratic Party/Partidul Social Democrat Român

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.10. Political parties in Romania

2016

2016

2016

2012

2000

1996

1992

1992

1992

1992

1992

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

Origin Election

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

3

2

2

3

2

3

3

2

3

2

2

Change Level

2016

2016

2016

2012

2000

2012

2000

2016

2016

1996

2012

2016

2004

2000

2012

2016

2000

1990

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

KSV NDSV DSB PA GERB RZS

Simeon II Coalition/Koalitsiya Simeon II

National Movement Simeon the Second/Natsionalno Dvizhenie Simeon Vtori

Democrats for Strong Bulgaria/Demokrati za Silna Bulgaria

Party Ataka/Partia ‘Ataka’

Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria/Grazhdani za Evropeisko Razvitie na Bulgaria

Order, Law and Justice/Red, Zakonnost I Spravedlivost

Bulgarian Agrarian National Union–National Union/Bulgarski zemedelski naroden suyuz–Naroden sayuz VMRO

BZNSNS

Bulgarian Business Block/Bulgarska biznes blok

ODS

BBB

Union of Democratic Forces/Sayuz na demokratichnite sili

United Democratic Forces/Obedineni Demokratichni Sili

SDS

Movement for Rights and Freedoms/Hak ve Özgürlükler Hareketi// Dvizehnie za Prava i Svobodi

Bulgarian National Movement/Bulgarsko Natsionalno Dvizhenie

DP HÖH/ DPS

Democratic Party/Demokraticheska partia

BZNS BZNSNP

Bulgarski zemedelski naroden suyuz–Nikola Petkov/Bulgarian Agrarian National Union–Nikola Petkov

BSP

Bulgarian Socialist Party/Bulgarska sotsialisticheska partiya

Bulgarian Agrarian National Union/Balgarski Zemedelski Naroden Sajuz

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.11. Political parties in Bulgaria

2009

2009

2005

2005

2001

2001

1997

1994

1994

1991

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

1990

Origin Election

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Transformation (strict)

Inception (strict)

Initial cohort

Change at Origin

2

3

3

2

3

3

2

2.5

2

3

Change Level

(Continued)

2013

2017

2017

2017

2014

2001

2017

2017

2005

2001

1994

2017

2005

2001

1991

2017

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

DBG NFSB ABV BBT Volya

Bulgaria for Citizens Movement/Dvizhenie Bulgariya na grazhdanite

National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria/Natzionalen Front za Spasenie na Bulgaria

Alternative for Bulgarian Revival/Alternativa za balgarsko vazrazhdane

Bulgaria without Censorship/Balgariya bez tsenzura

Will/Volya

Short Form

Political parties exceeding 3%

Table A2.11. Continued

2017

2014

2014

2013

2013

Origin Election

Inception (strict)

Inception (strict)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

Inception (relaxed)

Change at Origin

3

3

2.5

2.5

2.5

Change Level

2017

2014

2017

2017

2017

Most Recent Election

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/11/2020, SPi

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3 Maps and Measures Assessing Changes in the Composition of Central European Party Systems

In April 2015, we visited Latvia to conduct interviews with party activists and politicians. Arriving in the capital on a cold and blustery Sunday, we met a colleague and friend, Daunis Auers, who had kindly agreed to show us what he considered some of the most interesting and politically significant places in Riga and the surrounding area. We went first to the Soviet war memorial and then back across the river to the independence monument in the centre of the city. These two places, he explained, were the starting points for anyone seeking to understand politics in the country. Everything else, he stressed, was in motion. Discussion soon turned to whom we were due to meet in the coming few days and what we hoped to discover. Many of the politicians had interesting backstories: some were new to politics and brought their expertise and celebrity, but others had been involved in a succession of parties. During the course of our interviews, two politicians in particular expressed how their desire to root out corruption and improve the quality of governance had motivated them to enter politics. One acknowledged that her zeal had waned given the rough and tumble of politics and the difficulty of making a difference, while the other freely admitted she did not know if her party would be around in a few years’ time. We realized as we walked along the shore in Jūrmala that when we returned to Latvia for the next research project, there might be yet another new wave of parties reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s lines in his poem ‘Dover Beach’, ‘[t]o lie before us like a land of dreams. So various, so beautiful, so new’, but which so often resembled those ‘pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling. At their return, up the high strand. Begin, and cease, and then again begin.’¹ Our efforts to identify party change and define standards of newness in Chapter 2 allow us to identify the patterns related to various kinds of newness in ¹ Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’, available online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ 43588/dover-beach. The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond. Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause, Oxford University Press (2020). © Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198812920.003.0003

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Central Europe and provide an overall picture of the ways in which new parties have played a fundamental role in the politics of the region since the fall of communism. Political scientists are accustomed to looking at party systems in terms of parties’ political positions and their party families, the sources of their electoral support, their stability over time, and even, to a lesser extent, their membership bases and finances, but we have fewer measures for looking systematically at the overall degree and impact of novelty. In regions and time periods dominated by enduring parties, such tools are largely unnecessary, but periods of new party expansion in regions such as Central Europe (since the fall of communism as well as in many other countries in Western Europe and across the globe) call attention to the time dimension of party politics. The questions of when parties emerge and how long they survive are becoming ever more relevant, and they need closer study. As political scientists have done with voting patterns and ideology, we need to develop a toolkit that is appropriate for mapping cases and identifying similarities and differences in the field of new parties. Along with multidimensional schemas of programmatic position, and polarization and party shifts on ideological measurements, so we should also look at rates of new party entry, average age, and age distributions. These patterns then help us to identify key cases (countries and individual parties) and understand where and how we need to dig deeper into the phenomenon of new parties. A systematic application of these tools for new parties reveals how widespread such parties are in Central European politics and how important a role they play in party competition. The measures also reveal that emergence of new parties has continued over time, and has spread to countries where they were largely unknown, so that there is now no system in the region in which new political parties do not play a significant role. Furthermore, the fact that significant new parties continue to emerge in every major system in the region has effects on all the other parties in those systems. The centre of political gravity shifts toward the new, the political party system ages less than the country as a whole, and many systems find themselves divided between some parties that are well established and other parties that formed just last week. We begin the chapter by mapping the development of party politics in each of our eleven countries. Following a brief discussion clarifying our measures, we examine volatility, new party support at entry and over time, and devote significant space to examining various statistical approaches based on party age. Each of these different ways of seeking to map and measure party systems offer insights and perspectives into the type, magnitude, and extent of (continuity and) change. They not only serve as the basis for the findings of the remainder of the book, but may also be of broader use to scholars seeking to understand the dimensions and dynamics of party politics, beyond Central Europe, a theme to which we return in Chapters 7 and 8.

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Mapping Party Continuity and Change in Each Country The first order of business in understanding the overall impact of new parties in the region is to look at all individual parties in each of the region’s party systems, with a focus on the emergence of new parties in contrast to the parties that have remained over time—using the standards established in the previous chapter. For this purpose, we find that it helps to translate the large amounts of quantitative data (such as the tables in the appendix of Chapter 2) into graphic representations with an accompanying text explanation.

How to Map Party Change This chapter presents diagrams of party change between the start of 1990 and the end of 2019 for each Central European country covered in this book. These graphs represent only one of myriad ways to slice the data, but we believe they provide a useful tool for understanding and conveying relationships that emerge over time across whole party systems. Many other fields of academic study make active use of similar graphical tools to explore the shifts and flows, continuity and discontinuity of topics ranging from energy consumption to etymology (e.g. Schmidt, 2008). The diagrams used here follow the conventions of the Sankey or alluvial diagram, showing quantitative information about changing institutions over time. While we intend that broader patterns in these diagrams speak for themselves, there are several aspects that require some explanation. The horizontal axis in each of these diagrams is a straightforward dimension of time. The vertical axis provides the space to lay out the parties, and in most cases the vertical placement of parties reflects the approximate position of the party on the country’s left–right spectrum, but this positioning is much looser and should not be taken in any way as a formal claim about the party’s ideological orientation. The lack of precision here results in part from the fact that the political right and left in many of these countries are resoundingly multidimensional (Rovny and Edwards, 2012) (so it is impossible to add these additional dimensions to an already two-dimensional graph) and in part because we put more emphasis on reducing the confusion of criss-crossing lines than on difficultto-define ideological position. For the most part, however, parties considered radical right will be at the top of the diagram, those in the centre right will be in the top half, those on the centre left will be on the bottom half, and those on the far left will be below them. We tend to put parties of ethnic minorities—which often do not fit easily into any left–right spectrum—at the very bottom of the graph, because it is more unusual for them to experience coalitions, fissions, or fusions with parties on the far right than those of the far left. The vertical dimension also has a second and more rigidly defined value because the vertical height of each horizontal line (in practical terms its thickness) is proportional to its share of votes in the lower house of parliament. Where coalitions or intra-election shifts mean that we have no direct evidence of electoral

ESDTP 0.4%

EKE 25.4%

RM 7.0% SDE

ER 17.1%

EKRP 1.1%

ER 7.3%

UVE-RP 24.6%

ERL 13.0%

Rüütel Parts I Mar. 2003

VEE 0.2%

EÜVRP EÜVRP 2.2%

Kallas I

EVP

I

VEE

EÜVP KK (Constitution) 1.0%

EVP

EER(2) 7.1%

EKE 25.4%

SDE 10.6%

ER 27.8%

EEKD 1.7%

IRL 17.9%

ERL 7.1%

Mar. 2007

Ilves Ansip II I

VEE 0.9%

EER(2) 3.8%

EKE 23.3%

SDE 17.1%

ER 28.6%

EEKD 0.5%

IRL 20.5%

ERL 2.1%

EER(2) 0.9%

EKE 24.8%

SDE 15.2%

ER 27.7%

IRL 13.7%

EV 8.7%

EKRE 8.1%

II Mar. 2015

Rõivas

ERL (Est. Patriotic Mvt.) EKRE

III Mar. 2011

Ilves

Kaljulaid Ratas I

EER(2) 1.8%

EKE 24.8%

SDE 9.8%

ER 28.9%

EE200 4.4%

IE 11.4%

EE 1.2% EV 1.2%

EKRE 17.8%

II Mar. 2019

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

VÜP VEE 2.0%

EÜRP

MKE Coal. 5.9% EÜRP VEE

EÜRP List 6.1% ESDTP

ERL

O Coal. 1.6% ESDTP EDTP

PE-EK Coal 3.6%

ERP

KR Coal. 0.8% EER

EKE 23.4%

EKE 14.2%

EEE 2.4% EER 2.6% SK Coal. 7.1% ERP EK Coal. 6.9% EK V Coal 1.6% EKP EDTP

RM UE

M AP

M Coal. 9.7% ESDP

EMKE R Coal. 12.2% EKE 12.2%

M list 15.2%

RE

EKE 15.9%

VKR-P 5.0% ETRE 1.5% M Coal. 6.7% ESDP M EMKE AP

EKRP 2.4%

IL 16.1%

ESE 1.6%

EPPE EM EME 7.3% PK 0.5%

EKE 16.2

KDÜ

IL

RKEI/ESRP Coal. 7.9%

PK TEE 2.6%

EPPL EM EME

ELDP

RKEI

ERSP 8.8% I Coal. 22.0%

PK 2.9% EPL 3.7%

EDÕL EM

Meri Meri Laar Tar. Vähi Siimann Laar II I I I II Mar. 1995 Sep. 1992 Mar. 1999 EK Coal. 7.6% KK Coal.13.6% KMÜ Coal. 32.2% EK EK EK

Figure 3.1. Political party system map for Estonia, 1990–2019

Year

EKDL EKRE VK EKDE

No position Savisaar Vähi I II

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Premier Abbreviation: 1994 Tarand

Premier Term Election

President

Year

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strength, we have made approximations based on party performance in previous and subsequent elections. Party fissions are represented by diverging lines, whereas party fusions are represented by converging lines. In more asymmetrical fissions or fusions, the more dominant of the incoming parties tend to follow a horizontal path, while the less dominant diverge at an angle. In more symmetrical fissions and fusions, all lines diverge diagonally. Electoral coalitions are represented by shaded boxes linking parties, and when it is impossible to place all coalition parties adjacent in vertical space, a coalition may be represented by multiple shaded boxes that are linked by a vertical line.

Estonia The Estonian party system provides a picture of the region’s politics in microcosm, with its fair share of fissions, fusions, new party breakthrough, stabilization, and party death (Figure 3.1). Two of Estonia’s most significant parties in the three decades since independence were also the product of early splits. The Centre Party emerged out of the Popular Front, which was a major actor in the independence movement, and the economically liberal Reform was a fission from the National Coalition Party Pro Patria in 1994. The Centre Party, which advocated centre/centre-left economic policies, was closely identified with its long-time leader Edgar Savisaar and drew a sizeable slice of its support from Estonia’s Russian-speaking population. Reform was initially a smaller, liberal force, but became the main rival of the Centre Party and the most electorally successful party in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Reform was the mainstay of governments until 2016, when the governing coalition collapsed. Savisaar stepped down as Centre Party leader in 2015 and his replacement, Jüri Ratas, later became prime minister. The other notable long-standing party, the Moderates, experienced a wide variety of changes that do not quite rise to the level of strict transformation. They have run both independently and as part of electoral coalitions, changed the party name to Social Democrats in 2004, and over time experienced fissions and fusions, but have tended to maintain continuity in each of these interactions. In 2003, Estonia provided one of the most striking early examples of new party breakthrough in the region when Res Publica won just shy of a quarter of the vote with its anti-corruption appeals and a clarion call for new politics, propelling it into government. The party, however, soon lost support and merged with the conservative Pro Patria Union in advance of the 2007 elections. Since the turn of the century, there has been a fair degree of stability among the main players, but new parties have continued to emerge, especially in 2015. That year saw two new entrants into parliament: the Free Party, which lasted just one parliamentary term, and more significantly the far right Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE), which increased its share of the vote and entered government as a junior coalition partner in 2019.

LTF 2.6% KTP LZS Coal. 6.4% LKDS LKDS 5.0% LDP LZS 2.5% LZS LZS 10.7% LZS2 1.4% LZS2 LVP 0.5% LVP 0.1% LVP 7.1% LNP+MPA Coal 1.0% LNP MPA DT Coal 4.6% LSDA Coal. 12.8% LSDSP LSDSP 0.7% LSDSP LDSP LDDP 0.9% LDSP TPA TPA 1.5% SL-AT TSP TSP 5.6% TSP 14.1% 12.0% LSP LSP LSP 5.6%

L L 5.8% KNDS(DIC) 1.2% LKPP 1.3%

LTF 2.6%

LC 4.9%

TP 16.6%

JL 23.9%

BITE

SDS 1.5% PCTVL Coal. 19.0% TSP JC LSP

LSDSP 4.0%

LP SDLP 1.3%

LG 1.6%

LZS

ZZS Coal 9.5% LZP

LKDS

PS SCP

SDP TSP "S" JC LSP PCTVL Coal. 6.1% BITE PCVTL TT 15 L

LSDSP 3.5% SC Coal. 14.5% SDS

Dzimtene Coal 2.1% ASDP

LZS

LZS

SDP "S" LSP LSP PCVTL 1.5% PCVTL 0.8%

SDP "S"

SC 26.6% SC Coal. 28.6%

LZS

ZZS 20.1% ZZS 12.3% LZP LZP

RL 1.3%

TP

LSP LKS 1.6%

SDP"S" 19.8%

P 2.9%

LZS

ZZS 9.9% LZP

A-P 12.0% KP LA PPI NSL 0.8%

LRA 4.1%

KPV 14.3%

V 6.7%

JKP 13.6%

NA 11.0%

Vējonis Levits Kučinskis Kariņš I I Oct. 2018

SDP"S" 23.6%

LZS

NSL 6.8% ZZS 19.7% LZP

LRA 6.6% PVL 1.2% JKP 0.7% PPI 0.2%

V 21.9%

JKP 0.7%

NA 16.6%

Straujuma I II Oct. 2014

PLL ZRP 21.0% Coal. 7.8% SRP+LPP+LC 2.4% LPP +LC

V V 19.0% PS SCP

JL

ZZS Coal. 16.8% LZP

LPP+LC Coal 8.6% LPP+LC

TP 19.7%

JL 16.4%

Vīķe-Freiberga Zatlers Bērziņš Godmanis Repše Emsis Kalvītis Dombrovskis II I I I I II III II Oct. 2002 Oct. 2006 Oct. 2010 Sep. 2011 VL 7.8% PVL 1.4% PVL JD 1.3% NA 14.0% TB-LNNK 7.0% TB-LNNK 7.0% TB V Coal. 31.9%

LPP LPP 9.5%

Figure 3.2. Political party system map for Latvia, 1990–2019

Year

JKP

DP Coal. 2.3% DP LZP LKDS

DPS 1.6%

JP 7.3%

LC 18.1%

TP 21.2%

TB- TB-LNNK LNNK 17.0%

TKL(ZP) 1.7%

Vīķe-Freiberga Bērziņš I

LKS 3.2% ) L L LKPP 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Premier Abbreviation: 1998 Krištopans

LC 14.6%

TB 12.0%

LZP

DCP 4.8% DP DP"S" 15.2%

LC 32.4%

ZS 1.2% TB Coal 5.4% TB LNAT 18NS

LNNK 13.4%

LNKP Coal. 6.3% LNNK

TKL(ZP) TKL(ZP) 15.0%

Krasts Kri. Šķēle I I III Oct. 1998

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

President No Position (Gorbunovs) Ulmanis Godmanis Birkavs Gailis Šķēle Premier I I II I II I Term Election Oct. 1995 Jun. 1993

Year

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Latvia The key dividing line of party politics has been ethnicity, between Russophones and ethnic Latvians (Figure 3.2). While the divide has remained stable, the party roster has changed dramatically. On the Russian side, many smaller parties agreed on a loose coalition in 2002, which in 2010 merged into a single major party, Harmony. On the ethnic Latvian side, there was no such consolidation. The liberal conservative Latvian Way (LC) was able to win a significant slice of the vote in a few elections in the 1990s, providing four of the country’s prime ministers, but after dropping below the electoral threshold, it returned to parliament in 2006 in an electoral alliance (later a full fusion) with the Latvia First Party (LPP). In 2010, the LPP/LC joined forces with the People’s Party (TP), which had emerged in 1998 as the political vehicle of businessman Andris Šķēle after his term as prime minister, but by then both parties were in decline, and neither returned to parliament in 2012. Latvia has experienced a number of new party breakthroughs, most notably New Era (JL) in 2002. Formed by the former Central Bank governor, Einars Repše, the party placed anti-corruption, novelty, and expertise central to its pitch. It won the most votes (24 per cent) in 2002, but by 2010 had begun to fade and merged into Unity (V). Originally an electoral alliance of three parties, Unity, latterly recast as New Unity (JV), merged into a single party in 2011 largely as a counterweight to Harmony. A platform mixing newness, anti-corruption, and expertise, but without having much staying power, was not just unique to New Era. Zatler’s Reform Party (ZRP), for instance, merged into Unity four years after it had won nearly 21 per cent of the vote in 2011 but then faced nearly catastrophic decline and survived only by merging with Unity four years later. Moreover, former State Auditor Inguna Sudraba formed For Latvia From the Heart and won 6.8 per cent of the vote in the 2014 election, but mustered just 0.84 per cent four years later. Even more recently, encapsulating the appeal of the new in its name, Who Owns the State? won over 14 per cent of the vote in 2018 in the first national election it contested. Latvian party politics is also notable for two alliances: The National Alliance (a single party from 2011) and the Union of Greens and Farmers. The latter has been a relatively stable presence since being forged in 2002.

LSDP 6.0%

TPJ 1.1%

LLL 1.2%

LCJ 2.5%

LKDS LLS 1.5% LVS

LTS+NP Coal. 1.9% LTS LKDP+LPKTS+LDP Coal. 12.6% LPKTS LDP LKDP LKDS-LTJS Coal. 3.5% LTJS-JL

TS(LK) 8.6%

Adamkus Pas.Kub. Pas. I I I Oct. 2000

LSDP 6.9%

LMP 3.9%

LLP 0.2% NJ-R96 LVP 1.7%

LLL 1.0% LLaS 1.6%

LCS 8.7%

LLS 17.3%

LLS 1.9% LUP 1.3%

NDP SDK Coal. 31.1%

VNDPS 6.6% BPK-UDL Coal. 20.6% NS(SL)

LSP F 3.2% SLF

LLP (2)

NS(SL) 3.6%

LVLS 3.7%

DP 9.0%

LLaS 0.3% DP 28.4%

TT 12.7% PDP 1.1%

RPK-UTT Coal. 11.4% LDP TT

LDP PDP

LCP 0.7%

LiCS 5.3% LRLS 5.7%

TPP 15.1%

NCP 0.5%

LiCS 9.2%

LKD 1.4%

PJL 1.7% LKDP(2)

KKSS

TS-LKD 19.7%

LSDS LLP 0.2%

LVŽS 4.1%

DP 20.7%

TT 7.8%

AF ST(TAIP) ST(TAIP) 1.8% LiCS 2.2% LRLS 9.0% ULL Coal 1.0% LCP incl. LTS and LSDS

FVL

PJL 0.7% DK 8.3% KP 1.3%

TS-LKD 15.7%

LLP 1.1% LŽP 2.0%

LVŽS 22.5%

DP 4.9%

TT 5.6%

AK Coal. 6.3% LCP LPP

LRLS 9.4%

LLS(L) 2.2%

LS 1.8%

DK 0.3%

TS-LKD 22.6%

Grybauskaitė Grybauskaitė Kubilius Butkevičius Skvernelis II I I I Oct. 2008 Oct. 2012 Oct. 2016

NCP

LKD

VNDPS NS(SL) 19.6%

LVP 4.1%

UTL 1.5%

LLaS 1.3%

MKDS MKDS LCS 2.9%

KDS 4.2%

KDS 3.2%

LNP-JL 4.0%

LRLS

TS(K-PKT-KD) 8.6%

Adamkus Paskas Kirkilas Brazauskas II I I Oct. 2004

JKDL KKSS 2.0% LTS+LDP Coal. 2.2% NKS NKS 2.0% LTS JL-NT-PKT Coal. 1.2% LPKTS+LDP Coal. 1.6% LPKT LNP-JL JL-NTS LKDP 3.1% LKDP(2) LKDP(2) LKDP 10.4%

Landsbergis Brazauskas Pru. Vagnorius Ab L Šleževičius Stan. Vagnorius I I I I I I II Oct. 1992 Oct. 1996 SK Coal. 21.2% TS(LK) 31.3% TS(LK)

Nausėda

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Figure 3.3. Political party system map for Lithuania, 1990–2019

LSDDP SLF 1.3% Premier LSDP Abbreviations: LDDP 44.0% LSDP LSDP 11.7% LSDP 19.2% LSDP 15.0% LSDP 1990 Prunskienė LDDP 10.0% 1992 Abišala 1992 Lubys LRS 0.9% LRS 1.7% LRS 1996 Stankevičius LRS LLRA 3.1% 1999 Paskas LLS-ZPL 2.1% LLRA 1.9% LLRA 3.8% LLRA 4.8% LLRA 6.1% LLRA 5.7% 2000 Kubilius LPA 2.6% LTMA 2000 Paskas 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Year

Premier Term Election

President

Year

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Lithuania In contrast to the other Baltic States, the contours of Lithuanian party politics were shaped more by attitudes towards the communist past and left versus right socio-economic differences than by ethnicity (Figure 3.3). The anti-communist forces were first assembled under the Sąjūdis movement in the late 1980s, which produced the Homeland Union in 1993. Homeland Union experienced several fissions and fusions, and was involved in electoral coalitions, but maintained its core throughout these changes. The left of the political spectrum was divided between the revived social democrats and the communist-successor Democratic Party of Labour (LDDP). These parties fused in 2001 under the name Social Democratic Party of Lithuania (LSDP). The Lithuanian Farmers and Greens (LVŽS), which by the end of the 2010s was the largest party in parliament, can trace its origins back through a fusion and electoral coalition to the 1990s. Given the significant degrees of continuity, albeit with some comings and goings, it is no surprise to see the Lithuanian party system is notably older than its Baltic cousins. The system, however, has not been immune to new party breakthroughs. The Labour Party (DP) won 28.3 per cent of the vote in 2004 thanks in no small part to its leader, the businessman Viktor Uspaskich. He soon became embroiled in scandal, and party support oscillated dramatically, from less than 10 per cent to more than 20 per cent and back below 5 per cent in 2016. Twotime prime minister Rolandas Paksas formed the Liberal Democratic Party in 2002 and won the presidential elections. Following his impeachment, the party was rebranded as Order and Justice (TT), maintaining parliamentary representation in a succession of elections. The creation of the National Resurrection Party (TPP) was straight out of the new party handbook. Founded by the TV show host Arūnas Valinskas, TPP offered the electorate a message of newness, celebrity, and anti-corruption, propelling the party to 15.1 per cent of the vote in 2008. But the party showed little internal cohesion in parliament and, following a wave of scandals and defections, it merged itself out of existence by the time of the 2012 elections. A more unusual case was the Way of Courage (DK), which emerged out of unproven allegations of a widespread paedophilia ring among high officials and collapsed when its leader fled to the United States to avoid trial on a variety of charges that she labelled political persecution.

UP 7.3%

PSL 15.4%

UD 10.6%

KLD 4.0%

PPPP 0.1%

RS-AWS

KPEIR 2.2% SLD 27.1% PPS

UP 4.7% PLD

PSL 7.3%

UW 13.4%

‘S’ incl. KPN-OP, SwW, SPR, ZP and others on AWS list PC SKL ROP 5.6%

NP PL

PO PO 41.5%

PiS 32.1%

PSL 8.9% PPP 1.0% LiD coal. 13.2% SDPL 3.9% PD SDPL incl. PZ, UP incl. PZ, UP on SDPL in LiD coal. list PSL 7.0% PPP 0.8%

PD 2.5%

PSL 9.0% SLD-UP coal. 27.1% PLD UP KPEIR

PO 24.1%

UW 3.1%

PiS 27.0%

LPR 1.3% LPR 8.0% RP coal. 1.1% PRz ROP ROP RKN RKN PdP

PO 12.7%

SKL

ROP RKN PdP PP PiS 9.5%

LPR 7.9%

RS-AWS

C

RP 10.0% SDPL

PSL 8.4% PPP-S80 0.6% TR

PSL 5.1% PPP-S80 TR

N 7.6%

PO 24.1%

PR-ZP

PJN 2.2% PR-JG

PO 39.2%

PiS 37.6%

SP

PRz

K'15 8.8%

UPR

P-JG from KORWiN

PR

PSL in KP coal. incl. K’15

PZ N

PO

P-JG KO coal. 27.4%

PiS

ZP coal. 43.6% PR SP

KP coal. 8.6% K'15 on PSL list

Duda Szydło Morawiecki Kopacz I I I Oct. 2015 Oct. 2019 KWiN Coal. KNP 6.8% KORWiN 4.8% KORWiN to P-JG RN RN

PiS 29.9%

SP

PRz

LPR

P coal 0.2% UPR UPR

L. Kaczyński Komorowski Belka Mar. J. Kaczyński Tusk II I&II I I I Oct. 2005 Oct. 2007 Oct. 2011 WiP-UPR KNP KNP 1.1% PKJM 1.6% WiP UPR UPR RN

Figure 3.4. Political party system map for Poland, 1990–2019

SLD 20.4% PPS

PZ Premier Abbreviations L coal. ZL coal. 7.5% 1990 Mazowiecki SLD 12.0% 12.6% SLD 1991 Bielecki SLD SLD 8.2% SdRP SdRP SdRP SLD SLD 11.3% SLD 1992 Olszewski incl. PZ, UP on SLD list W 1992 Pawlak R 3.6% R 1995 Oleksy SRP 0.1% SRP 0.1% SRP 2.8% SRP 11.4% SRP 1.5% SRP 10.2% 2005 Marcinkiewicz 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Year

PSL 8.7% SD 1.4% SP 2.1% PPS RDS 0.5%

KLD 7.5% to PK UD 12.3%

PPPP 3.3%

PK &FPP PL 5.5% SLCh SLCh PSL-PL 2.4% PSL-PL NZSS ‘S’ 5.0% NZSS ‘S’ 4.9% KDR 2.7% AP ChD 2.4% SDP PFChD RdR to PK PC-ZP 4.4% ChPP ChDSP ChDSP POC 8.7% PC PC RTR

PPChD ZChN

UPR on PO list AWSP 5.6% KPN

Kwaśniewski Miller I Sep. 2001

Jar. Wąłęsa Kwaśniewski Buzek Maz. Bie. O. P. Suchocka Pawlak Ole. Cimoszewicz I II I I I I I I I Sep. 1997 Oct. 1991 Sep. 1993 PX 2.7% PX 0.5% UPR 3.2% UPR 2.0% incl. PR, RDR UPR 2.3% KPN KPN 5.8% KPN 7.5% NChDBdP 1.4% BBWR 5.4% KPEIR RP 1.6% KKW-0 6.4% AWS 33.8% PChD 1.1% PChD PPChD PChD WAK 8.7% ZChN ZChN ZChN

President

Premier Term Election

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Year

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Poland Poland’s party system experienced significant change, but that change is largely linked to the new party breakthrough in the early 2000s. Very little of the Polish party system at the end of the 2010s resembles the party system of the early 1990s (Figure 3.4). Only the agrarian Polish People’s Party (PSL) has consistently maintained a parliamentary presence since the collapse of communism. In the 1990s, party politics was dominated by a battle between the postcommunist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the successors of the anticommunist Solidarity labour movement, with Solidarity characterized by disunity while SLD maintained its cohesion. In the early 2000s, however, SLD lost significant support in a series of scandals. From that point on, the picture of Polish party politics changed, with the left of the political spectrum becoming fractured and the right becoming more cohesive. From the remnants of the complex coalition labelled Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS), two parties came to dominate the subsequent two decades: Civic Platform (PO) and Law and Justice (PiS). Both identified themselves as right-leaning, but they differed on social questions, European integration, democratic norms, and how to interpret the nature of the 1989 exit from communism, with PiS taking a conservative, Eurosceptic, and more illiberal line. PO ruled Poland for two terms from 2007, but lost power to PiS in 2015. Although these parties have dominated since their arrival in 2001, Poland has also experienced other new party breakthroughs. In a similar vein to new parties which have broken through across the region, the appeal of parties such as Palikot’s Movement owed something to novelty, anti-corruption, and the expertise of the leader, but in the case of some, such as Palikot, it also drew on an appeal to social liberal values. In 2015, musician Paweł Kukiz ran for president, and his party, Kukiz ’15, won parliamentary representation through appealing to disenchanted voters and advocating a change in the electoral system. The late 2010s also saw a slew of new parties in parliament—many of which resulted from the fissions of larger parties—with such names as Agreement, Modern, and Spring.

I

KDS SZPZR 3.1% NEI 1.0% SB 1.0%

ODS

ODA 5.9% ODS-KDS Coal. 29.7%

SDL

SD 4.1%

II

US 8.6% DEU 1.4%

ODS 27.7%

SPR-RSČ 3.9%

Jun. 1998

Havel Zeman I

SZ 1.1%

Klaus Gross Paroubek I I

KSČM 18.5%

SZŽJ 0.9%

ČSSD 30.2%

ED SNK 2.8%

SZ 2.4%

KDU-ČSL

K Coal. 14.3% US-DEU

ODS 24.5%

RMS 1.0%

Jun. 2002

Špidla I

KSČM 12.8%

ČSSD 32.3%

SNK-ED 2.1%

SZ 6.3% SZR 0.5%

SZR 0.5%

KDU-ČSL 7.2%

US-DEU 0.3%

ODS 35.4%

Jun. 2006

Topolánek I

Zeman Sobotka I SPD

KSČM 11.3%

ČSSD 22.1%

SPOZ 4.3%

KSČM 14.9%

.

ČSSD 20.5%

SPOZ 1.5%

ANO 18.7%

KSČM 7.8%

ČSSD 7.3%

SPO 0.4%

ANO 29.6%

SZ 3.2% SZ 2.4% S-BJB 3.7%

S-SZR 0.3%

SSO 1.6% SZ 1.5%

SSO 2.5% SSO 0.7%

PS 10.8%

KDU-ČSL 5.8%

TOP 09 5.3%

STAN 5.2%

ODS 11.3%

SPD 10.6%

Mar. 2016

Zeman Babiš I

PS 2.7%

KDU-ČSL 6.8%

TOP 09

TOP-STAN Coal. 12.0% STAN

ODS 7.7%

ÚSVIT 6.9%

Oct. 2013 DSSS 0.9%

R. I

PS 0.8%

KDU-ČSL 4.4%

TOP 09

TOP-STAN 16.7% STAN

ODS 20.2%

VV 10.9%

DSSS 1.1%

LIDEM

Nečas I

May 2010

Klaus Fischer I

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

KSČM 10.3% KSČM 11.0%

KSČM

DZŽJ 3.1%

LB 1.4% SDS

DZŽJ 3.1%

ČSSD 26.4% ČSSD 32.3%

SD-LSNS 2.0% ČSNS 0.3%

HSMS-MNSj 0.4% HNS-HSMS 0.3% ČMUS 0.5%

KDU-ČSL 8.1% KDU-ČSL 9.0%

DEU 2.6%

ODS 29.6%

ODA 6.4%

SPR-RSČ 8.0%

Jun. 1996

T. I

LB Coal. 14.0% SDL LB (party)

ČSSD 6.5% HZSS 1.1% HDŽJ 3.8%

ROI 0.3%

KDU-ČSL 8.4% KDU-ČSL 6.3% HSD-SMS 5.9% HSMS HSD-SMS 10.0% HSDMS/ČMSS LSU Coal. 6.5% ČMUS SZV 4.1% LSU SZ 4.1% SV ČSS 2.7% ČSS to ODA ONAH to ODS OH 4.6% OF SD-LSNS OH 49.5% SPP 1.3% OF KAN 2.7%

from OF

from OF

Havel Klaus

Figure 3.5. Political party system map for the Czech Republic, 1990–2019

Year

Jun. 1992

VDSPR 1.0% SPR SPR-RSČ 6.0% VDS

Jun. 1990

(Havel) Pithart I

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Premier Abbreviations: 1990 Tošovský KSČ 13.2% 2013 Rusnok

Premier Term Election

President

Year

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The Czech Republic For the first two decades after the fall of communism, Czech party politics was quite stable. Although some parties came and went, particularly in the liberal centre, the party political scene was dominated by a left–right battle between the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and the Social Democrats (ČSSD), with the Christian People’s Party (KDU-ČSL) floating between them and the hard-line Communist Party (KSČM) remaining a pariah on the far left (Figure 3.5). All four of these long-standing parties presented the electorate with a clear ideological pitch based on their attitudes to the state’s role in the economy, social values, and attitudes towards the communist past. Government alternated between ODS and ČSSD, but the country also experienced two periods of technocratic caretaker governments in the run-up to the 2010 and 2013 elections. The 2010 elections ushered in a new era with the breakthrough of two significant parties. Public Affairs (VV) relied heavily on anti-corruption, newness and expertise appeals, an investigative journalist at the head of the party list, and a clarion call: ‘Down with Political Dinosaurs!’ In contrast, Tradition, Responsibility and Prosperity 09 (TOP ’09) combined the political experience of a former prominent member of KDU-ČSL with the avuncular appeal of Karel Schwarzenberg, who combined a position as the heir to the country’s most prominent aristocratic family with close personal connections to former Czech president Václav Havel. Those elections appeared to have broken open the Czech political system. In the subsequent elections in 2013, two more parties, the right-wing Dawn (Úsvit) and Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO), burst onto the scene and crossed the parliamentary threshold. The latter drew heavily on the appeal of new parties, stressing anti-corruption, novelty, and the business acumen of its leader and founder Andrej Babiš. While Dawn split, with its leader forming a new party, Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD), which won parliamentary representation in 2017, ANO increased its support and became the main party of government. Although those elections saw a slight recovery in the fortunes of the long-established ODS, it also witnessed the breakthrough of Mayors and Independents (STAN), which had played a role in supporting the now sagging TOP ’09, and a sudden rise in support for the previously unsuccessful Pirate Party, which jumped from 3 per cent of the vote to nearly 11 per cent.

SSL 0.3% KSS 0.8%

MPP 2.3% MK 7.4% MKDM ESWS

SSL 1.8%

MPP

MK Coal. 10.2% MPP

ZRS 7.3% KSS 2.7%

HZPCS 1.1%

SV Coal. 10.4% SZS SDSS HP SDĽ

LDU

SDKÚ

KSS 2.8%

ZRS 1.3%

SDĽ 14.7%

SOP 8.0%

Smer

DS Coalition filed under single party list SZS SDSS

KDH

DU

SDK 26.3%

HZDS 27.0%

SNS 9.1%

Figure 3.6. Political party system map for Slovakia, 1990–2019

Year

ROI 0.6% SZ 1.1% SZS 2.1% SDSS 4.0%

ODU 4.0%

DS 3.4%

NAS

Schuster Dzurinda I

Sep. 1998

Vacant

KSS 6.3%

ZRS 0.5%

Smer 13.1%

SDĽ 1.4%

SDA 1.8%

SZS 1.0%

ANO 8.0%

KDH 8.3% DS

SF

SDKÚ 15.1%

HZDS 19.5%

ĽU

HZD 3.3%

PSNS 3.3%

SNS 3.7%

Sep. 2002

Dzurinda II

Fico I

KSS 3.9%

Smer-SD 29.1%

Fico II

NaS 0.6%

SNS 4.6%

SDKÚ-DS 15.4%

OĽaNO 8.6%

Smer-SD 44.4%

Most 8.1% Most 6.9%

KSS 0.8%

Smer-SD 34.8%

SaS 12.1% SaS 5.9% "99%" 1.6% SDĽ 2.4%



KDH 8.5% KDH 8.8% NoVa ZZ-DUS 1.3%

SDKU-DS 6.1%

SSS 1.2%

HZDS 4.3% HZDS 1.0%

SNS 5.1%

Jun. 2010 Mar. 2012 ĽS-NS 1.3% ĽS-NS 1.6%

Gašparovič Radičová I

Unia Unia 0.7%

SDĽ (unrelated) 0.1%

Nadej 0.6%

ANO 1.4%

KDH 8.3%

SF 3.5%

SDKÚ-DS 18.4%

HZDS 8.8%

HZD 0.6%

SNS 11.7%

Sep. 2006

Gašparovič

#Sieť

Čaputová Pellegrini I

Most 6.5%

Smer-SD 28.3%

SaS 12.1%

OĽaNO-NOVA 11.0%

KDH 4.9%

#Sieť 5.6%

SR-BK 6.6%

SNS 8.6%

ĽS-NS 8.0%

Mar. 2016

Kiska Fico III

MK 8.7% SMK 4.3% SMK 4.3% SMK 4.0% SMK 11.2% SMK 9.1% SMK 11.7% MKDM MKDM ESWS ESWS 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Premier Abbreviations: 1990 Mečiar 1991 Čarnogurský 1994 Moravčík

KDH 10.1%

DU 8.6%

RSS

HZDS

HZDS-RSS 35.0%

SNS 5.4% KSU 2.1%

NS 1.3%

Sep. 1994

Kováč Mečiar III

DS-ODS 3.3% SPK 1.3%

KSČ SDĽ SDĽ 14.7% SDĽ (29) 13.3% SPV 2.5%

SZ 3.5% SDSS 1.8%

VPN ODU 29.3% ROI

DS 4.4%

KDH 19.2% KDH 8.9%

ADSR APR

HZDS 37.3%

NDS

SNS 13.9% SNS 7.9% SKDH 3.1%

Jun. 1992

Jun. 1990

Election

Premier Term

Mečiar Mor. II I

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

(Havel) Meč. Čarn. I I

Year

President

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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 16/11/2020, SPi

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Slovakia Slovakia has been remarkably stable in its instability, with new parties breaking through into parliament at almost every election. Only a small number of parties have endured since the early 1990s, such as the right-wing nationalist Slovak National Party (SNS) and the Christian Democratic Movement (KDH), and even these have repeatedly struggled to cross the parliamentary threshold in recent years (Figure 3.6). Party politics in the 1990s was dominated by the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS), which polarized the country with its illiberalism and appeals to the nation. In its lack of adherence to the niceties of democratic politics, HZDS not only raised the stakes of Slovakia’s elections, but also introduced legal barriers in 1998 that encouraged the fusion of smaller parties representing the ethnic Hungarian population into the Party of the Hungarian Coalition (SMK), and caused several anti-HZDS parties to fuse into the Slovak Democratic Coalition (SDK). After its election victory, SDK fractured unevenly, with some returning to the constituent parties and others to the new Slovak Democratic and Christian Union (SDKÚ), which became a major force in the subsequent decade. Meanwhile, HZDS faced repeated fission and continued its gradual loss in popularity over a series of elections until it fell out of parliament in 2010. Both the 1998 and 2002 elections saw new parties, such as the Party of Civic Understanding and the Alliance of the Democratic Citizen, breakthrough linked to the celebrity and (perceived) attributes of their leaders combined with an anticorruption appeal. But in terms of the long-term development of the party system, the most significant entrant in 2002 was Smer. At its launch, Smer offered a new direction (hence its name), a clear anti-corruption appeal, and fresh faces, including its popular young leader Robert Fico. Over time, the party’s pitch shifted to a critique of the neoliberal policies of the new government, and the party became the dominant party of politics. Pitching to voters on different mixes of novelty, anti-corruption, expertise, and positions on social values, the 2010s witnessed the repeated breakthrough of new parties, including Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) in 2010, Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO) in 2012, and #Network (#Sieť) and We are Family-Boris Kollár (SR-BK) in 2016. The 2016 elections also saw a sudden increase in popularity of the extreme right People’s Party (ĽSNS) of Marian Kotleba.

Orbán I

SZDSZ 19.7%

MSZDP 0.9%

MSZP 33.0%

ASZ 2.1%

MSZDP 3.6%

MSZP 10.9%

ASZ 3.1%

Fidesz 7.0% Fidesz -MPP Fidesz-MPP 29.5%

Fidesz 9.0% HVK 1.9%

SZDSZ 21.4%

LPSZ-VP 0.6%

VP 1.9%

MSZP 32.9%

SZDSZ 7.6%

MKDSZ MKDSZ

KDNP 2.3%

KDNP 7.0%

MDF 2.8%

MDNP 1.3%

FKgP 13.1% USZ 0.5%

MIÉP 5.5%

May. 1998

Göncz

KDNP 6.5%

KP 2.5%

FKgP 8.8% EKgP 0.8%

MIÉP 1.6%

II May. 1994

Horn I

MDF 11.7%

B. I

MDF 24.7%

FKgP 11.7%

Göncz Antall I I Mar. 1990

KDNP

I

Fidesz-MPSZ

MSZP 42.1%

SZDSZ 5.6%

FideszMPP

MKDSZ

Fidesz-MDF Coal. 41.1%

MDF

C-OM Coal. 3.9% HOM MDNP KDNP

MIÉP 4.4% FKgP 0.8%

Mádl Medgyessy II I Apr. 2002 Bajnai I

MSZP 43.2%

SZDSZ 6.5%

Fidesz-MPSZ

Fidesz-MPSZKDNPCoal. 42.0% KDNP

MDF 5.0%

C-OM 0.3%

MIÉP-Jobbik Coal. 2.2% Jobbik MIÉP

Sólyom Gyurcsány II Apr. 2006 II

MSZP 19.3%

Fidesz-MPSZ

Fidesz-MPSZKDNPCoal. 52.7% KDNP

MDF 2.7%

Jobbik 16.7%

Apr. 2010

Schmitt

MLP

DK Együtt

III

MSZP PM MM 3.1%

MSZP PM

MSZP Coal. 12.0% MLP

DK 5.4% Együtt 0.7%

Összefogás Coal. 25.6% DK Együtt MLP

Fidesz-MPSZ

Fidesz-MPSZKDNPCoal. 49.6% KDNP

Jobbik 19.2%

Apr. 2018

II IV

Áder

Fidesz-MPSZ

Fidesz-MPSZKDNPCoal. 44.9% KDNP

Jesz 0.2%

Jobbik 20.2%

Apr. 2014

Áder Orbán

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Figure 3.7. Political party system map for Hungary, 1990–2019

LMP 7.1.% LMP 5.3% LMP 7.5% Premier MKM 4.0% MKM 2.2% MKM 0.4% MKM 3.2% Abbreviation: MKM 3.7% MKKP 1.7% 1993 Boross Year 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Premier Term Election

President

Year

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Hungary In a similar vein to the Czech Republic, Hungary’s politics stayed stable until breaking open in the early 2010s, but more than any other country in the region the infusion of new parties remained extremely contained (Figure 3.7). As late as the 2018 election, Hungarian politics was striking for the levels of support won by the same parties that had contested elections back in the early 1990s. The high continuity figure owes much to the electoral success of Fidesz. Under its leader Viktor Orbán, Fidesz transmogrified from a party of liberal youth to a party advocating national conservatism and illiberalism. Fidesz was initially a much smaller political force, but its decision to take a more nationally inclined direction in the mid-1990s, combined with its alliances with groups in civil society and well-developed organizational structures, yielded significant electoral rewards. After winning power in 2010, Fidesz used its government’s constitutional majority to push through a series of changes to the electoral system, constitution, and media laws that helped to entrench its powerful position. Until 2010, the other major party of Hungarian politics was the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSzP). The communist-successor party inherited a welldeveloped organizational structure and pitched itself to the electorate as a competent manager for the country. This reputation collapsed following the 2006 elections when a recording emerged of the prime minister admitting he had lied about the state of the country’s finances, a revelation that Fidesz used to great effect in subsequent years. MSzP suffered a significant drop in support in 2010 and experienced a degree of fission, although it stabilized its political position in 2014 and 2018 in part thanks to participation in electoral coalitions. The 2010 elections saw the far-right Jobbik achieve parliamentary representation, but also the emergence of another party with striking similarities to other parties in the region with a name that encapsulates its pitch: Politics Can Be Different (LMP). The party experienced fissions, but was able to maintain a small parliamentary presence. Both the MSzP-appointed prime ministers after 2006 created new parties of their own for the 2014 elections, but these remained relatively minor actors who felt it necessary to join with MSzP in an electoral coalition. Other small parties emerged in 2018, including Momentum, an offshoot of the civic movement opposing an Olympic bid, and the practical-joke-turnedreal Two-Tailed Dog Party.

LDSS 1.4% SN 2.5%

SPD

ZL Coal 13.6% DeSUS incl. small parties

SOPS 1.6% SEG 0.6%

SSS 2.8%

LDS 23.5%

DS 5.0% KS-DS 1.1%

ND-SGS 2.2%

SF 1.1%

ZLSD 9.0%

DeSUS 4.3%

SOPS 1.2%

LDS 27.0%

DSS 2.7%

ZS 1.8%

SLS + SKD

Rop II I

ZLSD 12.1%

DeSUS 5.2%

LDS 36.3%

DSS 0.7%

SMS 4.3%

ZZ 0.9%

SDSS 15.8%

SKD SLS+SKD 9.5% SLS

SLS N.Si 8.7%

SNS 4.4%

Kučan B. Drnovšek I IV Oct. 2000

SD 10.2%

Zares-NP

Janša I

DeSUS 4.0%

LDS 22.8%

AS 3.0%

SMS 2.2%

SJN 2.6%

SDS 29.1%

SLS 6.8%

N.Si 9.1%

SNS 6.3%

Oct. 2004

Drnovšek

N.Si 4.9

SNS 1.8%

SD 30.4%

DeSUS 7.4%

LDS 5.8%

Zares-NP 9.4%

SDS 29.3%

TRS 1.2% DSD 0.6%

SD 10.5% IDS

DeSUS 7.0%

LZJ-PS 28.5%

LDS 1.5%

Zares-SL 0.7%

DL GV 8.4%

SDS 26.2%

ZL Coal. 6.0% IDS TRS DSD

SD 6.0%

DeSUS 10.2%

PS 3.0%

ZaAB 4.3%

PS 1.3%

SMC 34.6%

DL 0.6%

SDS 20.7%

SLS 4.0%

N.Si 5.5%

SNS 2.0%

Pahor Janša Bratušek Cerar II I I Dec. 2011 Jul. 2014

SLS+SMS Coal. 5.2% SLS 6.8% SLS SMS-ZE 0.9% SMS

N.Si 3.4%

SNS 5.4% Lipa 1.8%

Türk Pahor I Sep. 2008

L

L 9.3% ZLS 0.6%

SD 9.9%

DeSUS 4.9%

DD 1.5%

LMŠ 12.6%

SAB 5.1%

PS 2.2%

SMC 9.7%

AČZS 1.1%

SDS 24.9%

SLS 2.6%

N.Si 7.2%

SNS 4.2%

Šarec II I Jun. 2018

Pahor

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

ZOEO 2.5%

ZKS-SPD 18.8%

SZDL 5.4% SOPS 1.6% DZL 2.0%

ZSMS 15.8%

SDZ 10.3%

ZS 9.6%

ZS 3.7%

SDSS 16.1% LS 0.7%

SDSS 3.3%

LS 1.5%

SOS 3.8%

SDZS 7.4%

SKD 9.6%

SNS 10.0%

SKD 14.9%

SNS 3.2%

Dec. 1992

III

SLS 19.4%

I

Kučan Drnovšek II Nov. 1996

SKZ 13.7% SLS SLS 8.7%

SKD 14.1%

DEMOS Coal.

Kučan Peterle I I Apr. 1990

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Figure 3.8. Political party system map for Slovenia, 1990–2019

Year

Premier Abbreviation: 2000 Bajuk

Premier Term Election

President

Year

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 16/11/2020, SPi

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 16/11/2020, SPi

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Slovenia The story of Verjamem that begins this book is indicative of the way in which Slovenia’s party system suddenly spun apart in the early 2010s (Figure 3.8). Nonetheless, Slovenia had a number of perennial parties that had been in parliament since the early 1990s, including the Democratic Party of Pensioners of Slovenia (DeSUS) and the Social Democrats (SD). But the most notable perennial was the right-wing Slovene Democratic Party (SDS) under its leader Janez Janša, In addition, the nationalist Slovene National Party (SNS) maintained a parliamentary presence for much of the three decades, although it fell below the electoral threshold for two terms in 2011. Much of the 1990s was dominated by the centrist Liberal Democracy (LDS), but the party did not long survive the elevation of party leader, Janez Drnovšek, to the country’s presidency in 2002. LDS experienced a slow decline into insignificance during the two subsequent election cycles, a period that also saw a fission that led to the creation of Zares (Dawn) and the rise in electoral significance of both SDS and SD. The 2011 elections, however, saw the beginning of cycles of rapid change that were driven by new political actors. Sizeable numbers of voters shifted their support in 2011 to two parties—Positive Slovenia (PS) and the Civic List of Gregor Virant (DLGV)—formed just weeks before the elections, which won over a third of the vote. Both parties made great play of the expertise of their founders. PS was led by Zoran Janković, the manager of the largest retail company in the country, whereas Civic List’s leader Virant had served as Minister of Public Administration. This story was repeated in 2014 when another new party formed just weeks before the election, the Party of Miro Cerar (SMC), won a third of the vote. SMC made much of the personality and the legal expertise of Cerar combined with a strong anti-corruption appeal, but this was tied—as with Janković three years previously—to a claim his party was the best placed to ensure Janša did not return to power. Moreover, in 2018, another new party, the eponymously named List of Marjan Šarec (LMŠ), whose leader had a background both as a satirist and a local mayor, won nearly 13 per cent of the vote and elevated its leader into the role of prime minister.

IDS-DA-RDS coal. 3.2% IDS DA RDS

SDU 1.2%

SSH 1.2%

SDP 5.5%

SDU 3.2%

SDP 8.9% incl. RDS

SBHS in HSS-led coal. in HSS-led coal. IDS DA in ASH-led coal. RDS in SDP list 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999

SSH

SKH-SDP

SKH-SPD coal. 35.5% incl. SS ASH-led coal. 1.7% incl. DA

HNS incl. IDS, SBHS

HNS 6.7% SDSH 0.6%

SDSH

KNS

HSS

HSS 4.3%

HSU 4.0%

SDP

HNS-led coal. 8.0% incl. PGS, SBHS HNS SPD-led coal. 22.6% incl. IDS LIBRA LIBRA LS

HSS 7.2%

to HDSSB

IDS 3.5%

HDSSB 1.8%

HSU 4.2%

SDP 31.9%

HNS-LD 6.9%

HSS incl. PGS

HDZ

3.3% ZP coal. 4.0% incl. BUZ 1.5%

NHR to ZP H... HSLS H-P Hrast-PZUH

HDZ

SDP

SDP HSU HSU HL-SR 0.2% ORaH 1.7% HDSSB 2.8% 1.3% HDSSB 1.2% PNS coal. 1.9% ZJJI coal. 2.2% IDS in Kukuriku coal. IDS IDS RI RI RI PGS in BUZ coal. PGS PGS

HSU HL-SR 5.0%

SDP

Most 13.2% Most 9.6% ŽZ 4.1% JO coal. 6.0% ŽZ P 0.3% P-ZG coal. 2.0% ZG 0.1% ZG NK coal. 32.8% HSS 2.9% in DK Coal. HSS HSS KHR Kukuriku coal. 41.1% incl. IDS 32.2% HNS HNS HNS NHR

BUZ-led coal 2.8% incl. PGS HSLS 3.0% NL-IG 2.7% Hrast-PZUH Hrast-HR 1.2% NL MB 1.0% KRS Coal.. UH Coal.

HDZ 23.2%

incl. HSS HDZK coal 35.8%

Josipović Grabar-Kitarović Milanović Oreš. Plenković I I I I II Dec. 2011 Nov. 2015 Sep. 2016 HSP 3.0% HSP 0.6% UIO 1.0% HSP-AS 2.7% DK coal 33.5% HSP-AS 0.6%

PGS in ZZK coal. PGS in SDP-HSLS coal. PGS in HNS-led coal. 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

from HDZ SBHS in SDP-HSLS coal. SBHS in HNS-led coal. in SPD-led coal. in HSS-led coal. IDS IDS

HSU 1.8%

SDP

LS ASH

HNS

HSS-led coal. 14.9% incl. IDS HSS

Figure 3.9. Political party system map for Croatia, 1990–2019

Year

HKDU

HSS-led coal. 17.9% HDKU

HDS 2.7%

HSNS 1.1%

HKDS 0.7%

HSLS incl. PGS, SBHS

HSLS 11.6%

DC-led coal. 0.8% ZZK coal. 6.7% HSLS

HSP-AS

HSLS-DC coal. 4.0% DC HSLS

II Nov. 2007 HSP 3.6%

Kosor I

DC SPD-HSLS coal. 39.2%

I

Mesić

HDZ 37.3%

HPS 0.3%

HSP 6.4%

Nov. 2003

Sanader

HDZ 33.9%

II

Iliescu

HDZ 27.0%

HKDS 2.7%

HDZ 45.2%

I Jan. 2000 HSP coal. 5.2% HSP HKDU HSP1861 0.8% HPS 1.1%

Račan

HSLS 17.7%

HDZ 44.7%

HSP1861 1.3% HND 3.0%

HSP 4.9%

HDS HSS

HKDS

KNS coal. 15.3% HSLS

HDZ 41.6%

HSP 7.1%

Tuđman Tuđman Tuđman Mateša M Man. Gre. Š. Valentić II I I I I I Oct. 1995 May 1990 Aug. 1992

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Premier Abbrev: 1990 Mesić 1990 Manolić 1991 Gregurić 1992 Šarinić 2015 Orešković

Premier Term Election

President

Year

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Croatia Until the 2010s, party politics in Croatia had been much more stable than many other party systems in the region (Figure 3.9). The main axis of Croatia’s party politics has been a battle between the conservative Croatian Democratic Movement (HDZ) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP), although both parties have experienced splits and defections. Other smaller parties, such as the Croatian Peasant Party (HSS) and the Croatian People’s Party (HNS), have also endured since the early 1990s, as have several small regional parties, although nearly all of them have participated in larger electoral coalitions in order to get elected. HDZ was the mainstay of most governments in Croatia during the first three decades of independence. Its initial attraction was linked to the charisma of its leader Franjo Tuđman and his appeal to the Croat nation during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the military conflicts that followed. Projecting itself as the party that delivered independence (and adapting electoral laws to its declining support), HDZ remained dominant until Tuđman’s death in 1999. To arrest the decline, HDZ’s new leader Ivo Sanader moved the party towards the centre of the political spectrum and sought membership of the European Union (EU). Subsequent leaders of the party have come from both the christian democratic and the more nationalist wings of the party, resulting in changes of direction. HDZ’s main rival, SDP, was the successor of the League of Communists of Croatia. The party pursued a social democratic and pro-European agenda. It forged electoral coalitions with other left and centre-left parties and was at the helm of governing coalitions from 2000 to 2003 and 2011 to 2015. New party breakthrough has been rarer in Croatia than elsewhere, but the country has not been immune, and the role of new parties has increased over time. The Croatian Labourists—Labour Party (HL-SR) was formed in 2010, coming third in the 2011 elections, and the Bridge of Independent Lists (Most) was formed at a regional level in 2012. The latter went on to win 13.2 per cent of the vote in the 2015 elections and briefly to gain the country’s premiership. Both Most and another successful new party, Human Shield (ZZ), put their newness and anti-establishment appeals at the centre of their pitch for voters.

FSDN 27.5% PDSR

FSN 10.2% PD-FSN

MER 2.3% PDAR 3.0%

PNŢCD PER PSDR (SD) PSDR (S) 0.9%

PNL-CD NPL

PD

AR

PR 1.6% PNL-C PNL 2.6% CDR 20.0% PAC PNL-AT PL93

PUNR 7.7%

PDSR 21.5%

PS 2.3%

PSDR

FER UFD PAR PER UNC 0.9% MER PDAR PUR USD coal. 12.9% PD

PNŢCD

PUNR 4.4% PNRO 0.3% PR 0.1% ANL Coal. 1.6% ANLE Coal. 1.6% PAC PLDR PL93 PL CDR 30.2% PNL-CD PNL

PRM 4.5%

PSD

PDSR coal. 36.6% PUR PSDR

PD 7.0%

FER UFD PER 0.9% ApR 4.1%

PNL 6.9% CDR2000 5.0% PNŢCD

PLDR 0.5%

PNL-C 1.4%

PAN coal. 1.4% PUNR PNR

PRM 19.5%

PPR 1.4%

PSD

PSD+PUR coal. 36.6% PUR

PD

PLD

PNŢCD 1.8% PPCD

PNL

DA coal. 31.3%

PAP 0.5%

PNG 2.2% PUNR

PRM 12.9%

Băsescu Popescu-Tăriceanu I II Nov. 2004

PPR 0.7%

PSD

IV

PSD

PC

USL coal. 58.6% UNPR

PPDD 14.0%

PDL

PLR ARD coal. 16.5% FC PNŢCD

PNL

in USL coal.

PRM 1.2%

Băsescu Ponta Un. I I III III Dec. 2012

UNPR PSD+PC coal. 33.1% PC

PDL 32.4%

PNŢCD

PNL 18.6%

PNGCD 2.3%

PRM 3.2%

I I II Nov. 2008

Boc

PSD 45.5%

ALDE 5.6% PRU 2.8%

PMP 5.3%

USR 8.9%

PNL 20.0%

PRM 1.0%

Iohannis Cioloș Gr. Tu. Dăncilă O. I I I I I Dec. 2016

Figure 3.10. Political party system map for Romania, 1990–2019

Premier Abbrev: 2000 Isărescu PSM 2.1% PSM 0.8% PSM 3.0% 2012 Ungureanu EMNP 0.6% PSMR 1.7% 2017 Grindeanu UMDR 6.2% UMDR 6.6% UMDR 6.8% UMDR 7.2% UMDR 7.5% UMDR 6.2% UMDR 6.2% UMDR 5.1% 2017 Tudose Year 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

FSN 66.0%

MER 2.6% PDAR 1.8%

PER 1.7% PSDR 0.5% (Soc. Dem.) PSDR 1.0% (Socialist)

PNŢ-CD 2.6%

PNL 6.4%

PR

AUR 2.1% PUNR

PRM 3.9%

Constantinescu Iliescu Ciorbea Vasile Isăr. Năstase I I I I Nov. 1996 Nov. 2000

Iliescu Iliescu Roman Stolojan Văcăroiu I II III I I May 1990 Sep. 1992

President

Premier Term Election

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Year

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Romania In some respects, Romanian party politics offers a similar story to Croatia, with a striking degree of party continuity, albeit with frequent coalitions, fissions, and fusions (Figure 3.10). The Social Democratic Party (PSD) experienced name changes, frequent coalitions, and some minor fission and fusion, but remained a major force on the party political scene from the early 1990s onwards, regularly winning around a third of the vote. The National Liberal Party (PNL) was another mainstay during the same period. Despite its own internal alterations and electoral coalitions, it grew stronger over time by absorbing other parties. During the 2000s and much of the 2010s, alongside these two parties, another major player, the liberal conservative Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), coexisted in a complicated triangle of coalitions and oppositions. Like PSD, the Democratic Liberal Party can trace its origins back to the anti-Ceausescu National Salvation Front (FSN). When the split of FSN, which led to the subsequent creation of PSD, occurred in 1992, the remnants renamed themselves the Democratic Party (PD), changing their name to PDL in 2007 when they were joined by a splinter party from PNL. After working in coalition with PSD, PDL eventually folded itself into PNL. The other perennial has been the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), representing the ethnic Hungarian voters in the country and consistently winning between 5 per cent and 7 per cent of the vote. Although most of the party movement in Romania has occurred in the complicated dance related to the trio of PSD, PNL, and PDL, the country has also witnessed a number of new party breakthroughs. Most strikingly, TV presenter Dan Diaconescu created the People’s Party–Dan Diaconescu in 2011, which won nearly 14 per cent of the vote in 2012, but experienced major defections and had disappeared from view by the time of the 2016 elections. Those elections, in turn, brought success for the Save Romania Union, which emerged from local success as Save Bucharest Union to win significant parliamentary representation on a strong anti-corruption ticket.

incl. ASLP

incl. HDS

Parvanov Sakskoburggotski I Jul. 2001 VMRO+DG coal. 3.6% VMRO ODS coal 52.3% DG BZNS-NS NS-BZNS OZS coal. 0.3% ODS coal. 18.2% BZNS-NS DP DP VMRO SSD ODS ODS

Stoyanov Kostov I May 1997

SDS-T Coal. 3.2% DAR Coal. 3.8% BDSP BSDP BSDP BDSP BSDP DSH incl. Ekoglas. Ekoglas. to BSP PBSD to KzB GOR from BSP to KzB NDPS NDPS SDS-L Coal. 2.8% ALSP from SDS from DPS to KNR ZP to ONS ZP ZP & FKZD SNI 1.5% to ONS BZG 0.4% BBB 1.3% BBB 4.7% BBB 4.9% KSV 3.4% OT 1.1% OT 1.7%

incl. ASLP, FKZD

Zhelev Zhelev Luk. Pop. Dimitrov Berov I. Videnov Sof. I I I I BNRPI0.5% I BNRP 1.1% I Dec. 1994 Jul. 1990 Nov. 1991 BNRP 1.1% BNRP 0.5% NS coal. 6.5% BZNS-E 3.9% BZNS 6.0% BZNS-NS BZNS-AS SDS coal. BSP DP 36.2% ODS coal. 24.2% BZNS-NP BZNS-NP 3.4% BZNS-NP SDS coal. to ONS 34.4% DP DP VMRO SDS SDS SDS

NV 3.0%

DSB 6.4%

BSDP

Ataka 8.1% BNS coal. 5.2% VMRO BZNS-NS OZ SSD ODS coal 7.7% NS-BZNS DG DP ODS incl. DROM (new) Ataka GORD NFSB VMRO from LIDER RZS

GERB 30.5%

from TSD GN 1.3%

Ataka 4.5%

GERB 32.7%

RB coal. 8.9% HDPB ODS BZNS BDF DSB DBG BND NPSD to DOST GN 1.1%

PF coal. 7.3% NFSB VMRO

G. I

LIDER coal. 3.2% BBT Coal. 5.7% VMRO BBT NV LIDER coal. 1.7% LIDER LIDER LIDER BND TSD coal 1.6% NDSV 3.0% NDSV NDSV 0.2% NPSD to RB-GN from DPS Z 0.6%

GERB 39.7%

DSB

2.9% BDF DSB 3.3%

1.4%

1.7%

7.3% 0.5% 3.7% 1.9%

Plevneliev Borisov R. Ore. B. I I I II Jun. 2013 Oct. 2014

RZS RZS 4.1% SK coal. 6.8% OZ ODS ODS incl. DSB+BDF coal.. RDP (new) OZ from BZNS-NS BSDP DBG

Ataka 9.4%

Borisov I Jul. 2009

Parvanov

to LIDER

from BNS

Stanishev I Jul. 2005

Volya 4.1%

GERB 33.5%

GN

DBG BND

NFSB VMRO V 1.1% NR coal. 2.5% DSB RB-GN coal. 3.1% SDS BZNS BDF

Radev Borisov III Mar. 2017 OP coal. 9.3% Ataka

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019

Figure 3.11. Political party system map for Bulgaria, 1990–2019

BDT 0.1% PS coal. 1.4% BND PBZ PBZ 0.4% NDSV 42.7% DB coal 3.0% incl. DB NDSV 19.9% OPT from PS-BSP DNV-O GOR to DEOS from DAR KEL coal. 5.5% DAR Z GOR KNR coal. 1.3% from ODS from BEL 1.0% NDPS ABV+D21 coal. 1.6% BEL OPT 0.6% % SDS-T ABV BSD BSD ABV 4.1% BSP BSP coal. 43.5% BSP From D21 PS-BSP coal. OBT D21 1.2% BSP 47.2% BDSP KzB coal. 17.1% 33.1% BSPzB coal. 27.2% KzB coal. 31.0% incl. KzB coal. 26.6% BSP BSP PDSD from BEL, incl. DL coal. 22.1% Premier BSP BSP KzB coal.17.7% PBSB from BDSP BSP-LB 15.4% incl. KPB, PBSD, BZNS-AS BSP Abbreviations: PDSD, ZP from BZNS-E, incl. same BSP BSP BSP 1990 Lukanov 63.3 DSH from BPSD EKOGlasnost incl. BZNS-AS, KPB, DSH, as same as incl. incl. KPB, PBSD, PDSD, 1991 Popov ZS-AS formerly BZNS-AS DSH, ZS-AS from SDS-T EKOGlasnost ZS-AS, NZ 2009 2013 OPT incl. BZNS-AS 1994 Indzhova BKP 0.7% BKP 1.5% BKP 1.2% KPB incl. Euroroma, NZ (new) incl. KPB, OBT (new) DOST 2.9% 1997 Sofiyanski ONS coal. 7.6% DPS+Euroroma coal. 7.6% Euroroma 1.3% ENP 0.2% to 2013 Raykov FTB 1.8% FTB 1.4% FTB Euroroma NDPS ODS 2014 Bliznashki DPS, ZP, BZNS-NP, SNI DPS DPS 12.8% DPS 14.4% DPS 11.3% DPS 14.8% DPS 9.0% DPS 5.4% 2017 Gerdzhikov DPS 8.0% DPS 7.5% 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 Year

Premier Term Election

President

Year

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Bulgaria Bulgaria is striking both for its continuity and change. Parts of the country’s party system have remained largely intact from the early 1990s, while the rest saw some of the most dramatic change in the region. Part of the continuity owes something to ethnicity. The parliamentary perennial Movement for Rights and Freedom (DPS) drew large swathes of support from the country’s ethnic Turks. Within the majority Bulgarian population, the left side of the political spectrum was dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), albeit on occasions BSP was the largest component of an electoral coalition (Figure 3.11). In 2001, Bulgaria witnessed one of the most dramatic new party breakthroughs. Just weeks before elections, the former Tsar Simeon II formally announced his intention of entering politics at the head of a new political movement. The National Movement of Simeon II, with its appeals of celebrity, novelty, and anti-corruption, won just under 43 per cent of the vote. The party’s performance in government, however, did not live up to the promises of its campaign, and the party slid to 19.9 per cent in 2005 and below the parliamentary threshold in 2009. Other new parties quickly came and went. In 2009, the conservative anticorruption Order, Law and Justice (RZS) won 10 of the 240 seats in parliament, but failed to retain any seats in 2013. In 2014, Bulgaria Without Censorship, formed by journalist and businessman Nikolay Barekov in 2014, won 5.7 per cent of the popular vote but did not compete in 2017, and the Alternative for Bulgarian Revival (ABV) of former president Georgi Parvanov also failed to hold onto the seats it won in 2014. The one new party that not only survived but thrived in the late 2000s and 2010s was Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) founded by Boyko Borissov, the founder of a private security firm and bodyguard of major public figures (including Simeon II), who used his prominence to win election as the mayor of Sofia before advancing to national politics. GERB promised to fight crime and corruption, but also stressed the role of the family, the need for energy independence, and a pro-European outlook. The party not only succeeded in winning nearly 40 per cent of the vote in 2009, but also proved adept at the even more difficult task of maintaining its high electoral support in the subsequent three elections.

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Mapping the Big Picture Each of the individual party system maps tells a slightly different story of party competition. Even a quick glance is enough to tell us that Hungary, for example, has experienced something quite different from Bulgaria. But while the maps are sufficient to illustrate the individual narratives, we need some additional tools to make effective comparisons among the countries and to highlight the broader patterns and trends. Fortunately, the beginning and end points and width of each line in these stories derive from numerical values as determined by the standards of party newness we introduced in Chapter 2, and those values together offer a quantitative picture of changes in individual party status and party support over time. In the remainder of this chapter we measure and assess the overall degree of change of the party system in our eleven Central European countries over three decades. Before we do that, however, we need to clarify a few more decisions related to the data.

Time Period and Cohort In the rest of this chapter, the measurements will derive from a common statistical framework, but creating that framework involves overcoming a few challenges in linking together eleven countries with different election timelines and electoral calendars. The differences in timing and frequency of election pose several significant problems. In some measures that do not rely on overall cross-country comparison, we will use each individual election measured at the period at which it occurred. For comparing sequences of elections, the resolution is more complicated. The ordinal position of elections is one possible basis for comparison: first, second, and nth elections represent comparable milestones in countries’ democratic development. Differences in electoral laws and the frequency of early elections, however, cause ordinal elections to fall out of sync: Slovakia’s eighth free and fair election occurred in 2012, while Hungary’s eighth election did not occur until six years later in 2018. The least distortive method is to create a summary measure for standardized periods within the overall span of time. To minimize the amount of averaging and allow full coverage of the time period of this book, we have chosen to use six half-decade spans beginning in 1990. Every data period contains at least one election per country, and almost two-thirds of the 66 half-decades investigated here (the product of six periods in eleven countries) contain a single election, meaning that just under one-third of the half-decades required us to average the results for two elections and one in twenty required averaging results for three elections. In a few cases, this averaging diminishes significant highs and lows, but it does not have a major effect on the overall results.

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To correspond with the six time periods, we also subdivide the roster of political parties into six cohorts depending on the time period of their origin. Parties are therefore not merely ‘new’ and ‘old’, but they are linked to the half-decade period during which they first emerged. (We consider parties that existed under communism as starting in the first cohort, which covers the period from 1990 to 1994. This is not the only way to do such an assessment since such parties could be regarded as much older, but we believe that doing so makes sense given that all parties were new to the game of democratic electoral politics and were alike in facing the same enormous electoral challenges.)

Standards for Newness The levels of newness discussed in Chapter 2 require us to remain consciously aware of ways in which the decisions about what counts as new may affect our results, and the availability of clearly defined levels allows to look at results at several levels of strictness to see if patterns hold across time or across space and where the big differences lie. As the predominant threshold for newness, this chapter uses the level 2 standard of ‘strict transformation’ described in Chapter 2. We use this level as our default because it includes those parties that operate in a fundamentally new way, including not only start-ups, but also fissions that need to remake themselves and fusions that alter the party’s internal workings or external image. At the same time, we also demonstrate that our overall arguments do not depend on a particular standard by showing that the similar patterns also emerge if we use higher (or lower) standards.

Comparison Sets For this chapter, it is convenient to use as a frame of reference the other countries of the EU. This provides a reasonably coherent framework of countries with relatively similar electoral systems and sizes: nearly all Western European countries have similar types of proportional representation systems, and the countries of Central Europe range from Poland and Romania (the EU’s sixth and seventh largest countries by population) to Estonia and Latvia (the EU’s third and fourth smallest). Western Europe is also the frame of reference for most of the countries themselves, and its countries are the focus of most pre-twenty-first-century academic writing on political parties and party systems. While looking at Central Europe through the lenses of frameworks and experiences of Western Europe is a useful initial reference point, it is not our final destination. Indeed, by world standards, the countries of Western Europe are the exceptions rather than the rule. Here we use Western Europe because of a convenient common statistical

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framework, but in Chapter 7 we move beyond the intra-European comparison to look at party systems across the world, and then look back at Western Europe to show the ways in which it has recently begun to follow trails blazed first in Central Europe.

Volatility As we note in Chapter 2, volatility is the most frequently used quantitative tool to assess and compare the degree of continuity and change in a party system. Most measures of volatility use a variant of Pedersen’s (1979) simple and effective index that sums the change in vote share for each party between two periods. Standard measures of volatility, however, range widely in the kinds of parties they include and how they calculate change. Studies that use different starting points can produce dramatically results and make it difficult to reach firm conclusions about the degree of volatility in any particular country at any given time (Casal Bértoa et al., 2017). Much of the difference in volatility scores depends on differences in scholars’ definition of newness, especially in the case of fissions and fusions. Chapter 2 shows in theory how the different levels of change associated with newness can produce such wide variations in measurements of volatility. Figure 3.12 shows why the risk of such differences is particularly great for Central Europe: parties with change levels in the intermediate zones between alteration and inception regularly received a large share of the vote. Fissions and fusions have declined steadily over time from their high point in the early 1990s, during the splitting and reconfiguration of large anti-communist movements, to near zero in the 2010s. The same period has seen the rise of start-ups. As the share of fissions and fusions has declined and the share of start-ups has increased, the ease of reaching a consensus about overall change has become slightly easier, but even at the end of the 2010s nearly a tenth of the vote was regularly received by parties in the ambiguously new categories, especially among parties that emerged through relaxed inception (level 2.5). Fragmentation patterns differ not only over time but across geographic lines. New party support in Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, for example, was more likely to go to inceptions than to fissions or fusions, while the opposite was the case in Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, and Romania (Casal Bértoa et al., 2017). One corrective to this problem is a method of calculating volatility that rejects the binary approach and looks at partial inheritances and partial legacies. Such adjusted measurements produce results that depend less on individual coding decisions about novelty (Casal Bértoa et al., 2015). Volatility, calculated in this manner, shows a narrower range (especially during the early years after the end of communism and less variation within countries over time. Figure 3.13 shows the results averaged for five-year time periods using both the standard volatility

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  

Share of Parties by Category of Change During Period

100%

Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 1 2 3 4 5 6

95

Level 3.0

Inception (strict)

Level 2.5

Inception (relaxed)

Level 2.0

90%

Transformation (strict)

Default newness threshold (2.0) Level 1.5

80%

Transformation (relaxed)

Level 1.0

70%

Alteration (strict)

Level 0.5

Alteration (relaxed)

60%

Level 0.0

Continuation

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1990 to 1994

1995 to 1999

2000 to 2004

2004 to 2009

2010 to 2014

2015 to 2019

Figure 3.12. Share of vote to parties in Central Europe over time, 1990–2019, according to degree of party change during half-decade periods Source: Authors’ calculations

measure (with a level 2.0 strict transformation threshold for newness) and the adjusted method. Some countries, such as Estonia and Hungary, showed fairly significant drops in volatility over time, while the Czech Republic and Slovenia showed an increase. For most countries, the trend was a moderate one, between one and three points of decline in volatility per decade, such that if trends continued at their post-communist pace, it would require another two decades just to come down to a 20 per cent volatility rate. Furthermore, there is little to suggest that volatility is showing a dropping overall trend. Since around 2010 the volatility graph is nearly flat, and levels have risen slightly over time from that low point (which by Western European standards is not low at all). While volatility is commonly used as a measure of how much party systems change, it actually measures the movement of voters and only indirectly measures changes in the composition of the party system. To serve that purpose, the method needs some substantial modification. Mainwaring, Gervasoni and España-Najera

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Pedersen’s Volatility Index

Average Volatility During Period

60 50 40 30 20 10 0 50 40 30 20 10 0 50 40 30 20 10 0

Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 Period Period Period 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Regional Average Poland Slovenia

Standard Adjusted Estonia

Czech Republic

Croatia

Latvia

Slovakia

Romania

Lithuania

Hungary

Bulgaria

50 40 30 20 10 0 1990

‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19

Figure 3.13. Electoral volatility in Central Europe 1990–2020 Source: Authors’ calculations

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(2017) and Powell and Tucker (2014) begin to resolve this problem by subdividing the types of volatility into multiple categories and looking at changes in aggregate support among existing parties and parties entering and leaving the system, what the former set of authors refer to as intra- and extra-system volatility. The result of their insight is to clarify for the first time (along with earlier work by Birch (2003)) the extent to which overall volatility is a result of internal churn among supporters of existing parties or new parties breaking through into the system or falling out of it. These calculations, however, again depend heavily on the threshold for calling a party new. So, while these new subdivisions of volatility significantly improve our understanding by focusing on important subcategories, they do not go far enough. It is possible, and indeed desirable, to go deeper into their area of concern without taking along the limitations of the standard volatility measure.

New Party Entry A more direct indicator is simply the space that new parties occupy in party systems over time. The measure of new party entry is not only simpler but arguably more useful than the more complex measurement of extra-system volatility, since the latter would register an equally high figure for two quite different circumstances: one in which a new party draws away the votes of existing parties and the other in which expansion of an established party draws support from an equally established rival and forces it into liquidation. Both types of change are important, and both deserve to be addressed, but they are very different. The average inflow of new parties to Central European party systems between 1990 and 2019 (excluding the first post-communist elections) averaged one vote in five over the entire span from the second post-communist election. The individual results, of course, varied significantly across countries and over time. In six of the eighty-three elections covered here, the share attracted by new parties covered in this book was zero, but in another six, the share of voters opting for new parties was more than half. And in another seven elections, the share of votes for new parties was between 40 per cent and 50 per cent. The share of votes going to new parties is strikingly high in comparison with the region’s Western neighbours. Nearly all Western European countries saw the appearance of a major new party during the thirty-year period covered in this book, but few saw such frequent and significant eruptions of voter support for new alternatives. In Western Europe, the share of elections with no significant new parties was about four times as high (34 out of 128 elections), while in only one election did it exceed 50 per cent (Italy in 1993) and in only two others was the total range between 40 per cent and 50 per cent (Italy in 2013 and France in 2017). The total share of votes for new parties in the other seventeen member states was less than 6 per cent, only one vote in sixteen, compared with Central Europe’s one in five.

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The figures for Central Europe show no clear geographical pattern, with the highs and lows spread fairly evenly across the region. The lowest overall values appear not only in the south (Croatia and Romania), but also in the north (Estonia) and in the centre (the Czech Republic and Hungary). The highest values are similarly spread across sub-regions, with the highest overall values in Latvia and Lithuania in the north, Bulgaria in the south and Slovakia and Poland in the centre. Overall the share of newness is slightly higher in the Baltics than in the other sub-regions (twenty-four compared with seventeen in the Višegrad Four, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary) and eighteen in the countries of the former Yugoslavia and SouthEastern Europe, but the differences are not extreme. It is worth noting here that patterns related to new party entry do not depend on a particular level of change as the basis of newness. Restricting the standard of new parties from level 2 (transformation) to the stricter level 3 (inception)—only parties with no ties to other parties already in the system—lowers the average share of new party vote in each election from nearly 20 per cent to just over 10, but it does not significantly change the shape of the results. According to these strictest standards, the number of elections with more than 50 per cent of the share to new parties drops to only one (Bulgaria in 2001) and the number with more than 40 per cent drops to three, but the basic trends and regional distribution remain essentially unchanged at the stricter level. The overall correlation between country results based on the two standards of newness is extremely high (0.88), and most countries do not even change their relative ranks. Only Slovenia changes its rank order by more than one place, rising from sixth using transformation to fourth using the more restrictive inception. Regardless of the standard, the share of votes for new parties has changed little over time. The array of new party entry in the region’s eighty-three post-transition elections in Figure 3.14 shows only minor shifts over time. The range expands in the 2000s with more very high and very low levels of new party entry, but then contracts somewhat in the 2010s with slightly smaller vote shares for new parties, but also with fewer elections without at least one significant new party. Averaging across half-decade periods produces a slowly declining linear trendline, but the experience of countries such as Slovenia and the Czech Republic suggests that long periods without new parties can be followed by intense outbreaks, and the patterns give little cause to expect that new party entry in individual countries will follow linear trends.² Furthermore, novelty can be a cumulative phenomenon. Even at an average new party share of 14.2 per cent (the overall average for the 2015–2019 period), three successive elections can quickly put a huge share of electoral and parliamentary power in the hands of parties that are under ten years

² The timing of this book’s publication offers only one data point for the 2020–2024 period, but it is at least worthy of note that Slovakia’s February 2020 election saw a jump in the share of new parties to nearly 18 per cent, reversing a slight decline over the previous two election periods.

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Support for New Parties by Election in Each Country

  

70%

99

Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 1 2 3 4 5 6 Estonia Latvia Lithuania Poland Czech Rep. Slovakia Hungary Slovenia Croatia Romania Bulgaria

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1990 to 1994

1995 to 1999

2000 to 2004

2004 to 2009

2010 to 2014

2015 to 2019

Regional Average of Support for New Parties During Each Period at Change Level 2.0

Figure 3.14. Share of total vote going to new parties in individual elections in Central Europe over time Source: Authors’ calculations

old. As later chapters of this book (especially Chapters 4, 5, and 6) suggest, these no-longer-new-but-still-young parties remain fragile, and many of them continue to function as if they had just emerged. The overall magnitude of new parties is even more striking when we consider that votes go not only to new parties but also to other parties whose origins are quite recent. Parties in their first or second election attracted nearly one-third of all votes cast in post-transition Central European elections, and even according to the strict standard of genuinely new (excluding fissions and fusions), these young parties (see Mainwaring et al., 2009) attracted nearly one vote in every three, spread broadly over the three decade period across the entire region.

New Party Trajectories The role of new parties is determined not only by their initial electoral position but also by their subsequent performance. Figure 3.15 separates parties into their

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Cumulative Share of Overall Vote

100

   

100%

Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 1 2 3 4 5 6 Cohort 6 (2015–2019)

80% Cohort 5 (2010–2014) 60%

Cohort 4 (2005–2009) Cohort 3 (2000–2004)

40%

Cohort 2 (1995–1999)

20%

Cohort 1 (1990–1994)

0%

1990 to 1994

1995 to 1999

2000 to 2004

2004 to 2009

2010 to 2014

2015 to 2019

Columns do not sum to 100 due to exclusion of parties that never rose above the 1% threshold

100%

Period Period Period 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Cohort 1 Cohort 2 Cohort 3 96% 96%

Average Share of Country Vote

80% 60%

58% 57% 41% 37%

40%

21%

20% 0% 100% 80% 60%

Born 2000 to 2004

Born 1995 to 1999

76%

Cohort 4

25% 13% 9% 6% 5%

Cohort 5 Born 2005 to 2009

Cohort 6

20% 19%

15%

Born 2010 to 2014

Born 2000 to 2004

22%

17%

40% 20% 0%

12% 10% 8%

16%

1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19

Figure 3.15. Average electoral support for five-year party birth cohorts in Central Europe over time Source: Authors’ calculations

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five-year birth cohorts, determined by the election in which the party first qualified for our database, and then shows the overall average support of those parties during every five-year period in our study. Support for parties formed in the first half-decade of post-communism declined by a substantial margin, to 74 per cent in the second half of the 1990s, with another drop to 56 per cent and stabilization at 54 per cent in the first and second halves of the 2000s, before a second drop and stabilization in the 2010s to 40 per cent and then 37 per cent. Taking their place were parties from subsequent eras: the cohort of parties formed in the second half of the 1990s began, on average, with 23 per cent of the vote, before dropping steadily to 7 per cent in the last half of the 2010s. The cohort of parties formed during the early 2000s started a bit higher, with 25 per cent of the vote in their first electoral half-decade, but also fell off sharply, dropping to just over 12 per cent in the last half of the 2000s. The same pattern follows for parties formed in each half-decade: an initial support in the period of their emergence of around 20 per cent (ranging from 13 per cent to 25 per cent), followed by decreasing support in each subsequent decade. Overall, the parties of Central Europe thus show a strikingly consistent pattern: aggregate support for each party cohort decreases without exception from one period to the next. Since overall electoral support declines in each period, the pattern contains an equally important corollary that undergirds the following chapters: the declining support of newer parties does not translate into increasing support for older parties. In some cases, the drop is small. Parties created in the 1990 cohort that survived the first decade lost only three percentage points of their support during elections between 2000 and 2005, and parties created in the 2000 cohort lost only one percentage point of their previous support in the period between 2010 and 2015, but the average drop in support from each period to the next was 21 per cent of the previous period’s total. The 1990 cohort of parties (those created 1990–1994) saw their overall support in elections drop from 96 per cent in their origin period to only 37 per cent of the vote by the time of the 2015 period (2015–2019).³ That drop of 60 per cent of their original support over a period of twenty-five years represents a loss of 2.4 per cent per year. For parties in the 1995 cohort (the period from 1995 to 2000), support dropped from 23 per cent in the initial direction along a smooth curve to 7 per cent in the 2015 period. While smaller in absolute terms, this represents a proportionally larger loss of the original support (70 per cent) over a shorter period (only 20 years), amounting to a drop of 3.5 per cent per year. For parties of the 2000 and 2005 cohorts, the annual percentage drop was extremely similar, at 3.4 per cent and 3.2 per cent per year respectively, and for the parties of the 2010 ³ Theoretically, the first cohort should score 100 per cent in the period of its first appearance, but our database only looks at parties above 1 per cent and also involves some averaging when a period contains multiple elections.

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cohort the drop was even higher: 4.7 per cent of their original support each year (though for these parties we only have one electoral period by which to judge). The shifts are relatively even across time periods and geography, and they are not simply the result of extreme outliers. Of the fifty-five cohorts for which we can measure change (eleven countries and all but the most recent of the six cohorts in each), fifteen cohorts disappeared completely from the analysis, as their parties were eliminated from competition. Some of these cohorts had begun small but others—more than half—had begun with at least 5 per cent of the vote, and the initial average support among those disappearing cohorts was 12 per cent. Overall, individual cohorts in individual countries exhibited a consistent pattern. In every country in the region—even Hungary, which stands out in other ways—cohorts were more likely to contract than to expand, and in nearly every case the ratio of contractions to expansions was more than 3:1. In Western Europe, by comparison, the overall levels of cohort decline were far lower. Parties present in those systems in the 1990–1994 period cohort lost only 1 per cent of support per year during each subsequent five-year period. The overall loss for all cohorts in all periods averaged considerably less than for Central Europe—only 2 per cent per five-year period—but this includes a notable rise in the fragility of new parties over time to levels that approach those in Central Europe, especially for the parties in the fourth and fifth cohort. Our discussion in Chapter 7 addresses in more detail what we might dub this Central Europeanization of Western Europe. Since there is no period in Central Europe in which any cohort increases its overall support when compared with the previous period, the missing percentages must be accounted for in the support of the newest parties. This alone does not tell us which voters are moving and where they are going, but it does represent a sharp departure from traditional Western European patterns. Older cohorts consistently decline and new parties emerge. The decline, furthermore, is fairly consistent. Overall, the emergence of new parties has the effect of compressing the vote of previous cohorts. With individual countries, the compression is not universal, but it happens far more often than not.

Patterns of Party Support Over Time The separate overall levels of party support in Figure 3.15, when stacked vertically by time period, yield an overall picture of the relative position of each new cohort over time depicted in Figure 3.16. The combined vote shares show the decline of the original post-communist cohort in the darkest band along the bottom half of the graph and the emergence in each five-year period of a sizeable new cohort, producing a sunburst pattern focused in the upper right on the newest parties in the newest period.

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100%

103

Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 Period Period Period 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 Regional Average Poland Slovenia

Share of Vote for Cohort Duriong Time Period Among Parties Reciving at Least 1%

80% 60% 40% 20% 0%

Estonia

Czech Republic

Croatia

Latvia

Slovakia

Romania

Lithuania

Hungary

Bulgaria

80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0%

1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19

Figure 3.16. Patterns of political party support by birth cohort in Central Europe over time Source: Authors’ calculations

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The pattern is visible in every country in the region, though it takes different forms. Five countries show almost no fundamental change in the party system until 2010: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, and Romania. In these five countries the initial cohort remained exceptionally strong as late as the 2005–2010 period, attracting between 82 per cent (Croatia) and 98 per cent (Hungary) of the total vote. After 2010, however, each of these countries experienced at least two elections with a significant influx of new parties. In Slovenia and the Czech Republic, the influx was so large that it pushed long-established parties firmly into the minority. In Hungary, Romania, and Croatia, the gains of new parties were smaller, but still exceeded 15 per cent of the total vote share. Furthermore, in all five cases the share of support for the long-standing parties not only dropped between the fourth and the fifth periods (2005–2009 to 2010–2014) but also (to a smaller extent) between the fifth and sixth periods (2010–2014 to 2015–2019). The older parties did not collapse as they did elsewhere, but they also found it difficult to recover their initial position after the new incursion. These systems ended up with a sharp gap between new and old, with the new predominating in the former two cases and the older parties predominating in the latter three (though in Croatia one of the newer parties was able to name its preferred prime ministerial candidate). In six other cases, the incursion of newness happened much more quickly. In Estonia, Latvia, Slovakia, and Bulgaria second- and third-cohort parties had, by the third period (2000–2005), already outpolled the first cohort by a significant margin. Newer parties in Lithuania and Poland also came close to forcing first-cohort parties into the minority. A strong third period cohort of parties emerged in the Baltics, Poland, Slovakia, and Bulgaria, but only in Poland and Lithuania did they maintain their strength in the face of subsequent newer cohorts.⁴ In Estonia and Bulgaria, the third-cohort parties quickly gave way to those from the fourth cohort, though the oldest parties also stabilized their position during that period. In Latvia and Slovakia, the third cohort parties fended off those of the fourth cohort but succumbed to the fifth and sixth. In the Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, and Romanian cases, by contrast, parties from the third and fourth cohorts found no purchase at all, but each of these countries saw significant outbreaks of new parties during the fifth and sixth periods. With the exception of Hungary, every single one saw a decline in the already small support of the 2000s cohort parties and a significant rise of parties created in the 2000s. (As with the partial Lithuanian exception, this interpretation of Hungary’s overall development also depends on a single question of interpretation, since the Jobbik party technically campaigned for office in 2006 had minimal support, and did not transform into a significant electoral force until the 2010 election.) ⁴ Lithuania is something of an ambiguous case because the strength of the third cohort in the final period is the result of a strong showing by LŽVS, which later in its life experienced change that might best be described as fitting the relaxed transformation standard at level 1.5; if we instead counted it as a strict translation at level 2, Lithuania would move to roughly the same position as Slovakia, with a more significant share for the most recent cohorts.

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Finally, it is notable that some countries’ positions converged in the 2010s despite different experiences. By 2018, the Czech Republic and Latvia exhibited a similar balance of old cohort and new cohort parties with almost none in between. Whereas in the case of Latvia this came about through a process of continual change and resulted from the failure and transformation of middle cohort parties, in the Czech Republic parties from that generation never played a significant role. Likewise, Estonia and Hungary reached a similar position when Estonia’s initially strong middle cohorts weakened over time, while Hungary’s initially weak middle cohort (mainly the Jobbik party) strengthened its position. In no country, however, did new parties fail to play a significant role in electoral competition.

Weighted Party System Age These graphic depictions of party cohorts offer a striking visual contrast between countries, but it is not easy to compare them systematically across the region. For that we need to distil the data into additional quantitative indicators. The easiest and most useful of these is the calculation of Weighted Party Age, introduced by Kreuzer and Pettai (2011). As the name suggests, the indicator averages the age of each party in a system at each election and weighs it by its relative electoral support at that time. Figure 3.17 provides an assessment of each party system in the region according to this measure for every election between 1990 and 2020. Figure 3.18 shows a system-wide average for each of these systems according to our thresholds for newness above the zero level. These not only clarify the specific patterns of particular countries, but also show that the age levels differ with different specifications for newness. Considering parties as new even though they have experienced change below level 2 (strict transformation) produces a larger share of new parties and reduces the apparent age of the system, while using the strict inception standard of level 3 makes newness a rarity and depicts a much older system with more continuity. None of these standards is intrinsically right or wrong, but what is important for the purpose of this book is that regardless of the chosen level, the systems tend to follow the same overall patterns. To complete the exploration of party age in Central Europe, Figure 3.19 presents the calculation of weighted party age as a share of the possible weighted party age (a party system where all votes went to established parties) at two time periods: the last election before the midpoint of our study in 2005 and the last election before 2020. For the sake of comparison, it also does so for Western European cases in the EU using the starting point of 1990. The most striking result of the comparison is that while there are some Western European cases moving rapidly toward the lower end of the range, not a single Central European case breaks into the top ten, and even Hungary and Croatia barely make it into the top half. Central Europe contains the only cases with significant upward movement in

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Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 30

1

2

3

4

5

6

Hungary

20

Croatia Romania Estonia Poland Slovenia Lithuania Bulgaria

Rom. in Years

Weighted Average Party System Age

25

Hun. Sloven. Cze.

15

Cro.

10 Lat. Bul. Slovak.

Czech Rep. Slovakia Latvia

Est.

Pol.

5 Lith.

0

1990 to 1994

1995 to 1999

2000 to 2004

2004 to 2009

2010 to 2014

2015 to 2019

Figure 3.17. Weighted party age in Central European party systems over time Source: Authors’ calculations based on method derived by Kreuzer and Pettai (2011)

age across this period (Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Estonia), all of which were near the bottom of the rankings in 2005, but their increasing weighted age merely pulls them from exceptionally low previous positions and edges them into the space now occupied by Italy and France. While half of the Western European cases remain above 84 per cent, nearly all of those have seen a drop from 2005, when the median case was the United Kingdom’s 95 per cent. Furthermore, Greece and Spain come a close second to the Czech Republic in the sharpest relative age drop. Weighted party age provides a quantitative basis for comparing the newness of party systems over time, but even this more precise measure can obscure important differences, and it is necessary to make one more distinction and a related quantitative measure. As with all averages, a medium-sized result for weighed party age may reflect either a predominance of medium-sized values or an equal

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Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 Period Period Period 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 30 years Country Average Poland Slovenia

25 years

20 years 15 years 10 years 5 years

Weighted Average Party System Age

0 years 25 years

Estonia

Czech Republic

Croatia

Latvia

Slovakia

Romania

Lithuania

Hungary

Bulgaria

20 years 15 years 10 years 5 years 0 years 25 years 20 years 15 years 10 years 5 years 0 years 25 years 20 years 15 years 10 years 5 years 0 years

1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 Level 3.0 Inception (strict) Level 2.5 Inception (relaxed) Level 2.0 Transformation (strict) Level 1.5 Transformation (relaxed)

Figure 3.18. Weighted party age according to multiple thresholds for party newness in Central Europe over time Key: The bold line represents weighted party age with a newness threshold of strict transformation (level 2) that is inclusive also of relaxed and strict inception (levels 2.5 and 3). Lighter lines represent higher thresholds while darker lines represent lower thresholds Source: Authors’ calculations

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Weighted Average Party System Age as a Share of Maximum Possible Value

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100%

Period 3

Period 6

Malta 100% United Kingdom 96% Finland/Sweden 94% Luxembourg 92% Denmark/Austria 90% Portugal 88% Germany 85% Ireland 84% Netherlands 81% Cyprus 78%

90%

80%

70%

Hungary 72% Croatia 70% Romania 69%

Belgium 71%

Estonia 63%

Greece 63%

Lithuania 60%

60%

Spain 59%

Poland 55% Slovenia 53% Bulgaria 52%

50%

France 48% Italy 44% Czech Rep. 43% Slovakia 40% Latvia 38%

40%

30%

Last election before 2005

Last election before 2020

Central Europe

Western Europe

Figure 3.19. Actual party system age as a percentage of maximum possible party system age in Central Europe and Western Europe over time Source: Authors’ calculations

balance between values at both the high and low ends of the range. Slovenia and Poland have nearly identical weighted ages, for example, but the graphic depictions in Figure 3.16 show that their age profiles are fundamentally different. Poland’s system is middle aged (by Central European standards) because its biggest parties emerged in the middle period in this study and have subsequently held onto more than half of the electorate, with the rest divided between smaller groups of parties, some from the 1990s and others from the 2010s. Slovenia’s system, by contrast, has exceptionally weak middle-cohort parties, and its midlevel score results instead from a nearly even split between the half of the electorate that chose parties created during the 2010s and the rest who remained with parties created early in the 1990s.

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Party Age Distribution These two pathways to a mid-range score are implicit in the age array diagrams of Figure 3.16 and 3.18 but the pattern becomes clearer when the age cohort distribution of each country is laid out column by column. Figure 3.20 shows the distribution of support for each cohort in each time period for four countries with distinctive patterns. These show the evolution of the party systems over time in direct comparison as vote shares decline in some cohorts and increase in others. In some cases, there is little change until new parties suddenly pop up at the top

Cohort 1 2 3 4 5 6

Period

Latvia

1

1990– 1994

2

1995– 1999

3

2000– 2004

4

2005– 2009

5

2010– 2014

6

2015– 2019

Romania

Period

Distribution of Support for Cohorts during five-year time periods

Poland

Cohort 1 2 3 4 5 6

Slovenia

1

1990– 1994

2

1995– 1999

3

2000– 2004

4

2005– 2009

5

2010– 2014

6

2015– 2019 1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 to to to to to to 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 Period when party was born

Triangle marks modal cohort

1990 ‘95 ‘00 ‘05 ‘10 ‘15 to to to to to to 1994 ‘99 ‘04 ‘09 ‘14 ‘19 Period when party was born

Circle marks distribution midpoint

Figure 3.20. Cohort distribution and mean cohort position of selected representative Central European party systems over time Denotes mean cohort position. Source: Authors’ calculations

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end of the time scale. In other cases, the patterns look like diagrams of cellular separation, with a slow migration of half the electorate toward newer parties. In some cases, certain cohorts remain dominant over time. In others, the positions are far more fluid. In most countries in the region, there is least one sizeable cohort that maintains much or all of its initial support over time. For Poland, the first cohort remained dominant for the first decade, but in the third period new parties emerged as a major challenger and by the next period this third cohort had come to dominate Poland’s political life, holding the average age near the centre point and allowing it to slip upward only slightly as a few new parties emerged in the final period. For Slovenia, by contrast, no major parties emerged at all in the middle periods and those cohorts remained mostly empty, allowing the first cohort to remain dominant for the first four periods until the outbreak of major new parties in the fifth period and the subsequent decline of those in favour of even newer ones in the sixth period. Like Poland, Slovenia’s average age remains near the centre of the range, but unlike Poland, there are not actually any major parties in that centre location. Rather than a gradual climb, therefore, Slovenia’s average age shows stability followed by a rapid jump. (Although we do not show the full graphs here for reasons of space, the Czech Republic exhibits a similar pattern, as does Bulgaria, though with its bimodal distribution it is dominated by the first and fourth cohorts.) For Romania (along with Croatia and Hungary), the parties born in the first period anchor the system throughout the thirty-year period. The first cohort remains the largest and keeps the average party age quite low. Romania (again like Croatia and Hungary) experienced a late influx of new parties in the 2010s, so it shows a small shift toward the new, but the overall distribution remains heavily skewed toward the established parties. In Latvia, by contrast, the system showed little stability over time, spreading out over multiple cohorts with parties from multiple time periods (except the fourth) and a gradual shrinkage of older cohorts over time. (Slovakia, not shown here, experienced a similar gradual evolution, with a strong third cohort gradually overtaken by parties formed in subsequent time periods.) While these calculations lend themselves to a more systematic analysis, the final step to a broad comparison of many countries requires us to translate the shapes of these curves into a fully quantitative variable that can measure the degree to which party ages tend to focus toward the centre of the range or toward the extremes. Fortunately, measurement of distribution is well established, and we adapt a summary measure for distribution developed by Esteban and Ray (1994) as an improvement to basic measures of polarization of income. Because this measure incorporates the relative weights and distances of all data points, it is responsive to widely spaced peaks (bi- and multimodal distributions), and produces higher values as the peaks move away from one another (Haughton and Deegan-Krause, 2015, p. 64). This indicator is responsive to widely spaced peaks

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and produces higher values when the extremes are larger or farther apart than when they are lower or closer together. Calculations for each of the party systems of the region over time yield distinctive patterns, to be found in Figure 3.20. In the party systems of Croatia, Romania, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the parties that emerged at the beginning continued to dominate the system for two decades, so the average age of their systems aged in parallel with the system itself and the distribution of ages remained low because few parties challenged the dominance of the established ones. Figure 3.21 shows that the pattern ended during the 2010–2015 period, as the emergence of new parties at the expense of some old ones caused the overall age to stagnate and the distribution to increase dramatically toward the maximum (old and new with none in between). Furthermore, new parties continued to

Weighted Distribution of Party Age as Share of Maximum Possible Value

Time Period Five-year periods between 1990 and 2019 1.0

1

2

3

4

5

6

0.9 Slovenia

0.8

Bulgaria Czech Rep. Hungary Latvia Romania Estonia Croatia Slovakia

Bul. Lith. Est.

0.7 0.6

Slovak.

0.5

Poland Lithuania

Lat. Pol.

0.4

Sloven.

0.3 Rom.

0.2

Cro. Cze.

0.1

Hun.

0.0

1990 to 1994

1995 to 1999

2000 to 2004

2004 to 2009

2010 to 2014

2015 to 2019

Figure 3.21. Weighted distribution of party age in Central European party systems over time Source: Authors’ calculations

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emerge in the 2015–2020 period, increasing the distribution. By contrast, in countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Poland, and Bulgaria, the age distribution widened early, either in the second or third cohort, and remained fairly stable, with a consistent low-level inflow of new parties. Because they did not preserve as strong a cohort from the first period, they soon found themselves with smaller distribution values than parties where half the voters jumped from old to new, as in Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Combining the figures for age and the figures for distribution shows the distinctive array of patterns in Figure 3.22. Within the parabolic space of mathematically possible combinations (a wide age distribution of young and old is not consistent with very high or very low ages for the system overall), Slovenia and Poland stand at the mean of weighted system age but at the extremes of distribution on the horizontal axis. Likewise, Romania and Latvia exhibit similar positioning on the horizontal axis, reflecting their middle-range distributions, but Romania’s older party system stands far above Latvia’s younger ones on the vertical axis. The figure also shows the paths by which some representative combinations came about across multiple individual elections after 1995. In Poland, the strong parties of its third cohort and the slow erosion of older parties in the face of newer ones kept the overall system consistently in middle age, while Slovenia arrived at middle age quite suddenly, in a rapid slide that resulted from the births of major new parties at the expense of older ones. The frequent birth of new parties in Latvia contributed to its shift towards the bottom of the region’s age ranking, while after some initial turmoil, Romania’s established parties held on to make the system one of the oldest and to keep it near the top even after the birth of some smaller new parties. Of the countries not depicted, Hungary and Croatia followed Romania in this path of partial disruption, while the Czech Republic’s path followed the path of extreme disruption taken in Slovenia. Estonia, Lithuania, and Bulgaria, meanwhile, took tentative steps toward the upper left because there were fewer new parties to increase the distribution or lower the age. No clear pattern dominated for the region as a whole or gave much indication about which path the region would be likely to take in the 2020s.

Conclusion Even a casual glance at the party systems of Central Europe suggests they have changed profoundly and that the change has continued without pause. But just as with our discussion of newness in Chapter 2, it is helpful to drill down into what change means and how we can best capture that change. Long-established indicators such as Pedersen’s volatility index, even with more recent refinements, fall short when dealing with the kind of novelty that pervades Central Europe’s party

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a. Central European Cases in Period 6 (2015-2019)

25 Romania Hungary Croatia Lithuania Estonia Slovenia Bulgaria Poland Czech Rep. Slovakia Latvia

20 In Years

Weighted Average Party System Age

30

113

15 10 5 0 100%

b. Change Over Time for Representative Cases

75% As a Share of Possible Age

Weighted Average Party System Age

RO 2009 RO 2004

SI 1999

RO 2014

SI SI 2005 2009 RO 1999 LV 2009 PL 1999 LV 1999

50%

Romania RO 2019

Slovenia

PL 2004

SI 2019

SI 2014 PL 2019

Poland

LV 2014

LV 2019

Latvia 25%

0% 0.0

0.1

0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 Party System Age Distribution

0.7

0.8

Figure 3.22. Age distribution as a share of maximum possible distribution and weighted system age as a share of maximum possible age in Central Europe in 2019 and over time for selected representative cases Source: Authors’ calculations

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systems. This chapter, therefore, provides a series of tools to map and measure types of change in party politics. The party maps, for instance, help to chart the twists and turns of systems whose rosters do not remain stable. Moreover, the measures using party age illuminate the contours of party systems that have experienced frequent change, helping to identify more clearly the type, magnitude, and distribution of continuity and change. We suggest that such approaches are not just useful for Central Europe, but can also be used effectively for other parts of the globe, including the once much more stable party politics of Western Europe. Our analysis of Central Europe underlines a series of contrary developments linked to continual and reinforcing change. We have witnessed the appearance of sizeable new parties with remarkable frequency. These parties squeeze the vote of the more established parties, but crucially most of these newcomers did not become fixtures of the system. Indeed, they themselves were squeezed by even newer parties. At the same time, it is important to note that change was not the only pattern shaping Central European systems. Many parties emerged and died but other parties survived for long periods, and in many countries the twin patterns led to a sharp and ongoing dichotomy between more established parties and newer ones. The region, however, is notable as much for what is absent as for what is present. What is absent is permanent system-wide stasis or return to the past. We observe parties that stay stable in changing systems and systems that stay stable for a while, but while change has not come to every party, it has come to every system and to some systems it has reshaped the entire party landscape. At the beginning of the fourth decade of democracy in Central Europe, the experience of the past suggests betting on continued bouts of significant change, but the only guide is what we have seen already, and to make an assessment of the future of the region’s parties, we need to take a look inside them. Indeed, the findings of this chapter provoke a series of questions that lie at the heart of Chapters 4, 5, and 6. First, given that many of these new parties live fast and die young, do they differ in significant ways from the parties that are older and more established? Secondly, despite the environment of change, why do some parties endure, and do the new parties that endure start to resemble the older parties? Thirdly, why are there more new parties and more significant new party breakthroughs in some countries than others? Fourthly, and tying together much of the discussion in the previous three questions, what is the relationship between party age, origin, and their ongoing survival? Having focused in this chapter on the broader system-wide developments, we turn in the next few chapters to examine the building blocks of party systems: the parties themselves. We begin by examining how and why new parties are different from the older, more established ones.

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4 The Old and the New How Parties Differ with Age and Time

In the autumn of 2015, Slovak politicians were preparing for the parliamentary elections due to take place the following spring. As part of the research for this book, we drove across Slovakia to visit party offices and to talk to officials from a variety of new parties, including the new entrants on the scene, such as #Network (#Siet) and Chance (Šanca). We were also keen to talk to officials from another new entrant that might prove to have a chance in March 2016. The party’s name, We Are Creating a Different Politics (Tvoríme Inú Politiku), echoed successful new entrants in Latvia and Hungary, and its acronym, TIP, suggested this was a good bet for voters. We arranged a meeting in their head office off the main square of the country’s third largest city, Banská Bystrica. Up a flight of back stairs between a jewellery store and a travel agency, we found two of the party’s leading figures in a two-room office crowded with vibrant electoral flyers. Sitting on their sofas, we asked ‘Why did you decide to form a new party?’ One of the politicians replied by lambasting the current political elite for incompetence and corrupt behaviour. But, we responded, ‘What makes your party different from other parties?’ His earnest reply was one word: ‘Colour.’ In response to our quizzical looks, he explained to us that no-one else in Slovakia had ever used magenta in their party logo and that he had come to understand the importance of colour when he had worked for the mobile phone operator Orange. TIP’s future, however, was not bright, and Slovakia’s future was not magenta. In the elections in March, TIP garnered a mere 18,845 votes (0.7 per cent).

New parties are everywhere in Central Europe, and their spread matters because they are different from more established parties. Having discussed different understandings of novelty in Chapter 2, and mapped and measured the party systems in Chapter 3, this chapter shines a spotlight on individual units in our universe of new parties. In order to explain, we first need to outline what we seek to explain. To that end, blending the insights gleaned from extensive comparative The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond. Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause, Oxford University Press (2020). © Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198812920.003.0004

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data sets, our countless visits to party offices across the region, and semistructured interviews with over 200 leading figures and functionaries of political parties across the region, we devote this chapter to examining how new parties differ from established ones, particularly in how they are organized, what role leaders play, and how they appeal to voters. Parties can be examined in a variety of different ways. To grasp how they are different and ultimately why they suffer different fates, we need to understand them both as complex entities with internal strategies, structures, and style, and also as organizations that seek to project themselves outwards to potential voters whom they need to convince to give them support at election time. Key to understanding specific parties, therefore, is how they are organized internally and present themselves externally in their appeals to the electorate. Moreover, as we will show, integral to both these aspects is political leadership, which both shapes the organizational structure and acts as a magnet for voters. While new parties formed in the region are not identical, many appear to have been cast in the same mould. Beginning with party names as an entrée to understanding the institutions that use them, we explore the organizational differences between new and old parties. We begin our analysis by looking at party organization, particularly party branches and different patterns of party membership. We then turn to the appeals these parties use to convince the electorate to entrust them with their support and votes, highlighting the importance of a new dimension of party competition: the divide between ‘clean’ and ‘corrupt’. Finally, we examine the role of the leader in the party’s organizational structures and appeals. Although we recognize there are some important variations, we argue that these new parties tend to be leader-driven and organization-light, placing their novelty and anti-corruption credentials at the forefront of their pitch to the electorate. Moreover, these are characteristics that matter both for a party’s own survival (as we discuss in Chapters 5 and 6) and for the political systems in which such parties thrive (as we discuss in Chapter 8).

Organization Parties are physical entities and are required by law to have some form of organization. The organizational structure of parties has changed over time, with political scientists coining terms such as ‘mass’, ‘catch-all’, and ‘cartel’ (e.g. Katz, 2017). These changes reflect alterations in the role of party members and links to the state, as well as wider societal changes. In part, they can be seen as products of their time. In the same vein, the new parties in Central Europe have been forged in an environment and context that has impacted on their shape and look. Although new and old parties alike use a mix of traditional tools, such as

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party offices, membership clubs, and media (including social media), newer parties are far less likely to make investments in physical spaces or personal interactions among members and activists, preferring instead to rely on social media and mobilization targeted primarily on online information-sharing, fundraising, and voting. New parties in the region often sought to demonstrate with their very names that they were trying to do something different from an ordinary political party. Some used the model of the dotcom or the hashtag to demonstrate web savvy. Others labelled themselves as just a group of people with something in common, or referred to a goal or a way to achieve that goal. As Igor Matovič, the founder of Slovakia’s Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO), explained in an interview, ‘we projected ourselves as a movement, which suggests a direction, a journey, that we were going somewhere’.¹ A quantitative analysis of the nearly 800 names in this book’s overall database shows that the share of electoral competitors using the noun ‘party’ in their name decreased every single five-year period from 1990–1994 to 2015–2019, falling from nearly half at the beginning of the first period to just over one-fifth in the final period. Those using ‘union’ decreased similarly, from one-eighth in the first period to less than one-twentieth in the final one. Those whose names implied some kind of coordination or agreement (such as blocs, alliances, associations, confederations, and many others) remained relatively constant over time, with about one-fifth of the total. Those whose names implied some kind of motion or action (such as movements, forces, fronts, actions, alternatives and initiatives) declined somewhat from their share of one-eighth of all parties during the first three periods, but made a rapid comeback in the final period. Filling in the gap created by the decline of ‘parties’ and ‘unions’ were non-traditional names that did not refer to the organization at all. These included parties that simply described the ideological position, such as ‘The Left’ or ‘The Greens’ (as opposed to The Party of the Left or the Green Party) as well as demographic groups, such as Pensioners for Life Security or United Patriots or Citizens. They also included a sharply expanding category of parties that simply referred to the name of a region or country, such as United Poland, Positive Slovenia, and Bulgaria without Censorship. Relatively rare but increasingly common were party names built around interrogatives or personal pronouns, such as Your Movement, Slovenia is Ours, We are Family, and Who Owns the State? The latter three names also reflect a growing trend for party names to quite literally tell a story by using full sentences, such as Poland Comes First, or prepositional phrases, such as Latvia’s For, Slovenia’s For Real, and (using two prepositional phrases) For Latvia From the Heart. The other expanding categories during the final periods were those ¹ Igor Matovič, Ordinary People and Independent Personalities, interviewed by the authors, Bratislava, 29 June 2012.

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built around adjectives, such as Smart, Modern, Better, and Together, and around nouns that did not refer to the party itself. Such names made reference to plants (Oak, Linden, Walnut) and natural cycles (one Spring and two Dawns), as well as pathways (two parties called Bridge and three referring to the Way). Other names focused on goals, and the region produced a proliferation of ‘X and Y’ parties, such as Slovakia’s Freedom and Solidarity, Poland’s Law and Justice, Lithuania’s Order and Justice, and Bulgaria’s Order, Law and Justice. Some parties preferred to emphasize overarching goals, such as Change, a Chance, Revival, and Resurrection, while others focused on methods of achieving their goals, including Determination, Choice, and multiple versions of Voice. These thematic and distinctly non-organizational names expanded dramatically, rising from less than one-tenth in the first several periods to over one-third of all new party names after 2015. The names parties chose for themselves tells us something about how they wanted to be perceived by voters. At the heart of that projection was a suggestion that they were somehow different from the existing array of parties, and the difference showed itself clearly in how the new parties organized themselves and their supporters. Members have long been considered key components in political parties. Indeed, the debates and discussion about declining levels of party membership in many democracies has been central to discussions about the state of representative democracy (Mair, 2013; van Biezen et al., 2012; Scarrow, 2015). Members provide volunteer labour, financial support, and personnel for positions in the party and public office. Moreover, members are a source of ideas in internal debates, as well as a transmission mechanism for ideas and preferences within the party and outside in their roles as ‘ambassadors to the community’ and party envoys (Scarrow, 2015, pp. 102, 122). Nonetheless, they did not appear a necessary ingredient of electoral success for new parties in Central Europe. Indeed, the most successful breakthrough electorally of a new party in the region was the New Simeon II Movement (NDSV), an organization that was not even registered as a party until 2002/3 and hence ‘for all practical purposes, it can be said that NDSV won 42% of the vote in 2001 with no members’ (Spirova, 2007, p. 130). We need to be cautious about membership figures. If they are reported by the parties themselves (not just across the Central European region but everywhere), they tend to be less than perfect (Scarrow, 2015). At times, they are clearly inflated as part of parties’ attempts to demonstrate their strength. Diaconescu’s party in Romania, for instance, claimed after its 2012 congress to have 1 million members, but figures presented in the official registry of political parties suggested the membership from late 2011 to 2013 was more in the 30 000–70 000 range (Gherghina and Soare, 2017, p. 210). Nonetheless, drawing on data from a variety of sources, including the databases collated by van Biezen et al. (2012), Cirhan and Stauber (2018), van Haute et al. (2018), Kopecky (1995), Poguntke et al. (2016), Spirova (2007), Tavits (2013), Ghergina (2015), and our own, we can show with

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some confidence that new parties have overwhelmingly lower levels of membership than older parties. Parties that emerged before the fall of communism (KSČM and KDU-ČSL in the Czech Republic, PSL and SLD in Poland, PSD in Romania, and to a lesser extent MSzP in Hungary and SDĽ in Slovakia) maintained extremely large membership bases, often in the hundreds of thousands. Many parties that emerged in the early post-communist period also started with significant membership bases and then worked to maintain them over time: ODS in the Czech Republic; PNL, PD, and PRM in Romania; and KDH, SMK, and HZDS in Slovakia. Of the parties that began in the second half-decade and later, however, we see a sharp drop off in the initial number of members: in the Czech Republic, US, SZ, and Tradition Responsibility Prosperity ’09 (TOP ’09) all reported fewer than 10,000 initial members, as did Palikot’s Movement and United Poland in Poland, Politics Can be Different in Hungary, and Bridge, Ordinary People and Independent Personalities (OĽaNO), People’s Party–Our Slovakia (ĽSNS), We are Family (Sme Rodina), and Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) in Slovakia. In many cases, the party memberships for these parties were in the low four digits or even lower (1,438 for ĽSNS, 800 for LMP, 638 for Sme Rodina, 189 for SaS and 13 for (OĽaNO). When factored for the number of voters, an even clearer pattern emerges: parties that emerged in the early 1990s almost uniformly had more than one member per hundred voters, while for many parties that emerged in the 2000s, even Law and Justice (PiS) and Civic Platform (PO) in Poland, the ratio was much lower. Parties emerging in the 2010s had even lower ratios of members to voters, some as low as one in a thousand. The Czech Republic offers conditions for a illustrative close-up of the difference between old and new parties, thanks to frequent data collection and the fact that membership data for four perennial parties that dominated Czech politics for much of the three decades since 1989—Civic Democratic Party (ODS), Czech Social Democratic Party (ČSSD), Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) and Christian Democratic Union–Czechoslovak People’s Party (KDUČSL)—can be compared with information on three smaller parties that emerged during the 1990s—Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA), Green Party (SZ) and Freedom Union (SZ)—and three parties that broke through suddenly in the 2010s—Public Affairs (VV), Tradition Responsibility Prosperity ’09 (TOP ’09) and Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO). The data shows three striking trends. First, although there was a marked decline in the number of members in the KSČM and the KDU-ČSL, both their levels of membership remained comfortably above those of all other parties in the country. Secondly, the two most significant parties of Czech politics, ODS and ČSSD, saw their membership rise or remain relatively stable. Thirdly, the new entrants of the 2010s, Public Affairs (VV),

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Tradition Responsibility Prosperity ’09 (TOP ’09), and Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) all had significantly lower levels of membership. Recasting the figures in terms of the ratio of members to voters in Figure 4.1, we see the four perennials almost always maintained at least a 1:100 ratio, and for KSČM this was closer to 1:10. The only exceptions to the 1:100 ratio were periods when parties had particularly strong elections (such as ČSSD in 1996 and 1998), when the influx of voters outpaced their membership numbers. For smaller parties created during this early period, we have solid data only for the small, pro-market ODA, which, because of its small size and focus on media over organization, did not actively engage in membership development. The parties that emerged between 1995 and 2005—the US and the SZ—differed from one another in their organizational strategies, but both started somewhat below the 1:100 ratio. Parties founded after 2005 show membership ratios that are lower still and, by a significant margin, all beginning below 1:300. These ratios did increase over time owing to slight increases in membership numbers and significant drops in electoral

Period 256,000

1&2

3&4

5&6

KSČM

64,000

(LOGARITHMIC SCALE )

Average Number of Party Members

128,000

KDU-ČSL KSČM

32,000

16,000

KDU-ČSL ODS ČSSD

ODS

VV+online ANO+online TOP09+online

ČSSD 8,000

4,000

US SZ 2,000

1,000

TOP09

ODA ODA

1990 to 1999

2000 to 2009

ANO VV 2010 to 2019

Figure 4.1. Average party membership in the Czech Republic by decade over time

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a. Overall (