736808
EEPXXX10.1177/0888325417736808East European Politics and SocietiesCasal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
research-article2017
Institutionalization and
De-institutionalization in
Post-communist Party Systems
East European Politics and
Societies and Cultures
Volume 32 Number 3
August 2018 422–450
© 2018 SAGE Publications
10.1177/0888325417736808
journals.sagepub.com/home/eep
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
https://doi.org/
Zsolt Enyedi
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
Fernando Casal Bértoa
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
In an article written in 1995 titled “What Is Different about Postcommunist Party
Systems?” Peter Mair applied the method that he called “ex adverso extrapolation.” He
matched his knowledge of the process of consolidation of party systems in the West
with what was known at that time about Eastern European history, society, and the
emerging post-communist party politics. Considering factors such as the existence of
fluid social structures, the weakness of civil society, or the destabilizing impact of the
so-called triple transition, his article predicted long-term instability for the region. In
the present article, we evaluate the validity of Mair’s predictions, thereby also contributing to a lively debate in the current literature about the scale and nature of East–West
differences and about the trajectories of the two regions. Going beyond the identification of cross-regional similarities and differences, we also differentiate between individual party systems, establish subgroups, and describe changes across time. Using
four major dimensions (i.e., party system closure, party-level stability, electoral volatility, and fragmentation), the article finds that Mair’s predictions were largely, though
not in every detail, right. Ironically, however, we also find that changes in the West tend
to match over time the trajectory of the East.
Keywords: party system institutionalization, closure, fragmentation, volatility,
Eastern Europe, Western Europe
Introduction
In many spheres of life, well-structured, predictable patterns of behavior develop
because nonstandard actions entail high risks. In an ideal-typical market situation,
for example, offering products well above or well below the established price can
turn out to be equally suicidal. In such situations, the negative feedback mechanisms
encourage the convergence of the individual strategies, and the micro-actions add up
to a system-level equilibrium.
Both authors have contributed equally. This is one of several joint works and the ordering of names simply reflects a principle of rotation.
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
423
In the more formalized environments, like in the world of political institutions, the
actors are more obviously constrained by rules, procedures, and codified and noncodified norms. The negative feedback mechanisms are often replaced by positive
reinforcements, and the hand that creates order is typically more visible than in the
case of markets. But notwithstanding these differences, factors leading to order and
stability dominate both types of situations.1
Party systems are neither the products of millions of autonomous decisions that
cancel out each other, nor outcomes of written rules and crystallized norms. They
are, of course, under the influence of the electoral choices of a large number of voters
and are constrained by procedural rules such as the electoral system, but they are
ultimately shaped by the behavior of a limited set of elite actors who base their decisions on a mixture of rational and normative considerations. Under such circumstances, it is a particularly intriguing question how much order will characterize the
relationships within the system.
Whether one considers market or state analogies or whether one compares party
systems to games consisting of repeated interactions between a small number of
players or rather to biological organisms, the passing of time is typically predicted to
stabilize party strategies and interaction patterns. Party systems are expected to
“mature” with time, and parties are anticipated to develop routine reactions toward
each other.
The vast literature on institutionalization of party systems (primarily Mainwaring
and his coauthors, see below) warns us, however, that the evolutionary path toward
stabilization cannot be taken for granted. Individual countries, regions, and time
periods differ substantially in the degree of the stability and predictability of party
systems. Often it is even doubtful whether the parties of a particular country constitute a “system” in the sense of operating an enduring configuration that goes beyond
the coexistence of a set of parties.
Post-communist Europe is a particularly interesting region from the point of
view of institutionalization as it is under the influence of a set of countervailing factors. Its proximity to Western Europe, its relatively high level of social modernization, the membership of most of its countries in the European Union, and its
party-centered model of political representation are supposed to foster institutionalization. The communist past, the weakness of mass political organizations, the volatile post-communist economic history, and the leader- and media-centered political
culture, however, are likely to hinder the very same processes.
The probably most influential early study on the region predicted long-term instability. In an article written in 1995 titled “What Is Different about Post-communist
Party Systems?”2 Peter Mair applied the method that he called “ex adverso extrapolation.” He matched his knowledge of the process of consolidation of party systems
in the West with what was known at that time about Eastern European history, society, and the emerging post-Communist party politics. Considering factors such as the
existence of fluid social structures, the weakness of civil society, or the destabilizing
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impact of the so-called triple transition, his article predicted continuous instability
for the region. His approach contradicted other scholars who foresaw the emergence
of more or less structured patterns of inter-party competition around certain (e.g.,
economic, ethnic), somehow strong, cleavages in a reduced number of countries
(e.g., the Czech Republic, Slovakia).3
The peculiar sequence of political modernization in Eastern Europe provided
Mair with additional reasons for skepticism concerning stabilization. While by the
1990s, all the elements of political modernity, such as incorporation, mobilization,
activation, politicization, and contestation, were in place in Eastern Europe, partybased competition appeared as the last stage of the development, unlike in Western
Europe, where it preceded democratization. The difference in the sequence of these
steps of modernization was expected to have substantial consequences for the shape
of party-politics. In the technologically advanced social environment of the 1990s,
old-style mass party strategies were no longer available. As a result, the organizational networks that had been so crucial for anchoring voters in the West were substituted, or at least dominated, by top–down structured political parties.
In Mair’s opinion, the fragility of collective identities, the general alienation of
voters from party politics, and the overlap between social movements, parties, and
interest groups would further hinder the prospects of the institutionalization of party
systems.
In the present article, we evaluate the validity of Mair’s predictions, thereby also
contributing to a lively debate in the current literature about the scale and nature of
East–West differences and about the trajectories of the two regions. Going beyond
the identification of cross-regional similarities and differences, we will contrast individual party systems with each other, establish subgroups within the region, and
describe change across time.
Party system institutionalization became a prominent topic at the turn of the century, primarily thanks to the work of Scott Mainwaring,4 either alone (1998) or with
Scully or Torcal or Zoco.5 As a result of these studies, the level of institutionalization
is often regarded today as one of the fundamental dimensions of party systems.
While the importance of institutionalization is rarely questioned, there is considerable diversity in the literature about how we should conceptualize and measure this
aspect of party politics. Our approach, based on the works of Giovanni Sartori and
Peter Mair, is rather straightforward: because the essence of party systems is defined by
the relations among parties, the institutionalization of the system should also be applied
primarily to these relationships.6 Party systems are institutionalized if the relations
among parties are stable. This stability and predictability is well captured by another
concept of Peter Mair’s, “party system closure,” to be discussed in detail below.7
The stability of party relations is profoundly shaped by three further major phenomena of party politics. The first is the strength and the stability of the parties
themselves. This aspect will be gauged in the present study at three levels: party
continuity, the strength of party organizations in terms of party membership, and the
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
425
assessment of the overlap between parties and interest groups. The second factor is
the stability of voting behavior, represented here by net electoral volatility. Finally,
the third aspect is the fragmentation of the party system, measured by the index of
effective parties. Countries and time periods that are characterized by large electoral
volatility, low organizational stability of parties, and high fragmentation are expected
to be, both for simple mechanical and for more substantive causal reasons, low on
party system closure.
By considering all these factors, we hope to provide a rather comprehensive picture of the cross-regional and cross-country differences in Europe three decades after
the collapse of Communism. Next to our fundamentally descriptive goals, we also
intend to evaluate the claim that post-communist party systems, because of the specific conditions under which they emerged, are bound to remain fundamentally more
open, volatile, and unstructured than the Western European party systems.
In line with the argument that the stabilization of party relations requires a period
of predemocratic organization building, we expect party system closure to be substantially lower in Eastern Europe than in Western Europe. Furthermore, while
acknowledging that the pre-communist history of the countries of the region differed
substantially, we expect no major differences between them given their long communist common history. To the extent that the cases are clustered into distinct groups,
we expect the group boundaries to either follow historical trajectories, meaning primarily the differences classified as national-accommodative (e.g., Hungary, Poland),
patrimonial (e.g., Romania), and bureaucratic-authoritarian (e.g., Czech Republic)
by Kitschelt and his colleagues8 or to reflect on the country’s relationship to the
European Union.9 The countries with the longest EU membership and with the most
modern and bureaucratic background are expected to be the most institutionalized.
The study covers fourteen post-communist democracies (Bulgaria, Croatia, the
Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Poland, Romania,
Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine) and contrasts them to Western European
averages.10 We will only consider those periods when the country obtained a score of
2.5 or less in the Freedom House Index. For some of the analyses, only eleven of the
listed cases will be presented, because of data limitations.
Party System Closure: Conceptualization and Operationalization
The central concept of this section, party system closure, taps the degree of stability of party relations from the point of view of coalition patterns. Coalitions reflect
the cooperative and competitive relations among parties. Mair identified three major
components of party system closure: the form of government alternation, the degree
of the access to office, and the innovative nature of the coalition formulae. Together,
these factors show whether a party system is closed, predictable or open, inchoate.11
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East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
The first dimension is alternation in government. As far as this dimension is concerned,
three patterns exist: wholesale, partial, and nonalternation. In the first case, the incumbent
government leaves the office in its entirety and is replaced by a completely different group
of parties (or a single party). The second option materializes when the new cabinet is a
mixture of parties from both inside and outside of the previous government. The third possibility is marked by a complete absence of alternation, as the same party or parties remain
in exclusive control of government over an extended period of time.
The second major component of the model, governing formulae, shows whether
the partisan composition of the governments is innovative or familiar. Familiarity
prevails if there are stable groups of parties that tend to govern together. If there is a
tendency toward previously unseen party compositions of cabinets, the system is
considered to be open, innovative.
The final component is access to government. The relevant difference on this
aspect is between, on one hand, systems in which all parties have the opportunity to
participate in government and, on the other, polities in which some parties are permanently excluded. Closed governments consist exclusively of parties that governed in
the past; the open ones include, or are dominated by, novices.
By assessing these three factors, one can determine whether a party system is
closed or open. Party systems are considered to be open when (1) the alternations of
governments tend to be partial, (2) no stable configuration of governing alternatives
exists, and (3) the access to government is granted to all relevant parties, including
the newly established ones. It is closed when (1) alternations of governments are
wholesale or none, (2) the governing alternatives are stable over a long period of
time, and (3) governments are confined to a narrow circle of parties.
Following Casal Bértoa and Enyedi’s12 operationalization of Mair’s framework,
this article will measure governmental alternation by adapting Pedersen’s (1979)
index of electoral volatility to the measurement of ministerial volatility, computed by
adding the net change in percentage of “ministers” (including the PM) gained and
lost by each party in the cabinet from one government to the next, and then dividing
it by two. The degree of familiarity of the governing formulae is captured by the
percentage of ministries belonging to familiar combinations of parties. Thirdly, the
percentage of ministers belonging to parties that governed in the past is employed to
display the degree to which access to government is open or closed. These figures are
calculated for each year. If in a year there was no change (i.e., no new party joined
the government, no new coalition formula was introduced and there was no alternation in office), then to that particular year a score of 100 is assigned, meaning complete closure. The composite and cumulative closure is calculated by averaging all
years and all the three components.
Party System Closure: East versus West
First, let us compare the countries of the region as well as the entire region with
the old Western European consolidated democracies. We do the comparison by
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
427
Figure 1
Party system closure in fourteen post-communist European democracies
(1990–2016)
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
taking the latest pieces of information on closure, the ones that refer to 2016. Since
we use a cumulative closure index, the scores summarize both the characteristics of
the latest year and the characteristics of all the previous years. In other words, the
figures do not only capture the state of affairs in 2016 but also summarize the entire
post-1990 period. As Figure 1 indicates, a substantial, 6.5 points-large difference
exists between the two regions, as the Western Europe average is close to 93 percent,
while the Eastern European one is only slightly above 86 percent.13
These figures confirm the fundamentally more structured nature of Western
European politics. This conclusion has to be qualified, however, in two ways. First,
there has been a move toward higher level closure across post-communist Europe: in
2000 the average closure score was 84.1; in 2010, 84.5; and in 2016, 86.3.14 The
progress toward stabilization was larger during the last six years than during the
entire previous decade. But because in the meantime closure has increased in the
West too (it was 90.5 at the beginning of the century, 92.7 ten years later, and 92.8 at
the end of 2016), the gap remained as large as it was one-and-a-half decade earlier.
Secondly, Eastern Central Europe appears to be much more differentiated than
expected. The most closed systems are to be found in Montenegro, Hungary, Croatia,
and Romania; the most open ones in Latvia, Serbia, Estonia, Lithuania and Ukraine.
The difference between the most and least closed systems in the region is 18.5,15
almost three times as much as the difference between Eastern and Western Europe.
While the closed systems tend to come from the Western rim of Eastern Central
Europe, and the open ones from the Eastern part of the region, the grouping of countries appears to have little to do with the differences in pre-communist pluralism, level
of modernization or the degree of suppression during communism, that is, factors
emphasized by Kitschelt.16 A country can develop a relatively closed system emerging
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East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
from both national-accommodative or patrimonial regimes, and the same applies to
open systems. Poor countries can have both predictable (Montenegro) and unpredictable (Ukraine) party relations. EU membership is not a major factor either: Old members can have very open party systems and new members as well as excluded countries
can develop considerably closed systems. The only noticeable structural pattern is the
overrepresentation of the post-Soviet countries on the open end of the continuum.
Table 1 provides information on temporal changes, excluding the two cases that
do not meet currently the Freedom House threshold, namely, Ukraine and Montenegro.
The table reveals that the overall ranking of the party systems within the region has
not changed much during the years. But contrary to the modest increase of the
regional averages, there was a decline of structure in Bulgaria and in the Czech
Republic, while in Lithuania and Hungary the party systems increased their level of
institutionalization rather rapidly. The Estonian party system underwent a period of
destabilization but it has subsequently stabilized, while Slovenia first followed the
standard route toward stabilization but then, during the 2010s, it deinstitutionalized.
The modest shift toward closure in Eastern Europe was due to the growing stability of governmental formulae and to the decreasing likelihood of new parties entering governments. While for the first part of the period Eastern European party
systems were particularly innovative in trying various coalition patterns, lately the
composition of the governments became somewhat more predictable.
Probing deeper into the issue of intraregional tendencies, Figures 2 and 3 present the
trajectory of party systems in the region,17 disregarding the first five years of their
democratic history. The figures indicate a tendency toward homogenization: the party
systems that have a high level of closure tend to change little, while the most inchoate
systems tend to improve their closure scores. On the other hand, the graphs show the
clustering of the cases into two separate groups: the closed systems virtually never fall
below 80 percent, while the open ones virtually never rise above 85 percent.
The trajectories demonstrate the steady institutionalization of the Estonian,
Latvian, and Lithuanian party systems since the early 2000s and they highlight the
continuously high level of structuration of the Hungarian party system. The figures
also reveal that some of the most inchoate systems have low scores because their
institutionalization has suffered major setbacks either during the early 2000s (Bulgaria,
Lithuania, and Estonia) or in the middle of that decade. The early frontrunners, the
Czech Republic and Romania, underwent similar periods of de-alignment, but in their
case the years of instability were not followed by a similarly steep recovery. Here
again we see that Slovenia, a country that appeared to be on a steady road of institutionalization of party relations, became significantly less predictable in the 2010s.
Party (In)stability
In order to place the trends in closure into the larger context of party politics
characteristics, we turn now to the analysis of more conventional dimensions. First
Table 1
Closure of Party Systems in Eastern Europe, a Contrast of Three Decades
Decade
1990s
2000s
2010s
Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech R
Estonia
Hungary
Latvia
Lithuania
Poland
Romania
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Average
88.2
85.8
84.7
84.5
88.1
91.7
87
87.9
84.7
82.6
82.7
86.1
89.3
91.8
72
77.8
79.8
79.2
80.4
83
83.7
83.2
85.7
87.1
88.6
77.8
80
86.6
86.1
86.6
79.4
88.7
86.9
83.5
84.2
85.5
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
429
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East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 2
The degree of closure in the party systems with currently above-average level
of closure
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Figure 3
The degree of closure in the party systems with currently below-average level
of closure
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
we consider the stability at the level of parties. While the characteristics of individual parties cannot be directly translated to the systemic level, the degree of stability
at party level is a major cause of the institutionalization of party systems. Some of
the relationships between the two levels are mechanical: if individual parties disappear then the relations among these parties cannot survive either. Others are more
indirect: The fluctuation in the list of actors may have a negative impact on the
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
431
Figure 4
Average number of new parties in fourteen post-communist European
democracies (1990–2016)
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
individual party strategies in the sense that the frequent disappearance of partners
may push parties toward prioritizing short-term considerations.
We examine party-level continuity by comparing the number of new parties above
0.5 percent of support, the average age of large parties, and the number of splits,
mergers, and new party foundations.
The difference between the two regions in terms of the stability of party rosters is
striking. As Figure 4 indicates, the number of new parties with more than 0.5 percent
of the votes is more than twice as large in the East (3.4) as in the West (1.4).18
With the sole exception of Montenegro, all post-communist party systems experience the entry of more than two parties per election, while in the West only Greece
and, more recently, Cypriots and Icelanders can be accustomed to a similar level of
renewal (not shown). Furthermore, in the East many of these new parties, some of
them formed just few months ahead of the elections, have a realistic chance of gaining governmental power. The Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) in the Czech
Republic, the Bridge of Independent Lists (Most) in Croatia, the Serbian Progressive
Party (SNS) in Serbia, the Liberal Reformist Party (PLR) in Romania, the Network
(Siet’) in Slovakia, Modern (.N) and Kukiz 2015 (Kukiz’15) in Poland, and the
Modern Centre Party (SMC) in Slovenia constitute the most recent examples of new
parties performing well at elections. In this context, the Slovenian case is particularly
dramatic, with SMC, a party that was created just forty-two days before the elections,
wining 35 percent of the votes and 40 percent of the seats.
The variation on party continuity is largely in line with the variation of party system closure, although Estonian and Ukrainian party systems achieved relatively high
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East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 5
Average age of parties in fourteen post-communist European democracies
(1990–2016)
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
level of openness with relatively few new parties, while in Croatia surprisingly many
new parties were established given the relative stability of the relations.
A contrast between the average age of parties confirms the gap between the two
parts of the continent. Figure 5 ranks party systems according to the age of the parties
that received at least 10 percent of the vote during the last parliamentary elections.19
Obviously, given the shortage of the democratic time span, Eastern Europe has an
in-built disadvantage in this aspect. Out of the parties that received more than 10
percent of the vote in the most current legislative elections, only Fidesz has a longer
past than the post-communist regimes.
But the difference between the regions is not due exclusively to the newness of
democracies. In fact almost half (twenty of forty-one) of the currently competing
Eastern European political parties were created after the beginning of the twenty-first
century, while in the West, if Italy is excluded, only nine such parties are relevant.
Furthermore, of the twenty cases of recent party formations in the East, five were
created in the 2010s. Only in a few countries, such as Croatia and Hungary, are the
party systems dominated by parties that are more than twenty-five years old.
In contrast, and in spite of the recent spectacular successes of new political initiatives, Western citizens keep on voting for parties that were established well before
the citizens themselves were born. This is particularly so in countries such as
Portugal, Cyprus, Malta, Luxembourg, Ireland, Sweden, United Kingdom, and until
very recently, also Greece and Spain. The only two significant exceptions to this
general rule are Italy and France. In the former case, the “implosion” of the old party
system in 1994 brought about new political parties that continue to struggle organizationally, while the French parties, mainly on the right of the political spectrum,
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
433
underwent a considerable degree of organizational restructuring after 2002.20 If we
exclude the extreme Italian case, then we find that out of the sixty-two relevant West
European political parties, forty-eight have been active prior to 1989. This means a
survival rate of 77.4 percent. In Eastern Europe, only eighteen of the forty-one major
parties were already active in 1994: This implies a survival rate of 43.9 percent.
The average age of parties typically changes little from year to year and, again
typically, the change is in the positive direction even in Eastern Europe. There are
some notable exceptions, however: 2015 Croatia, 2010 and 2013 Czech Republic,
2010 Hungary, 2011 Latvia, 2012 Montenegro, 2008 Romania, 2012 Serbia, 2010
Slovakia, and 2011 Slovenia. In these countries and years from one year to another,
the party system rejuvenated, because of the disappearance of established parties and
the breakthrough of novices.
Notwithstanding the higher renewal rate in Eastern Europe, the temporal trends
concerning average party age appear as rather similar across the two regions. From
1994 to 2016 the Eastern European average age changed from four to seventeen, the
Western European one from 57.2 to 66.4.
Finally, considering splits and the formation of new parties as indicators of centrifugal tendencies, the East again shows consistently and significantly more instability. The difference is not simply due to the turbulence characterizing the formative
years of the post-communist party systems. In the post-2000 period, as many splits
occurred in the East as in the West, but the ratio of new foundations, 6 versus 4,
shows a larger Eastern “advantage.” The difference in the number of mergers is even
higher than the difference in number of new foundations: nine mergers in the East
and only four in the West—though mergers could be interpreted, in principle, not
only as forms of discontinuity but also as intermediary steps toward consolidation.
Party Membership
The fluctuation of the roster of parties is closely linked to the general weakness
of the organizational networks surrounding parties. Concerning party organizations,
a number of scholars have confirmed the elitist nature of parties and the weakness
of organizational encapsulation in Eastern Europe. According to the data of van
Biezen and her colleagues,21 the total party membership as percentage of the electorate (i.e., M/E) is lower in the East than in the West, notwithstanding a sharp decrease
in the last decades in the West (Figure 6).
In particular, while in Western Europe only five countries fail to display an M/E
ratio higher than 3 percent, in the East only Bulgaria, Estonia, Romania, and Slovenia
reach this figure.
Surely, organization is more than membership, and the significance of organizational characteristics cannot be established simply by raw organizational data. Tavits,
for example, has shown that better organization provides a significant advantage in
the electoral competition in Eastern Europe.22 And one must also acknowledge that
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East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 6
Party membership in post-communist Europe (2010/2011)
* Does not include Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Ukraine.
** Does not include Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta.
Source: I. van Biezen, T. Poguntke, and P. Mair, “Going, Going…Gone?”.
the general erosion of organizational strength is not universal. Indeed, the party that
Mair cited as the best example of the conscious rejection of grassroots involvement,
the Hungarian Fidesz, has developed, since then, one of the most formidable organizational structures in the region.
The relevance of party organizations needs to be considered also in the context of
the relationship of parties and the state, and of parties and other civic society actors.
Eastern European parties are often more powerful in these relations than Western
European ones, even leading to claims that both spheres are colonized by parties.23
Boundaries
The organizational strength can be undermined not only by a lack of membership
and lack of bureaucratic apparatuses but also by the blurred boundaries between
parties and various other social actors such as movements, churches, or trade unions.
Mair’s assessment was that these boundaries are particularly porous in Eastern
Europe. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive data set measuring this aspect, but
in our view this evaluation is no longer correct. Today parties have fairly clear identities. Movements and interest groups tend to be relegated to the margins of the
political systems.24 In some sense, the opposite of Mair’s assertion seems to be the
case: In the East the emotional and organizational distance between political parties
and interest groups, social movements, trade unions, and other civic organizations is
larger than in the West. The relatively high autonomy of parties, however, does not
seem to foster the stabilization of the party systems. The gap between parties and
governments, on the one hand, and the civil society, on the other, provides rather the
(often populist) newcomers with ammunition to pose a continuous threat to the
established parties.25
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435
Electoral Volatility
The institutionalization of party systems is typically measured via electoral volatility indices. While in our view the party systems should be understood primarily in
terms of relations among parties, the fluctuation in the support of parties has a direct
influence on the institutionalization of party relations.
In order to calculate volatility scores, we use Pedersen’s index, which measures
“the net change within the electoral party system resulting from individual vote
transfers.”26 In terms of coding rules, we adopt Bartolini and Mair’s rules:27
1. Volatility figures are always rounded up from the second decimal point. . . .
2. When two or more parties merge to form a new party, or when one or more parties
merge with an existing party, the relevant electoral volatility is computed by subtracting the combined vote of the merging parties in the election immediately preceding the
merger. . . .
3. When a party splits into two or more parties, the relevant electoral volatility is computed by subtracting the combined vote of the new parties from that of the original
party in the election immediately preceding the split. . . .
5. When the name of a party changes, volatility is computed as if it were the same party.28
Following Sikk,29 and taking into consideration the specific organizational instability of political parties in Eastern Europe,30 we have considered as splits all those
cases in which a minority of the leaders or a relevant member of the leadership established a new party.
In line with previous studies, following somewhat different rules and principles,
we detect a dramatic difference between East (24.1) and West (12.2), (significance
.000). The only systems in the West approaching—but not reaching—the Eastern
European mean are Iceland (17.9 percent), France (16.4 percent), Italy (19.7 percent), and the Netherlands (20.7 percent). Of 140 pairs of elections held in Western
Europe, barely four-fifths (i.e., 73.6 percent) remained below the 15 percent ceiling.
Higher than 20 percent volatility figures are common in fact in only one Western
European country, the Netherlands, where four such elections occurred recently (and
all elections since 1990 were above the 15 percent threshold). Among the remaining
133 Western European election-pairs, only ten had a higher than 20 percent score,
namely, Italy in 1994 (36.7 percent) and 2013 (35.7 percent), Greece in May 2012
(34.4 percent), Ireland in 2011 (29.7 percent) and 2016 (36 percent), Iceland in 2013
(28.5 percent) and 2016 (21.8 percent), France in 2012 (24.1 percent), Portugal in
1995 (20.7 percent), and Spain in 2015 (35.1 percent).
In the East, on the other hand, the average election would be considered by
Pedersen’s standards to be “earthquake” election (i.e., with no less than 15 percent of
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East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 7
Average electoral volatility in fourteen post-communist European democracies
(1990–2016)
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
electoral volatility) in all countries. Eleven party systems display scores well above
20 percent. Of the seventy-seven pairs of elections considered, only fourteen31
remained below 15 percent: 7.7 percent in Poland (2011), 8.4 percent and 12.7 percent in Hungary (2006 and 2014), 8.5 percent and 13.2 percent in Serbia (2008 and
2016), 9.4 percent in Bulgaria (2014), 12.2 percent in Ukraine (2007), 13 percent in
Estonia (2011), 13.7 percent in Slovakia (1994), 14.7 percent and 13.8 percent in
Romania (2004 and 2016), and 14.9 percent, 13.1 percent, and 7.8 percent in Croatia
(2007, 2011, and 2016).
Figure 7 displays the average volatility scores between 1990 and 2016 for all the
fourteen post-communist countries studied here, and contrasts Western and Eastern
Europe. Two patterns stand out clearly. First, post-communist electorates differ from
each other substantially. The difference between the most and the least volatile systems is higher than 20 percentage points. Second, West European voters are far more
loyal than their Eastern European counterparts, in line with Mair’s predictions.32
Even though the Western European average has increased in the recent years, it is
well below—actually it is about half of—the Eastern European levels. The difference
between the two regions, considering almost three decades of democratic politics, is
11.9 percentage points.33
As far as temporal trends34 are concerned, three relevant findings need to be mentioned. First, while during the first decade of the twenty-first century electoral volatility decreased in both East and West, in the last six years Western European party
systems have experienced a reversal of this trend, resulting in a convergence between
the two parts of the European continent.35 In fact, the East–West difference decreased
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
437
decade by decade: it was 15.5 in the 1990s, 14.3 in the 2000s, and 7 in the 2010s.
Second, in spite of the general increase in volatility in Western Europe, most of the
examples of decline during the most recent democratic legislative elections (eight of
fourteen) still belong to the West. Third, while most Eastern European countries
(eight of twelve)36 have undergone electoral earthquakes (see above) at the time of
the most recent elections, only seven of nineteen (France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland,
Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) have experienced a similar fate in
the West.37
While in Eastern Europe there was a small decrease in electoral volatility since
the 1990s, the trends are not uniform across all countries (Table 2). The solid drop in
countries such as Estonia, Latvia, and Poland contrasts sharply with the general tendency of increase in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Out of the recently
more tranquil systems, only Croatia had no major rupture in the development of its
electoral landscape.
At the same time, Figures 8 and 9 show that the countries with currently high
levels of volatility more often had above-average scores than the currently more
stable systems, suggesting a clustering of cases into two broad groups, with only a
few cases shifting from one cluster to another.
Number of Parties in the Electoral and Parliamentary Arenas
Finally, we need to consider the factor that is perhaps most often discussed as a
cause of electoral volatility, and therefore of party system institutionalization: the
number of parties. While the association between the degree of party system fragmentation and inherent party system instability is disputable, extreme fragmentation
typically makes elections less consequential and increases uncertainty in government formation. Below we compare countries and the two regions by contrasting the
effective number of electoral and parliamentary parties (ENEP/ENPP).38
Figures 10 and 11 reveal that fragmented party systems constitute the norm in the
East. The average Eastern system can be labeled as a case of “extreme pluralism”
(ENEP = 5.3), while its Western counterpart rather belongs to the category of “limited pluralism” (ENEP = 4.8). But the difference between the regions is in fact much
smaller than what is implied by these qualitative labels. The gap is only 0.5 points, a
difference that is statistically not significant, and one can find highly fractionalized
systems in Western Europe (Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, and
Belgium [last one being by far the most fragmented system of Europe]), and highly
concentrated systems in the East (especially Hungary and, Montenegro).
Moreover, the decline in fragmentation in the East is striking. Taking the 1990s as
a starting point, the number of electoral parties decreased from 6.5 to 4.9 in the
2010s, the number of parliamentary parties from 4.5 to 3.8. Between 1992 and 2016,
the decline was continuous, and the correlation between year and average fragmentation is very high (–.74 at the parliamentary and –.82 at the electoral level). Since the
438
Table 2
Electoral volatility in Eastern Europe, a contrast of three decades
Decade Bulgaria Croatia Czech R Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Montenegro Poland Romania Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Ukraine Average
1990s
2000s
2010s
21.3
45.2
14.8
16.1
14.5
22.1
17.4
34.6
23.5
25.4
15.1
29.5
11.5
23.2
40.4
27.6
29
36.5
36.7
33.1
17.2
24.1
31
19.8
21.9
17
20.4
19.5
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
17.5
20
24
25.1
24
42.3
23.4
26.7
24.7
23.4
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
439
Figure 8
Degree of volatility in the currently more volatile electorates
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Figure 9
Degree of volatility in the currently less volatile electorates
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
fragmentation of West European party systems had increased in the meantime (from
4.6 in the 1990s to 5.3 in the 2010s at the electoral level and from 3.9 in the 1990s to
4.3 in the 2010s at the parliamentary level), the two halves of Europe, in fact,
switched positions.39 In the West, the fragmentation of sociopolitical structures
(especially of the working class and of religious blocs), and in the East the impact of
the restrictive electoral rules, contributed primarily to this convergence.40
The last point is underscored by the fact that Gallagher’s “least-squares index,”41
measuring the level of distortion of electoral systems, has a score of 6.8 for the EE14,
440
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 10
The average effective number of electoral (ENEP) parties in fourteen postcommunist European democracies (1990–2016)
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Figure 11
The average effective number of parliamentary (ENPP) parties in fourteen
post-communist European democracies (1990–2016)
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
as opposed to only 5 for the WE20. As a result of the disproportional electoral
systems42 adopted in the post-communist region, the average level of fragmentation
at the parliamentary level is exactly the same in the two regions (ENPP = 4).
As Tables 3 and 4 show, the number of parties is far from being a fixed trait of
Eastern Central European party systems. Hungary is the only country that had a
Table 3
The Effective Number of Electoral Parties in Eastern Europe, a Contrast of Three Decades
Decade Bulgaria Croatia Czech R Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Montenegro Poland Romania Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Ukraine Average
1990s
2000s
2010s
3.7
4.7
5.6
5.2
4.1
5.8
4.4
7.2
7.2
5.2
5
6
2.9
3
7.6
7.2
5.1
6.1
7.3
7.2
3.2
3.4
9.4
4.6
4.1
6.1
4.4
3.2
4.5
4.6
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
5.5
7.5
5.7
7.4
5.4
5.5
5.4
6.5
5.1
4.9
441
442
Table 4
The Effective Number of Parliamentary Parties in Eastern Europe, a Contrast of Three Decades
Decade Bulgaria
1990s
2000s
2010s
2.5
3.7
4.2
Croatia Czech R Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Montenegro Poland Romania Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Ukraine Average
3.6
2.9
4.2
3.4
5.3
5.2
4.6
4.3
3.4
2.3
2
6.1
5.5
4.5
3.2
5.2
4.9
2.5
3
5.9
3.6
2.9
4.3
3.5
2.9
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
3.7
3.5
4.1
5.5
4.2
6.1
4.7
4.4
3.8
4.5
4.0
3.8
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
443
Figure 12
The effective number of electoral parties in the currently more fragmented
systems
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
consistently below-average level of fragmentation (though in terms of the number of
electoral parties it was originally close to average), and Latvia, Slovakia, and
Slovenia are the only continuously highly fragmented systems. The other party systems have oscillated around the regional average. While originally, Slovenia, Estonia,
Latvia, and Poland had the largest number of parties, in the 2010s these countries
have been overtaken by the Czech Republic and Lithuania, party systems that were
originally rather concentrated. The most concentrated, and in this sense most “consolidated,” party systems are to be found today in Romania, Poland, Hungary,
Croatia, and Montenegro.
As indicated by the data, Latvia, Slovakia, and Lithuania took turns as the most
fragmented systems of the region, never falling below the threshold of four parties.
Interestingly, the destructuration of the Slovenian electorate noticed above is not
reflected by a growing fragmentation of the party system. Actually the number of
Slovenian parties slightly declined recently. On the other hand, the increase of electoral volatility in the Czech Republic is rather well mirrored by the increase in the
number of parties. The most dramatic decline in the number of parties happened in
Poland, turning the most fragmented system into one of the most concentrated ones
(Figures 12 and 13).43
While in most cases the number of parliamentary parties is significantly lower than the
number of electoral parties, showing the power of electoral rules, in the Czech Republic
the distortion is minimal, and consequently the effective number of parties in the Parliament
remained recently above six: an unusually high value. Interestingly, the countries that
democratized belatedly (and show up in our database only for the second part of the timecontinuum), Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Ukraine, had, for most of the time of their
democratic career, a relatively low number of parties (Figures 14 and 15).
444
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 13
The effective number of electoral parties in the currently less fragmented
systems
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Figure 14
The effective number of parliamentary parties in the currently more
fragmented systems
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Conclusions
Finally, we revisit the most important changes that took place in post-communist
party politics along the classical dimensions with the help of Figure 16 and provide
a comparative perspective by showing the respective figures for Western Europe in
Figure 17.
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
445
Figures 15
The effective number of parliamentary parties in the currently less
fragmented systems
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Figure 16
The evolution of post-communist party systems over time (1990–2016)
* For presentation purposes, closure scores have been divided by 10.
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
The contrast between the two regions is the largest in terms of electoral volatility,
but the difference is significantly large in terms of closure and party-level stability
too. But on most dimensions, with the possible exception of party instability and
party system closure, there is a convergence going on, helped by changes in both
446
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 17
The evolution of Western European party systems over time (1990–2016)
* For presentation purposes, party instability and closure scores have been divided by 10.
Source: F. Casal Bértoa, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” PSGo (2017), whogoverns.eu.
Eastern and, especially, Western Europe.44 The process reached furthest concerning
party system fragmentation, eliminating all differences between the regions and
opening the prospect for a more concentrated post-communist Europe.
The lack of convergence on closure is surprising because the de-institutionalization
of Western party politics is often taken for granted. We have found some indications
indeed of a structural dealignment, but this process does not (yet?) manifest itself at
the level of party relations in the governmental arena.45
The various analyzed dimensions do not always show the same dynamic, but
together they help us differentiate between few clusters of party systems. Hungary,
Croatia, and Romania (and among the newly democratized countries, Montenegro)
are party systems that have been, throughout their career, relatively institutionalized,
at least compared to the regional averages. The Baltic countries, Poland, and Slovakia
increased their level of structure from a very low one, while the Czech Republic and
Slovenia have gradually lost much of their stability and predictability. The emerged
grouping is not in line with theoretical models based on a pre-communist or communist past, on socioeconomic development, EU membership, or on distance from
the West. The existence of a transparent conflict structure (see the examples of
Montenegro, Croatia, and Hungary) appears as a more relevant factor, but bipolarity
does not guarantee stability and predictability, as Lithuania and the Czech Republic
of the 1990s have demonstrated.
Mair’s cited article suggested long-term instability. And yet the author still
expected that the passing of time would make a difference. He emphasized that one
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
447
needs time for coalitional norms to develop and for collective identities to crystallize.
From today’s vantage point, he appears as even too cautious. He wrote, for
example,
[m]uch like Germany and Italy in the postwar decades, and Portugal and Spain in the
last twenty years, the post-communist democracies will also eventually assimilate to
the pattern set by the established democracies.46
As the figures cited above indicate, the expectations toward maturation and stabilization are not (yet) met. The consolidation of party politics in the region remained
partial. Fragmentation declined, the closure of the governmental arena slightly
increased, and there are fewer new parties in the parliaments. But electoral volatility
and closure changed only marginally, and occasionally new parties are still able to
capture governmental power.
This means that some of our theoretical expectations have been entirely met, others less so. The difference between East and West has been found to continue to be
substantive on all analyzed aspects, except fragmentation. The low survival rate of
parties in the East, or the current de-institutionalization of the Czech or the Slovenian
systems contributed to the survival of the East–West difference. But the convergence
is apparent on many dimensions. The growing fragmentation, volatility, and rejuvenation of the Western systems are as responsible for the trend of convergence between
the regions as the “maturation” of the East.47 The differences within Eastern Europe
are often striking.
While the current article was not aimed at uncovering causal patterns behind the
changes in party system institutionalization, the presented differences cast doubt on
the systemic role of fragmentation: Eastern party systems continued to stay volatile
in spite of declining fragmentation.
To conclude, Peter Mair was largely, though not in every detail, right. The twenty
years’ time span of convergence observed in the West–South relation may need to be
multiplied when applied to the East–West relation, but the direction of convergence
is undisputable.
Notes
1. P. Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics,” American Political
Science Review 2 (2000):671–87.
2. Included later on as a chapter in Party System Change: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1997), 175–98.
3. H. Kitschelt, “The Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe,” Politics and Society 20
(1992): 7–50; and “Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-communist Democracies,” Party Politics 1
(1995): 447–72; also G. A. Evans and S. Whitefield, “Identifying the Bases of Party Competition in
Eastern Europe,” British Journal of Political Science 23 (1993): 521–48. For a critical view of the
above-mentioned studies, see F. Casal Bértoa, “Party Systems and Cleavage Structures Revisited: a
448
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Sociological Explanation of Party System Institutionalization in East Central Europe,” Party Politics 20
(2014): 16–36.
4. Mainwaring originally proposed four criteria for capturing party system institutionalisation: stability in the patterns of party competition, stable roots in society, legitimacy of parties and elections, and
strength of party organisations.
5. S. Mainwaring, “Party Systems in the Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy 9 (1998); S.
Mainwaring and T. Scully, Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); S. Mainwaring and M. Torcal, “Party System Institutionalization
and Party System Theory after the Third Wave of Democratization,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed.
Richard S. Katz and William J. Crotty (London: Sage, 2006); S. Mainwaring, and E. Zoco, “Political
Sequences and the Stabilization of Inter-party Competition,” Party Politics 13 (2007): 155–78. For a
comprehensive review of the studies on the topic, see F. Casal Bértoa, “The Three Waves of Party System
Institutionalization Studies,” Political Studies Review, published online 27 December 2016.
6. Mair, “Party System Change.” See also P. Mair, “The Freezing Hypothesis: And Evaluation,” in
Party Systems and Voter Alignments Revisited, ed. L. Karvonen and S. Kuhnle (London: Routledge,
2001).
7. In a comprehensive overview of the party systems literature, Steven Wolinetz discusses Mair’s
concept of closed competition as one of the most significant post-Sartorian models, but he also remarks
that “its full potential has not yet been explored.” We agree on both counts. See S. Wolinetz, “Party
System Institutionalization: Bringing the System Back In,” in Katz and Crotty, Handbook of Party
Politics, 58.
8. H. Kitschelt, Z. Mansfeldová, R. Markowski, and G. Tóka, Post-communist Party Systems:
Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999).
9. M. A. Vachudová, “Tempered by the EU? Political Parties and Party Systems before and after
Accession,” Journal of European Public Policy 15 (2008): 861–79.
10. By Western Europe, we mean the following countries in the text: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus,
Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands,
Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
11. Mair, “Party System Change.” See also F. Casal Bértoa and P. Mair, “Party System
Institutionalization across Time in Post-communist Europe,” in Party Government in the New Europe, ed.
H. Keman and F. Müller-Rommel (London: Routledge, 2012).
12. F. Casal Bértoa and Z. Enyedi, “Party System Closure and Openness: Conceptualization,
Operationalization and Validation,” Party Politics 22 (2016).
13. The difference is significant at .000.
14. If we exclude the short-lived cases, Montenegro, Serbia, and Ukraine, then 84.1, 84.8, and 86.
15. 12 percent if we discard Montenegro.
16. Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems.
17. Systems that were considered to be democratic for too short time (Montenegro and Ukraine) were
left out from these figures.
18. The difference is significant at .000.
19. This threshold is relatively high but it is line with the relevant literature: R. Dix, “Democratization
and the Institutionalization of Latin American Political Parties,” Comparative Political Studies 24 (1992);
S. Mainwaring and T. Scully, Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); M. Tavits, “The Development of Stable Party Support:
Electoral Dynamics in Post-communist Europe,” American Journal of Political Science 49 (2005). Of
course, parties can have an important role (can be “relevant” in Sartori’s sense) even below 10 percent if
they can contribute to government-building or if they can influence the strategy of other parties.
20. The French party system changed even more profoundly in 2017, but the entry of the La
République En Marche! is not part of the analyzed data set.
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi / Post-communist Party Systems
449
21. Biezen et al., “Going, Going . . . Gone?,” European Journal of Political Research (2012).
Unfortunately, the accuracy of national data on such a sensitive issue as party membership cannot be
guaranteed. The different sources converge on the relative position of the regions, but note that the difference between the figures reported in van Biezen, 3 and 5.6, across the seventeen cases, does not reach
the conventional statistical threshold (significance = .106).
22. M. Tavits, Post-communist Democracies and Party Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013).
23. P. Kopecký, “Political Parties and the State in Post-communist Europe: The Nature of Symbiosis,”
Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 22 (2006): 251–73; A. Ágh, “The Development of
East Central European Party Systems: From ‘Movements’ to ‘Cartels,’” in The Challenge of the
Europeanization in the Region: East Central Europe, ed. Máté Szabó; Magyar Politikatudományi
Társaság; Politikai Tudományok Intézet (Budapest: Budapest Institute for Political Sciences, 1996), Z.
Enyedi, “Party Politics in Post-communist Transition,” in Katz and Crotty, Handbook of Party Politics.
24. P. Webb and S. White, Party Politics in New Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
25. T. Haughton and K. Deegan-Krause, “Hurricane Season: Systems of Instability in Central and East
European Party Politics,” East European Politics and Societies 29 (2015): 61–80.
26. M. N. Pedersen, “The Dynamics of European Party Systems: Changing Patterns of Electoral
Volatility,” European Journal of Political Research 7 (1979): 1–26.
27. Often followed when calculating electoral volatility, M. Gallagher, M. Laver, and P. Mair,
Representative Government in Modern Europe (London: McGraw-Hill, 2011); Z. Enyedi and F. Casal
Bértoa, “Patterns of Inter-party Competition (1990-2009),” in Europeanizing Party Politics? Comparative
Perspectives on Central and Eastern Europe, ed. P. G. Lewis and R. Markowski (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2011); V. Emanuele, Dataset of Electoral Volatility and its internal components in
Western Europe (1945-2015) (Rome: Italian Center for Electoral Studies, 2015), http://dx.doi.
org/10.7802/1112.
28. S. Bartolini and P. Mair, Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability: The Stabilization of
European Electorates 1885–1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), appendix.
29. A. Sikk, “How Unstable? Volatility and the Genuinely New Parties in Eastern Europe,” European
Journal of Political Research 44 (2005): 391–412.
30. S. Gherghina, Party Organization and Electoral Volatility in Central and Eastern Europe:
Enhancing Voter Loyalty (London: Routledge, 2014).
31. In case we discount elections that took place barely a year following a previous election (Croatia
2016, Bulgaria 2014, Serbia 2008, and Ukraine 2007), then this figure is only ten.
32. See also J. Bielasiak, “Party Competition in Emerging Democracies: Representation and
Effectiveness in Post-communism and Beyond,” Democratization 12 (2005): 331–56; J.-E. Lane and S.
Ersson, “Party System Instability in Europe: Persistent Differences in Volatility between West and East?,”
Democratization 14 (2007): 92–110; T. Haughton and K. Deegan-Krause, “Hurricane Season.”
33. The difference would be just of 6.7 if we were to consider the last elections in each country.
34. When interpreting the averages, one should keep in mind that occasional sudden changes in the
levels of volatility from one election to another due to idiosyncratic reasons are common. In Bulgaria, for
example, volatility increased from 25 to 48 between 1997 and 2001 or between 2005 and 2009, while in
Poland it decreased from 23.7 to 7.7 between 2007 and 2011, but increased again in 2015, reaching 31.9.
In Serbia, in a four-year period (2012–2016) volatility went up from 17.5 to 27.8 before decreasing to
13.2. A similar trajectory can be observed in Croatia: 13.1 in 2011, 22.6 in 2015, but just 7.8 in 2016. In
Hungary, electoral fluidity decreased up to 10 points before 2006, just to reach 33.7 (an increase of 25
points) in 2010, while it decreased 20 points 4 years later (see also Enyedi and Casal Bértoa “Patterns,”
133–34).
35. F. Casal Bértoa, “Post-communist Politics: On the Divergence (and/or Convergence) of East and
West,” Government and Opposition 48 (2013).
450
East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
36. Exceptions are Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Serbia. The 2016 Croatian and the 2007
Ukrainian elections, which took place barely a year after the previous ones, are excluded.
37. The 2016 Spanish elections are not included for the reasons mentioned in the previous footnote.
38. M. Laakso, and R. Taagepera, “‘Effective’ Number of Parties. A Measure with Application to West
Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 12 (1979).
39. Though the difference is not yet statistically significant.
40. Casal Bértoa, “Post-communist Politics.”
41. M. Gallagher, “Proportionality, Disproportionality and Electoral Systems,” Electoral Studies 10
(1991): 33–51.
42. Casal Bértoa, “Post-communist Politics,” 402–8.
43. F. Casal Bértoa and S. Guerra, “Earthquake or Hurricane? The Rise and Fall of Populist Parties in
Poland,” in Absorbing the Blow. Populist Parties and Their Impact on Parties and Party Systems, ed. S.
Wolinetz and A. Zaslove (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2017).
44. Characterized by increasing volatility, fragmentation, and polarization.
45. See also Z. Enyedi, “The Discrete Charm of Political Parties,” Party Politics 20 (2014): 194–204.
46. Mair, “Party System Change,” 197.
47. Z. Enyedi and K. Deegan-Krause, “Voters and Parties in Eastern Europe,” in The Routledge
Handbook of East European Politics, ed. A. Fagan and P. Kopecky (London: Routledge, 2017).
Zsolt Enyedi is Professor at the Political Science Department of Central European University, working
on party politics, political attitudes, religion and politics and populism. He held research fellowships at
the Woodrow Wilson Center, Kellogg Institute (Notre Dame University), the Netherlands Institute for
Advanced Studies, the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Johns Hopkins University.
Fernando Casal Bértoa is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at
the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). He is also member of the OSCE/ODIHR “Core Group
of Political Party Experts” and co-director of REPRESENT: Centre for the Study of Parties and
Democracy. Currently he is writing with Zsolt Enyedi Party System Closure: Alliances and Innovations
in Europe between 1848 and 2016 (OUP).