Party Formation and Party System Consolidation in the New Democracies of Central Europe

Political parties and the party systems of the new democracies of postcommunist Central Europe are in the process of formation through a sequence of elections and parliamentary terms. The sequence theory of electionparliament cycles suggests that in new democracies the formation of political parties and the de®nition of relationships among the parties proceed through a series of elections and the ensuing terms of parliament. During the current beginning stages of the `®rst generation' of parties and of whole political systems, the main question concerns democratic consolidation. For political parties, the question is one of emerging stability: to what extent do political parties have a continuous existence? For party systems the question is a double one: to what extent is the system consolidating from many small parties to fewer larger ones, and how stable is the relationship among them?While party formation is usually considered an important component in the formation and stabilization of democratic systems, some observers have suggested an `overpartycisation' phenomenon in at least some of the post-communist democracies. In this essay I review the formation, splits and recombinations among various groupings active in the electoral process I also consider the resulting shape and characteristics of party systems in the new democracies of Central Europe. While some references will be made to the Republics of the former USSR, the main attention of this paper is on Central Europe, and especially upon the Visegrad 4: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. These questions are examined from the perspective of the electoralparliamentary sequence. The tentative ®ndings are that, in the ®rst half-decade of the post-communist transition the major tendency in party organization was to develop a small set of activists who made broad issue appeals, thus resembling more the American model of parties, while the patterns in party system more resembled those of multi-party western Europe.