Title: Political Preferences and Party Development in Post-Communist States: A New Approach with an Illustration of the Russian Case
Abstract: Political party formation emerged as a core element of theories of democratization developed to describe the third and fourth waves of transitions from authoritarian rule. In the first decade of post-Communist cases, party development became a central focus of research.1 However, despite both the diverse approaches and sheer volume of work focused on party development, scholarly analyses got bogged down in attempts to understand the mechanisms that drive political party and party system consolidation in new democratic regimes. As a result, students of democratization missed a unique opportunity to clarify the common mechanisms that link partisan development to regime outcomes, including the nature of state-society relations.As theoretical development stalled, and parties seemingly became marginal for governance, students of party politics adopted new research agendas. The dense cluster of party-based studies conducted in the 1990s gave way to a much more limited set of studies in the next decade. Yet, during this period, party organizations continued to evolve across the region while the relationship between party development (or the lack of party development) and regime outcomes became more evident. The variation in outcomes over this period is remarkable. In East Europe, there was a rise of moderate right parties rooted in nationalist appeals that reshaped the political landscape and a move toward consolidated systems in some states.2 In 1999, the partisan chaos in Russia gave way to a hegemonic organization, United Russia, an organization that evolved over time.3 In other states, such as Moldova and Latvia parties systems remained inchoate while in Estonia and Lithuania there were movements toward consolidation by the mid-2000s. Viewed through a longer lens, these developments in parties and party systems map to the variation in regime outcomes-or the level of democratic consolidation-achieved by individual states since the collapse of communist authoritarianism.Arguably, scholars abandoned the study of parties just as parties became more important political players, shaping both variation in the trajectory of democratic consolidation and variation in the nature of statesociety relations across the region. Moreover, the study of parties in the post-Communist context failed to address critical questions defined in the broader literature: how different preference structures influence party development, how elites tap into mass sentiment to define clear policy agendas, and whether or not parties that embody alternative linkage structures can evolve into accountable and responsible representative institutions.This article draws on both intellectual history and the intersection between party development theory and democratic consolidation theory to reconsider why the institutional approach promulgated to study party development in the 1990s fizzled. I argue that in adapting an institutional framework to understand post-communist outcomes, scholars generally failed to accurately assess both the importance and variation in preference structures across these cases. In other words, we failed to understand what voters, politicians, and social actors wanted from their new regimes and how parties come to aggregate individual preferences in order to achieve those goals.The Roots of the Problem: Disciplinary Evolution and Theoretical ShiftThe transition from communism in the former Soviet Union and East Europe coincided with the ascendance of both the economics-based, new institutional approach in the discipline of political science and the rise of democracy assistance as a critical component of foreign policy in the United States and Europe. Policy makers needed good and quick ideas about how to build democracy, and the new institutional approach provided them in the guise of institutional frameworks: election laws, parliamentary regulations, and, above all, political parties. Both camps argued that these rules would provide incentives for individuals to join together to pursue their goals through the new regime, forging stable, programmatic political parties and, from them, stable democracies. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot