Post-Communist Party Systems
Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation

This study examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the mid-1990s: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland.

Herbert Kitschelt (Author), Zdenka Mansfeldova (Author), Radoslaw Markowski (Author), Gabor Toka (Author)

9780521652889, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 August 1999

474 pages, 24 b/w illus. 68 tables
23.8 x 16.1 x 3.5 cm, 0.76 kg

"This outstanding volume, authorized by a multi-national team and deploying an empirically sophisticated and theoretically driven research program, attempts to explain variation in the quality of democratic accountability, governability, and responsiveness in four postcommunist states...The result is an engaging and highly nuanced account that highlights the structuring role of communist-era legacies in shaping choices concerning new political institutions and the quality of democratic procedures...the book is theoretically rich, methodologically innovative, and opens new avenues for further research...a work of great distinction." Slavic Review

Post-Communist Party Systems examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the mid-1990s: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. Legacies of pre-communist rule turn out to play as much a role in accounting for differences as the institutional differences incorporated in the new democratic rules of the game. The book demonstrates various developments within the four countries with regard to different voter appeal of parties, patterns of voter representation, and dispositions to join other parties in legislative or executive alliances. The authors also present interesting avenues of comparison for broader sets of countries.

Acknowledgments
Introduction Democracy and Party Competition
Part I. Theory, Party Systems and the Procedural Quality of Post-Communist Democracy: 1. Historical legacies and strategies of democratization: pathways toward post-communist polities
2. The quality of post-communist democracy: patterns of party competition, interest representation and governance
Part II. Setting and Research Strategy: 3. From communist rule to democracy: four central and East European countries
4. Empirical research strategy
Part III. The Structuring of Party Competition: 5. Programmatic citizen-elite linkage strategies across post-communist polities
6. Linkage strategies within party systems: diversity among parties
Part IV. Political Alignments and Dimensions of Competition: 7. Political divides and alignments: the politicians
8. Electoral constituency alignments: emerging political cleavages?
Part V. Political Representation and the Quality of Democratic Governance: 9. Political representation
10. The governability of post-communist democracies: collation politics between passions and policy interests
Part VI. Conclusion: 11. The diversity of post-communist democratic governance
Appendices
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Political structure & processes [JPH]