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CHAPTER 4
Civil Society and Political Parties
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN THE ORGANIZATIONS
LINKING PEOPLE AND POWER
Kevin Deegan-Krause
Communism fell and democracy rose because of complex geopolitical interactions and
powerful structural forces, but amid the turmoil small groups of thoughtful, committed
citizens were the ones who actually brought about big changes. Fledgling civil society
organizations and political parties promoted democratic values and built new institutions
that helped prevent a return to dictatorship. If we want to understand how Central and
Eastern Europe has changed and what we might expect for its future, we need to look
not only at the big questions of constitutions, markets, and national identity but also to
the concrete and local experience of civil society and political parties. This chapter will
set down basic definitions for civil society and political parties, consider the difference
between the two, and then discuss how they developed in the region with particular
attention to laws, values, organizations, and their impact on society.
What We Mean by Civil Society and Political Parties
Civil society and political parties are different, but they are similar enough to share a
chapter because they inhabit an “in-between” space. “Civil society” in particular is often
defined by what it is not. It is not “the family,” “the state,” or “the market” but rather
a sphere of activity located between these in which “institutions, organizations and
individuals . . . associate voluntarily to advance common interests.”1
More recent and
specific definitions try to recast this negative space into a positive set of values. Roberto
Foa and Gregorz Ekiert define civil society as
the realm of organized social life that is open, voluntary, self-generating, at
least partially self-supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by a legal
order or set of shared rules [and which] involves citizens acting collectively in
a public sphere to express their interests, passions, preferences, and ideas, to
exchange information, to achieve collective goals, to make demands on the
state, to improve the structure and functioning of the state, and to hold state
officials accountable.2
90 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
“Civil society organization” is the generic term for any institutional unit of civil society,
and this term includes all those interest groups, service groups, clubs, think-tanks,
foundations, churches, and any other institutions that fit the definition’s requirements by
being voluntary, independent, and oriented to public, collective goals.
Parties are not quite the same as civil society organizations. They are sometimes
easier to spot because they often use “party” in their name, but not all parties use
that label and not everything with that label is a party. One of the most widely used
definitions sets up two criteria: a party is an “institution that (a) seeks influence in a
state, often by attempting to occupy positions in government, and (b) usually consists
of more than a single interest in the society and so to some degree attempts to “aggregate
interests.”3
The lines between civil society organizations and parties are sometimes
blurry, but the general rule is that parties seek “influence from within the government”
while civil society organizations work from outside and that parties take a more “comprehensive
view of the public interest and political agenda” while civil society organizations
focus more narrowly on a few specific agenda items.4
Political parties together form
broader collectives called “political party systems” that describe how parties relate to one
another: their alliances and feuds, the issues they fight about, and their relative positions
on the political spectrum.
Understanding Civil Society in Central and
Eastern Europe
HOW CIVIL SOCIETY DEVELOPED IN A CHAOTIC REGION
Civil society in Central and Eastern Europe faced widespread destructive pressure under
communism, but when that pressure lifted, civil society organizations rapidly emerged to
play an important role in the postcommunist period. The development of civil society
has not been smooth, however. The mid-1990s were a time of particularly difficult adaptation,
and civil society organizations in the south of the region faced the most severe
challenges.
The seizure of power by communist parties in the late 1940s did profound damage
to civil society in Central and Eastern Europe, but its problems began much earlier.
Professional associations, discussion circles, charitable societies, and other groups began
to flourish in the late 1800s industrialized cities such as Prague and Budapest, but they
were much slower to develop in the countryside and in countries to the south and east.
Further growth was made more difficult both by the economic crises of the 1920s and
1930s, which starved civil society of resources, and by the emergence of authoritarian
leaders who saw civil society as a threat to their rule and tried to suppress its activity.
When communist parties took over after World War II, they also attacked independent
civil society but from a different direction. Communists were willing to allow clubs and
associations—and even to help build them—but only on the condition that they became
completely dependent on the state. Communist parties in the region actively used what
remained of civil society as “transmission belts” for mobilizing support (or at least the
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 91
appearance of support) for government efforts, and they made major efforts to create
a “dense network of large associations” while at the same time ensuring that these were
“tightly controlled by the party-state.”5
At the same time, another kind of civil society began to emerge beneath the surface.
Dissidents who rejected the overwhelming power of the communist regimes began
to work together to organize their opposition even though they faced the constant risk
of political persecution and legal prosecution. Most of these organizations remained
fragmented and hidden from view except in rare instances when (as in Poland) they
could find protection from other institutions such as trade unions or the Catholic
Church or when (as in Czechoslovakia) leaders of dissident organizations openly
accepted imprisonment as the price of speaking out. yet, whenever pressure from above
eased—as it did in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland in the late
1970s, and across the region in the late 1980s—organizations such as these showed a
strong capacity to organize, and they quickly mobilized marches and other acts of public
opposition along with newspapers, informal schools, and help for the families of those
who were fired or jailed.
As communism weakened and the Soviet union withdrew support, an independent
civil society again began to emerge from several directions: the increased strength of independent
dissident groups, the increased independence of formerly state-run groups, and
the creation of many wholly new civil society organizations. In the northern and western
countries of the region, these organizational networks played critical roles in pushing
some governments into negotiations and pushing others out of office. In the south of the
region, significant activity by civil society organizations also helped to end the communist
monopoly in yugoslavia, but much of that effort became bound up in ethnic conflicts
about the groups would control the state.
As a vibrant and voluntary alternative to the tired and oppressive state apparatus
of communism, civil society played a key role in the democratic transitions but popular
enthusiasm eventually waned. As many of the most skillful activists turned their
attention to parliament and the government, and as many of the smaller, less-connected
organizations saw their resources dry up, many skeptics believed that civil society simply
could not overcome the destructive historical legacies of suppression by interwar dictators
followed by subservience under communist rule. History was not destiny, however, and
instead of shriveling up, civil society organizations adapted to the new circumstances with
new goals and new forms of organization. Civil society survived and in some places it
even thrived.
MEASURING CIVIL SOCIETY ACROSS TIME AND SPACE
How can we assess the state of civil society? The region of Central and Eastern Europe
is diverse and rapidly changing, and there are simply not many tools for making good
comparisons. Of the available measures, one of the best is the varieties of Democracy
(v-Dem) project that asks scholars to estimate the strength of civil society for every year,
past and present. Figure 4.1 summarizes the views of experts about whether civil society
enjoyed “autonomy from the state” and whether citizens could “freely and actively pursue
92 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
their political and civic goals, however conceived.” In every country in the region, the
autonomy of civil society rose sharply from extremely low levels in the late 1980s to
higher levels in the early 1990s and then remained fairly strong.6
A closer look at individual countries, however, shows some significant variation. The
data show two fairly distinct regional patterns and a few variations. In the northern and
western countries of the region (especially in the eight countries that entered the European
union [Eu] in 2004), the graphs show that civil society followed an almost identical
pattern, strengthening rapidly from exceptionally low civil society under communism
and then remaining relatively strong in subsequent decades. In the south and east, the
graphs show much more variation, with some repeating the pattern above—especially in
Romania and Bulgaria—and others experiencing more gradual climbs and lower peaks.
While most countries in the region remained close to the levels they reached in the late
1990s, Hungary, Serbia, and Macedonia have shown noticeable declines. Even with the
drop, however, they have stayed well above their mid-1980s levels (unlike countries to the
east such as Russia whose civil society experienced the same initial rise but by 2016 had
fallen back to the levels of the late communist era).
Figure 4.1. Overall Strength of Civil Society over Time (Core Civil Society Score)
Source: V-Dem 2017.
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 93
DIMENSIONS OF CIVIL SOCIETY GROWTH AND CHANGE
These broad, all-purpose measurements are useful for making big comparisons, but they
do not tell the whole story because civil society can succeed or fail in many different ways.
Helmut Anheier and Lisa Carlson argue that civil society has multiple dimensions. Their
“Civil Society Diamond” breaks down the analysis of civil society into four different
categories:
• Space: “What is the legal and political space within the larger regulatory environment
in which civil society operates; and what laws and policies enable or inhibit its
development?”
• Values: “What values underlie civil society; what values, norms and attitudes does it
represent and propagate; how inclusive and exclusive are they; and what areas of consensus
and dissent emerge?”
• Structure: “How large is civil society in terms of institutions, organizations, networks,
and individuals; what are its component parts; and what resources does it command?”
• Impact: “What is the contribution of civil society to specific social, economic and
political problems?”7
Space: What Institutions Shape Civil Society?
All organizations work within broader frameworks of rules and resources that they cannot
completely control. The “in-between” nature of civil society makes it especially dependent
on decisions that are made somewhere else, whether by families, by firms or, especially, by
governments. But the relationship with government is complicated. Civil society needs
government to act but not too much. On the one hand, civil society organizations cannot
function without some degree of public order or formal legal status that allows them to
protect their organizational identity, oversee membership, and manage accountability
and finances. Many civil society organizations, furthermore, depend on government for
financial support, either directly through subsidy or indirectly through tax codes that promote
voluntary donations. On the other hand, civil society needs governments to refrain
from getting involved because governments that become too intrusive in their regulation
(either accidentally or intentionally) can undermine the positive efforts of civil society
organizations, scare off membership, and threaten their essential independence.8
The
communist era is perhaps the best example of a government that intrudes too much—to
the point of undermining and even criminalizing anything it did not like—while the
chaos of some countries in the early postcommunist era demonstrates the way that civil
society needs government to enforce the rule of law.
Some countries in Central and Eastern Europe in the postcommunist era have found
it more difficult than others to maintain this complicated equilibrium. Since the mid-
1990s, the united States Agency for International Development (uSAID) has issued
annual reports on civil society’s “legal environment” with special attention to questions
about how well governments register, tax, regulate, and respect the independence of civil
society organizations. The results follow familiar regional patterns: the legal environments
in most countries in the north and west of this region have consistently received high marks
94 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
as “supportive” while most countries in the south and east of the region received the lower
assessment of “evolving” because of problems such as administrative harassment, fines, and
deliberate refusal to register new organizations. Positive change did occur in most countries
as they began to enact more streamlined rules on tax exemptions, donations, and accounting
procedures, but improvement remained slow.9
A few declines, by contrast, were severe, most
notably in Hungary, whose once widely praised nonprofit legal environment descended
into “an atmosphere of intimidation” with the rise of viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy”
model. Now the atmosphere is characterized by “accusatory statements by the government”
and “ongoing administrative harassment” including police raids on organizations distributing
civil-society-related grants from the Norwegian government.10
Values: What Are Civil Society’s Motivations?
Even a supportive legal structure will not produce a strong civil society if a society’s underlying
values do not contribute to individuals volunteering the time, money, and effort
that civic efforts require. under these circumstances, even a high degree of public support
may not produce positive results if the values nurtured by civil society organizations are
too sharply at odds with one another or with the fundamental values of democracy.
The first question for a successful civil society is whether anyone cares. Other spheres
of action—governments, firms, and families—have carrots and sticks that allow them to
exert leverage and get what they want, but civil society organizations have no sticks to
force cooperation and even carrots are in short supply because of the famous “free-rider”
problem that allows some people stand by and take advantage of the social benefits produced
by civic engagement of others.
In the early years of postcommunism, the incentives won out and large parts of the
populations of many countries demonstrated the core values that sustain civil society.
At first, only a courageous few risked severe punishment to organize into groups and
take small-scale actions. They typed multiple copies of forbidden texts, organized small
discussions and events, and even mounted legal defenses of others facing prison as the
Committee to Protect the Workers (KOR) did after the 1970 strikes in Poland and the
civil-rights advocacy group Charter 77 did in Czechoslovakia. As organized groups got
stronger and sensed lack of resolution from the communist governments in the 1980s,
ever-larger numbers turned out for collective protests and introduced an independent
spirit into once-subservient communist-era associations. Many of the leaders of these
efforts came from the earlier opposition groups:  Lech Wałęsa, the shipyard worker
who became head of the Solidarity organization and movement in Poland, had been
in the workers’ group created by the intellectual group formed in 1976, Committee
to Protect the Workers, KOR, and václav Havel, the playwright who helped lead mass
demonstrations in Prague in November 1989, had spent years in prison for his activity as
spokesperson for the Czech dissident group, Charter 77.
Many of the leaders of dissident groups and civil society organizations went on to
prominent government positions—Wałęsa and Havel became the presidents of their
respective countries—but, at the grassroots level, the victory was less obvious. As early
public enthusiasm for demonstrations waned, the corrosive effects of communism on the
values of civil society members became increasingly apparent. According to Marc Morjé
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 95
Howard, communism’s tendency to force people into supportive organizations and then
label those activities as “voluntary” produced a low level of generalized trust in society as
a whole and encouraged the narrow relationships of trust based on the close-knit “private
and informal networks” that people built for self-protection. The end of communism
did not immediately break these habits, and the economic slumps and political crises of
postcommunism led to a deep dissatisfaction that encouraged many people to “withdraw
even further from public activities.”11
More recent evidence, however, indicates that instead of withdrawing completely,
people in the region shifted their civil society participation to other, less-obvious activities.
Fao and Ekiert have found that, although the level of many civil society behaviors
in Central and Eastern Europe falls considerably below those of Western Europe, the
gap is narrowing.12
Small-scale studies and local opinion polls show that the idea of
“volunteering” is losing some of the stigma of the communist era and that some segments
of the population have begun to adopt West European patterns of charitable giving and
philanthropy.13
The values of civic engagement, however, can do more harm than good if citizens
are engaged in the pursuit of destructive goals. Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein
mince no words when they confront the problem of “bad civil society,” by which they
mean groups that embody the civil society ideals of voluntary mutual engagement among
individuals but in the service of “hate and bigotry.”14
ugliness, of course, is in the eye of the
beholder, and fears about the violence of football fan clubs such as the Czech ultra Sparta,
the intolerance of conservative religious organizations such as the Polish nonprofit Radio
Mariya, or the nationalism of patriotic organizations such as Croatian Disabled Homeland
War veterans Association, exist alongside fears about the danger to the social order posed
by what many see as morally permissive Gay Pride Parades or the “anti-patriotic cosmopolitanism”
of organizations funded by Hungarian billionaire George Soros. In reality, though,
the potential sources of “bad civil society” in Central and Eastern Europe represent only a
tiny share of the sector as a whole. Far from the extremes, most civil society organizations
in East and West alike act to help the needy, solve practical problems, and engage together
on hobbies and areas of mutual interest.
Structure: What Are Civil Society’s Capacities?
Even when legal civil society merely provides open space for people with similar goals
or interest to interact, it requires organizations with formal names, bylaws, members,
and resources. How these are structured can have a huge impact on whether people can
use civil society to reach their goals. Along with its review of legal frameworks, uSAID
has also evaluated civil society based on the measures membership, management, fundraising,
training, and partnerships with other sectors along with the transparency and
accountability of civil society organizations.15
These show rapid growth in the capacity of
civil society in the early 1990s followed by a long period of overall stability. During this
stable period, however, big changes were happening under the surface. A three-decade
analysis of Poland, conducted by Ekiert, Kubik, and Wenzel, found that the submissive
associations of the communist era faced major challenges caused both by the loss of state
resources and the acquisition of a new and unfamiliar independence. Many formerly
96 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
communist-led unions, associations, and organizations either simply collapsed or limped
along with inherited memberships and little sense of direction. At the same time, new
professional associations, unions, and clubs emerged as fresh-thinking alternatives to
communist-era groups and other groups emerged to meet needs that had not existed
under communism such as campaign watchdog organizations, chambers of commerce,
and homeless shelters. In the process, civil society’s “center of gravity shifted from the
large, membership-based, formal organizations, such as trade unions and professional
associations (mostly inherited from the old regime), to a highly diverse sector of small,
professionalized NGOs that rely on voluntary involvement and public as well as private
funding.”16
In Poland’s case, there are “tens of thousands” of “small organizations run by
professional staffs that rely on public funding, fundraising, and volunteers” and “focus on
a wide range of local and national issues and initiatives.”17
Poland is not unique. Countries
across the region exhibit similar patterns with the most effective associations of the old
regime being “complemented by the dynamic growth of new organizations,” together
creating “a diverse, competitive, and balanced associational sphere.”18
Along with this organizational transition came new patterns of economic impact and
funding. Although civil society plays a significant role in serving people’s needs and stabilizing
the political system, it remains a relatively small part of the economy. A 2013 study
by Johns Hopkins university found that the nonprofit sector in the Czech Republic, for
example, accounted for just under 2 percent of all jobs and economic activity, though the
direct impact was slightly larger when adjusted to include volunteers, and the indirect,
nonmonetary effects were even more significant.19
Because civil society organizations did
their work with relatively few financial resources, wealthy outside institutions could, by
devoting only a tiny fraction of their own resources, have an outsized impact on the organization
and direction of civil society. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the Eu and
the united States, together with private philanthropists such as George Soros, funded
hundreds of consultants and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to strengthen
civil society organizations in the hopes of helping to consolidate democracy. Although
these efforts appear to have played a big role in creating the basic infrastructure for
civil society, there were limits. Critics argue this funding failed to achieve many of its
goals because recipients were concentrated in a relatively thin layer of elite nonprofits
with international connections rather than among local-level organizations with fewer
connections.20
This dependence on outside resources also led to problems for civil society
in the north and west of the region that had been the first to get aid either in donations
or advisors. By the time the other countries in the region were felt to be ready to get aid,
special-funding programs for soon-to-be Eu member states had begun to dry up. Other
outside donors then focused their efforts on the more vulnerable democracies of the south
and east.
Impact: How Does Civil Society Shape Its Surroundings?
The impact of civil society, then, depends on the combination of the rules that govern
it, the values that shape it, and the organizational capacity of its organizations. A recent
report by the World Economic Forum offered a long list of tasks that civil society
organizations perform in any society: “watchdog” over public institutions; “advocate” for
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 97
awareness of social issues; “service provider” to meet societal needs; “expert” to provide
well-crafted solutions; “capacity builder” and “incubator” to make future efforts possible;
as well as “representative,” “champion,” and “definer of standards” to identify voices that
otherwise go unheard and bring them into existing systems of governance.21
To what
extent does civil society in Central and Eastern Europe actually fulfill this role?
During the late stages of communism, dissidents excelled in the role of champion of
the people against the regime. In the absence of rival parties or opposition newspapers,
the small and vulnerable civil society organizations were representatives of the society
and its concerns by talking and writing as openly as they could about societal problems
including everything from corruption to industrial pollution as well the quality and availability
of vegetables. As democratically elected governments emerged in the early stages
of postcommunism, civil society added watchdog functions. Over time, much of the
watchdog role shifted to political parties that sought to keep one another in check, but
civil society organizations continued to advocate on issues that did not have any strong
political representation of their own. During this same period, civil society organizations
also began to respond directly to public needs and became increasingly involved in providing
services, even if they often lacked the funding to really solve the problems they
were addressing.
The surveys by uSAID measure the impact of civil society using two main
factors: advocacy, the ability of organizations to “communicate their messages through
the media to the broader public, articulate their demands to government officials, and
monitor government actions to ensure accountability,” and service provision, “the range
of goods and services that [civil society organizations] provide and how responsive these
are to community needs and priorities.”22
Civil society organizations across the region
rank higher for their advocacy than for their service provision. This is understandable
because civil society groups generally have fewer resources than governments, and it is
usually more expensive to provide services than to advocate. Furthermore, even with foreign
support, civil society organizations usually cannot afford to provide wide-reaching
services without assistance from the domestic government. The barriers to advocacy, by
contrast, are more uneven and depend heavily on how governments treat civil society.
In the most extreme cases, governments emphasize the threat posed by civil society.
Hungarian Prime Minister viktor Orbán, for example, claimed that policy advocates
from civil society organizations “are being paid by foreigners” who use this access to government
“to apply influence on Hungarian political life.”23
Orbán subsequently escalated
tensions with a law whose administrative procedures threatened to force the closure of
Central European university, a social science-oriented institution based in Budapest and
funded by Hungarian refugee and human rights advocate George Soros.
In response, many of these civil society organizations have tried to get around these
barriers by turning to more public forms of protest. Hungarian civil society has responded
not only with significant demonstrations but also with numerous smaller efforts that
that range from serious investigation of corruption by government officials to successful
gofundme.com campaigns for creating parodies of government anti-immigrant billboards
(“Come to Hungary, we’ve got jobs in London”).
In a similar vein, Poland’s 2016 Black Monday Women’s March to oppose a government
antiabortion law progressed quickly from online protest ideas—calls for women to
98 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
boycott work and to gather in public wearing black—to mass demonstrations of women
and men in more than sixty Polish cities, which closed down many businesses and government
offices and ultimately helped push the government into withdrawing the legislation.
Less than a year later, the government’s attempt to subordinate the independence
of the courts (chapter 9) led to yet another series of mass demonstrations in front of the
government and the Supreme Court and in cities around the country (including a group
claiming to represent the earlier women’s organization, along with opposition political
parties and angry citizens). In this latter case, demonstrations did not deter Polish parliament
but did strengthen the case for Poland’s president’s to veto the initial bills even
though they had been initiated by his own party.
Although the concerted efforts of a strong civil society have been unable to check the
efforts of a government that has both the desire and the parliamentary votes necessary for
undermining democratic accountability. But, the absence of victory does not mean total
defeat and, even if civil society is not the “make-or-break” factor in preventing the return
to dictatorship, it is still important because it reinforces support for the everyday work
of democratic institutions, builds connections among citizens that may later help with
mobilization, and helps secure the well-being of those who are hit hardest by political and
economic decline.
Indeed the true impact of civil society—the full expression of its values and its
capacity—is often only apparent when these organizations find themselves under
pressure. Attempts by the governments of Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia to impose
authoritarian rule in the mid-1990s led to strong and effective response by civil society
organizations, revealing strengths that had been honed under four decades of resistance to
communism combined with new tactics learned from around the world. Working independently
of political parties (though accepting European and American financial and
technical assistance), these organizations produced “rock the vote” tours, sought to boost
turnout with a campaign built around the slogan “It’s not all the same to me,” and prepared
civil disobedience that could detect and respond to evidence that the government
had manipulated election results. While these efforts probably could not have defeated
the government without an equally effective campaign of cooperation by parties in the
political opposition, they certainly helped increase the new government’s majority and
gave it political breathing room in its first years of operation. These efforts also provide
one of the earliest examples of Central Eastern civil society as an international influence
in its own right since leaders from Slovakia helped advise their counterparts in Croatia
in the following year, and representatives of both groups went on to advise civil society
organizations in Serbia in 2000 and in Georgia and ukraine in the early 2000s.
Understanding Political Parties in Central and
Eastern Europe
Civil society raised the curtain on democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, but political
parties stole the show.24
Civil society organizations moved to the margins and transformed
into a solid, stable sector of service providers and advocates. Political parties jumped to
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 99
the center of the political stage, transformed to keep up with changing circumstances
and then transformed again and again to keep up with opponents who were changing
too. In the process, Central and Eastern Europe produced complicated party systems with
many parties and rapid shifts in names and membership as well as programs. Many of
those parties built themselves in traditional ways, around economic and cultural issues
and ties to specific voting groups, but others burst in with new ideas and new ways of
organizing.
HOW POLITICAL PARTIES DEVELOPED IN A CHAOTIC REGION
Central and Eastern Europe lacked party competition between 1948 and 1989, but it
certainly never lacked political parties. In every country of the region, a single, dominant
Communist Party controlled every political institution and, though there were periodic
elections, voters usually faced the choice of voting for the sole Communist Party–
approved candidate on the ballot or risking party disapproval (or worse) by failing to vote
or making the ballot invalid with an “X” across the ballot or writing in “No.” When they
had a “choice,” the other parties on the ballots were subordinate to the Communist Party
that were sham opposition, loyal to the Communist Party but presenting themselves as
representing specific groups, like the peasants in the case of the Polish Peasant Party, for
whom the Communist Party had no appeal.
Photo 4.1. Black Monday Women’s Strikes in 2016 against the legislation which would
criminalize all abortions. (Adam Lach, NAPO)
100 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
The communist monopoly on power ended by the early 1990s. Communist parties
did not. In most countries of the region, the successors of the various communist parties
proved resilient and, while most were pushed out of office in the first years after 1989,
some actually managed to stay in governing coalitions and others returned to power
in coalitions at the next election through a combination of internal reform, strong
organization, and voters’ desire for economic protection. Some broke apart and others
changed their names to “Socialist” or “Reform” or “Labour”; but, since they began with
a huge membership base and still retained some member loyalty, most were successful
in translating the membership and inherited resources—funds, offices, and bureaucratic
connections—into strong results in the early competitive elections.
Competing against the communists in these elections were parties representing all
of the various forces that had previously opposed communist rule—those who favored
freer markets or sought more civil liberties—as well as those with strong religious belief
or national identity, and those with strong ecological concerns or other specific interests
such as larger pensions or higher farm supports (or even more specific interests such as
the Czech Republic’s “Independent Erotic Initiative” and “Friends of Beer”). In some
countries, these extremely disparate forces managed to band together into one or more
large anti-communist movements. In others, they found that cooperation more difficult.
Although all of the anti-communist movements ultimately splintered into many
parts, some of the fragments went on to become strong parties in their own right.
Many of these new parties took as their models the kinds of parties found in Western
Europe: liberal parties supporting free markets, Christian democratic parties supporting
moral values, ethnic parties supporting their own particular cultural groups, and social
democratic parties (other than the communist successors) supporting moderate redistribution
of wealth and income. Many other parties remained difficult to pin down in
those familiar terms but possessed well-known leaders who could attract votes. During the
1990s, some of these leader-driven parties (often allied with nationalist groups) sought
to stifle competition and return to one-party rule. Croatia’s Franjo Tuđman, Serbia’s
Slobodan Milošević, Slovakia’s vladimír Mečiar, and ukraine’s Leonid Kuchma all used
their executive powers to defeat or eliminate (and in some cases, apparently, kill) political
opponents who threatened to hold them accountable. They all, to varying degrees,
manipulated electoral rules and procedures to try to stay in power. Through a combination
of illness, political miscalculation, and popular counterpressure, however, none of
the four succeeded in bending the political system fully to his will (unlike parallel cases
in Russia and Belarus).
By the mid-2000s, every country in the region had developed a reasonably robust
political party system in which entities recognizable as political parties actively competed
fairly over jobs and taxes and minority rights and other predictable, if mundane, issues.
The emergence of regularized party competition did not necessarily produce stable party
systems, however, and the 2000s and 2010s brought significant disruptions by new
political parties that capitalized on public dissatisfaction with politics and the apparent
corruption of the newly entrenched postcommunist leaders. Often led by celebrities from
nonpolitical backgrounds (ranging from an ex-king to the manager of a supermarket
chain, and including colorful figures such as television investigative journalists and gameshow
hosts), these parties promised cleaner government based on new ways of thinking
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 101
(“neither left nor right but forward”) but they usually found it difficult to deliver on these
promises and faced their own outsider challenges in the elections that followed. Parties
such as Positive Slovenia (the manager), Lithuania’s Party of National Resurrection (the
game-show host), the Czech Republic’s Public Affairs (the journalist), and the National
Movement of Simeon the II (the king) rose quickly and then disappeared without a trace
one or two election cycles later, leaving space for another new party in its wake.
MEASURING POLITICAL PARTIES ACROSS TIME AND SPACE
The challenges of assessing parties are different than those of civil society. Gathering
statistics on individual parties is fairly easy because governments keep specific lists of
what count as a party and when parties compete they compete almost exclusively using
the common currencies of votes and seats. But there’s no easy way to judge the overall
health of a party system. The number of parties and the speed of change provide two
good starting points because there are dangers on both sides: too many parties can be as
dangerous as too few, and too little change can be as destructive as too much.
Fragmentation: How Many Parties?
There is no way, in the abstract, to decide on the right number of parties in a political
party system. Without at least two parties, it is hard to imagine meaningful competition,
but every addition to the party system makes it more unlikely that a majority will
agree on who will run the government and what policies it will pursue. Figure 4.2 shows
the sizes of political party systems in Central and Eastern Europe using a mathematical
formula designed to deal with the problem of how to count parties with vastly different
sizes, especially tiny parties.25
A measure of less than 2.0 on this scale suggests that one
party is significantly larger than all the rest combined, while a measure of more than 6.0
indicates a number of parties so large that cooperation becomes difficult. Figure 4.2 shows
that the average in Central and Eastern Europe has declined from the high-end of the
normal range in the early 1990s to a middle position that is now in line with political
party systems in Western Europe.
unlike the graphs for civil society strength, the graphs of fragmentation do not
show any clear geographic patterns. Slightly larger party systems were more common
in the north, particularly the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which
tended to hover between five and six systems with below-average levels of fragmentation
were more common in the south and east of the region (with the sole exception of
Bosnia and Herzegovina where the constitution separates voting along ethnic lines and
multiple parties can compete successfully for support within each of the three major
ethnic groups). Only a few countries fell below the threshold indicating one-party dominance
and it was rare for any single party to command a majority of the seats in parliament.
Some of these single-party-dominant periods were short-lived, such as Bulgaria
and Lithuania during the mid-1990s, and Slovakia in the early 2010s, but a few other
countries have seen more consistent one-party dominance, especially Montenegro, where
the Party of Democratic Socialism has dominated over other parties since 1992 and nearly
102 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
always controlled a parliamentary majority, and Hungary, where the party Fidesz gained
a two-thirds majority in parliament in 2010 against a fragmented opposition and then
repeated that performance in 2014.
Volatility: How Much Change?
The first decade of democracy in any country is often a time of extreme party system
change in political party systems as voters and politicians try various options before
deciding to settle down. Central and Eastern Europe experienced similar changes but
never actually came to rest. Calculating party volatility is measured here by the changes
in every party’s vote share from one election to the next. Like fragmentation, volatility
has “danger zones” at both the high and low ends: constant change means that voters and
politicians cannot make intelligent guesses about what will happen next and, therefore,
cannot make long-term plans. Infrequent change gives parties little incentive to listen
to voters.
Figure  4.2. Effective Number of Parliamentary Parties in Central and Eastern Europe
over Time
Source: Casal Bértoa, Ferdinand, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond,” 2017, (http://
whogoverns.eu).
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 103
volatility in Central and Eastern Europe started high and has remained high. Even
the relatively conservative measurements used in figure 4.3 show that about one-third of
all voters changed their minds from one election to the next, resulting in a volatility of
about 30 percent during the first postcommunist decade. This was three times as high
as in Western Europe during the same period. volatility dropped to around 20 percent
in the second postcommunist decade with one-fifth of all voters changing their minds.
Then, instead of declining further toward what had been West European levels, it began
to rise again in the mid-2000s and remained high in the 2010s and West European levels
also rose in this later period.
As with fragmentation, the location and timing of volatility reflect broad regional
differences. To the extent that there is any geographical pattern, it is the opposite of what
occurred in civil society. The most extreme volatility levels emerged in the northern and
western states rather than those in the south and east (though, even in those countries,
Figure 4.3. Volatility of Party Systems in Central and Eastern Europe over Time
Source: Casal Bértoa, Ferdinand, “Database on WHO GOVERNS in Europe and Beyond” (http://
whogoverns.eu).
104 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
the level of change has been well above West European levels). Part of the explanation
lies in the fragility of political parties themselves. Furthermore, economic problems and
corruption scandals do not just weaken parties’ support among voters, they kill parties
outright or cause them to splinter into many pieces, and new parties pop up out of
nowhere to fill the open spaces. Because this kind of volatility depends on the choices of
parties and their leaders, and most did not come into politics with the same party loyalties
as their counterparts in Western Europe, the region’s volatility is quite unpredictable. In
some countries, such as Slovakia, the changes have occurred frequently but at a relatively
moderate level. In other countries, such as Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and
Slovenia, periods of stability ended with massive changes to the party system. Sometimes,
the self-inflicted wounds were sudden: a leaked recording of a Hungarian prime minister’s
profanity-filled admission that “we lied morning, noon and night,” revelations in Poland
of top politicians conversations in expensive restaurants about their planned luxury
vacations and contemptuous comments on voters, and a police anti-corruption raid
on the office of the Czech prime minister. In other countries, the changes reflected the
hope for a better alternative as was the case with the return of Bulgaria’s former king as a
possible savior, and the emergence in Slovenia of a wave of new parties run by nonpolitical
outsiders.
DIMENSIONS OF POLITICAL PARTY GROWTH AND CHANGE
As with civil society, these broad measurements only scratch the surface. A deeper understanding
of parties can use the same categories as the analysis of civil society, but the
questions are different—how are parties regulated? How do they compete? How are they
organized? And how do they govern?
Space: What Institutions Shape Political Parties?
Democracies depend on elections and, since political parties are the main actors in
the electoral process, they are subject to a significant amount of regulation. As in
other regions of the world, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have distinct
regulations about how parties apply for formal registration (often requiring a petition
with a minimum number of signatures) and preventing parties from using the same
or similar names or acronyms as established parties and how they interact with their
members with a requirement that party leaders submit, periodically, to election by party
members. Government involvement is especially strong in the area of campaigns and
finance. Almost every country in the region requires full disclosure of donations and
places limits on what individuals and organizations can donate and prevents or limits
what foreign organizations can give as well as how much parties can spend. In return,
nearly all countries provide free media time for campaign advertisements and most provide
a public subsidy (in some countries as much as $10 for each vote a party receives
over a certain threshold).26
Lawmakers justify these rules and subsidies as part of an effort
to reduce the dependence of parties on hidden private interests; but, the enforcement of
disclosure requirements in many countries often depends on what party is in power and
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 105
the generous subsidies to victorious parties are seen by many as an attempt to create a
cartel to exclude potential rivals.27
Of all laws related to parties, by far the most important is the choice of an electoral
system, particularly in terms of the rules that determine how votes are translated into
seats in parliament. Except for presidential elections, where there can only be one winner,
the winner-take-all system of voting for individual candidates is extremely rare in Central
and Eastern Europe (and even in the region’s presidential voting systems the winner is
not simply the one with more votes than anybody else; if no presidential candidate wins
an outright majority of 50 percent plus one vote, then the top two candidates must face
each other in a second round of voting held several weeks later). Instead of winner-takeall,
countries in Central and Eastern Europe preferred the proportional representation
model of continental Western Europe where voters cast ballots for political parties and
the share of seats in parliament roughly matches each party’s share of the vote. (Only the
parliaments of Lithuania and Hungary have consistently used winner-take-all systems to
elect individual candidates from single-member districts, and even in these systems they
use the proportional representation system to elect a significant share of the parliament).
If proportional representation often fails to produce exactly proportional results, it is
because most systems also try to reduce fragmentation by imposing a “vote threshold”
that prevents a party from getting any seats at all unless its overall vote share exceeds a
certain threshold of about 5 percent. When many of these smaller parties are excluded,
it can help to magnify the performance of larger parties. In Poland in 2015, for example,
the threshold excluded five significant parties with a total of nearly 16 percent of the
overall vote. A result in an above-the-threshold party such as Law and Justice could benefit
from having its 37.8 percent share of the vote translated into 51.1 percent of all seats
in parliament.
Because electoral laws and electoral systems define the gateway into political power,
they can be tempting targets for political manipulation. During the first decade of
postcommunism, leaders in Slovakia, Croatia, and Serbia made significant changes in
electoral laws—switching seats from proportional to winner-take-all, raising the size of
the threshold, changing the ability of parties to band together in coalitions—often at
the last moment, in order to knock opposition parties off balance, and these were often
successful, though, in the long run, they tended to strengthen political oppositions and
unify their efforts. In subsequent decades, such attempts have been less blatant, but
parties in power continue to adjust the legal space of party competition for their own benefit,
especially in countries to the east and south such as ukraine, Albania, Montenegro,
and Macedonia, which scored lower on measurements of integrity of the electoral process
especially because of problems with government use of state media, voters excluded from
election rolls, and opaque party finance. Hungary faced particular scrutiny for manipulated
district boundaries in its winner-take-all section (a phenomenon known in the
united States as “gerrymandering”) and for its restrictive electoral regulations.28
Values: What Do Political Parties Fight About?
The only value that political parties in a democracy can be expected to agree on is the
value of democracy itself (and even that is not a certainty). Fighting about values is
106 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
what parties do and the party system is the main realm in which rival visions of a better
world can come into clearer focus. Those visions take different forms depending on the
preferences of the party. For clarity, political scientists group them into three main categories
of appeals: charisma, clientelism, and program.
While “charisma” is notoriously resistant to a precise definition, it is found when
individual leaders demonstrate they (and they alone) have solutions to their voters’
Photo  4.2. Law and Justice Party majority voting for their legal reforms. (Adam
Lach, NAPO)
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 107
deepest fears. Since charismatic parties depend on a personal connection with the leader,
they often disregard ideology and the specifics of how to solve the problem and emphasize
the leader’s ability to get things done. Many of these parties (though not all) even bear the
leader’s name: “Palikot’s Movement” and “Kukiz ’15” in Poland, “We Are Family-Boris
Kollar” in Slovakia, the “People’s Party of Dan Diaconescu” in Romania, and many others.
Clientelism involves direct transfers of resources between parties and supporters,
ranging from cash for votes to jobs for supporters to subsidies for particularly supportive
clans, industries, or neighborhoods. Research by Herbert Kitschelt finds that parties in
the south and east of the region use the most clientelism but that even the less clientelist
Baltic and višegrad countries used such tactics more than the Western Europe average
(though not much more than Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain).29
Parties in the north
and west tend to rely most on hidden “wholesale” clientelism at the national level in
which firms receive lucrative government contracts in exchange for hidden cash payments
that parties use to pay for expensive election campaigns. Parties in the south and east also
engage more frequently in “retail” clientelism at the local level, such as the use of local
community services to encourage turnout among favorable voting groups reported in
Bulgaria and Romania and even the individual cash-for-votes transactions identified in
analyses of ukrainian elections.
While charisma and clientelism are important for specific parties, the most important
differences between Central and Eastern European parties—and the strongest
sources of competition—occur on the programmatic level. Some early observers expected
that precommunist and communist legacies would sentence the region to unproductive
struggle over personalities and payments, but parties across the region quickly adopted
specific policy positions and began to compete along internationally recognizable issue
dimensions. Several common patterns began to emerge quite soon in almost every
country in the region:
• Economics. Emerging parties immediately clashed over whether markets or the government
would exert the dominant influence over economic activity. The battles took many
forms: whether to lower taxes to attract investment or raise taxes to provide more public
services in education and health care; whether to focus on the well-being of pensioners or
the opportunities for students; whether to keep industries safely in state hands or raise revenue
by privatizing them to the highest bidder; and whether those bids must come from
domestic buyers or from wealthier foreign investors with less commitment to the country’s
well-being. Social democratic and socialist parties across the region (including some
Communist-party successors) were the most frequent promoters of government intervention
in the economy, facing off against pro-market parties that used labels such as “civic,”
“free,” or “liberal” (in the classical, “small-government” sense of the word).
• Culture. Clashes over cultural values varied from country to country to a greater degree
than economic questions, but the cultural issues tended to revolve around respect
for norms of religion and moral authority such as abortion, homosexuality, and restoration
of church property previously confiscated by communists. These values,
championed by parties with labels such as “Christian” or “people’s” were initially
stronger in countries with Roman Catholic traditions such as Poland and Slovenia, but
similar emphasis has subsequently emerged also in parties in the northern Baltics and
Romania and other countries across the region. In some countries, parties emerged on
108 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
the opposite end of this dimension with calls for a free choice of lifestyle and morals,
and in the absence of strong interest in ecological questions, it is on these questions of
cultural freedom that the region’s “green” parties often focused their efforts.
• Ethnicity. Most countries in Central and Eastern Europe have a sizeable ethnic minority
with a distinct language and culture, and minority groups in those countries almost
invariably led to competition between political parties of a minority group that sought
more rights and resources and parties of the majority group.30
The ethnic dimension
sometimes also encouraged conflicts among parties of the ethnic majority about
whether to demand majority dominance or to adopt a more conciliatory stance. Nearly
every country in the region produced at least one sizeable party that went beyond
praise of the majority ethnic group to call for stronger steps against potential internal
threats such as the dangers posed by minority groups—often secession or criminality—
and potential external threats such as a flood of migrants, a loss of national identity due
to globalization or Eu rules, or mistreatment of people from the same ethnic group
living in neighboring countries. Although such extreme right (“nationalist” constitutes
yet another meaning of “right” in the region) parties have appeared across the region—
from “Attack” in Bulgaria to “All for Latvia!”—their direct role in politics has been
relatively minor, though larger parties with only slightly more moderate positions have
led governments in Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia.
In some ways, party competition along these three dimensions has come to resemble
the West European model, and recent research finds that over time voters in Central and
Eastern Europe have come to agree with party positions almost as much in the east as
in the west.31
In other ways, however, the dimensions are different. Whereas in Western
democracies, the preference for higher taxes and spending usually aligns with a more
open approach to moral judgments, this connection was almost wholly absent in Central
and Eastern Europe countries such as Slovakia. It has actually been reversed in others
such as Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria where those who wanted more government
involvement in the economy often sought a much stronger government hand on
questions of morals and national identity. This, in turn, blurred common political labels
so that a party that supports welfare spending but rejects gay marriage might call itself
either “left” (as in Slovakia) or “right” (as in Poland and Hungary).32
Although economic, cultural, and ethnic issues played the most important role,
parties also fought about issues that did not have obvious parallels in Western Europe:
• Democracy. Nearly all parties in the region claimed to support “democracy” but many
still sometimes disagree about what the term means and some see democracy as entirely
consistent with significant power in the firm hand of a charismatic leader who can put
for restrictions on rival branches of government or opposition parties or public protest
in order to preserve a higher goal such as public order, national unity, or moral cultural
values. Such conflicts have led to near collapses of democracy in Slovakia, Croatia, and
Serbia in the 1990s and ukraine in the 2000s and continue in some form to the present
especially in Montenegro, Macedonia, Hungary, and Poland where governments
have taken steps to weaken or subordinate potential sources of accountability such as
courts, oversight agencies, and the mass media. The conflicts in Hungary and Poland
are particularly worrisome because these countries, once exemplars of democracy in the
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 109
region, have begun to see a political sorting of the population between those who are
willing to tolerate a firmer political hand and those who are not. As long as advocates
of the strong hand hold a parliamentary majority capable of constitutional change, the
democratic system remains at risk.
• Corruption. The use of state resources for private gain has become a major issue in
Central and Eastern European politics, but corruption does not follow the ordinary rules
of issue competition. Parties in power cannot easily defend the corruption that may have
happened on their watch (and it is often quite significant), so they try instead to talk
about their experience or redirect public attention to other issues where they can make
stronger claims. On the other side stand antiestablishment parties—often newly created
with assertive, clever marketing and celebrity leaders from outside the political realm—
which identify corruption as the single most important issue and argue that there is no
difference between any of the existing parties, all of which should be replaced.
Closely related to the debates over democracy and corruption is the growing importance
of populism. The subject is difficult to discuss because “populism” has developed
many overlapping and contradictory meanings over recent decades and often becomes a
slur used to describe the unexpected success of an opponent (we are “popular” but they
are “populist”). If populism still has any meaning, it involves the sweeping rejection of
elites on behalf of virtuous ordinary people.33
Many (though not all) of the radical right
parties discussed above have strong populist elements, but populists do not always have
strong anti-immigrant or anti-minority tendencies. The most recent crop of populists
in Central and Eastern Europe call for a thorough housecleaning but do not offer many
details on policy positions, something that is readily apparent even in the new parties’
names: “For Latvia from the Heart,” “The Party of National Resurrection” (Lithuania),
“Dawn” (Czech Republic), “Ordinary People” (Slovakia), “Positive Slovenia,” “Bridge”
(Croatia), “Save Romania union,” and “Will” (Bulgaria).34
Without a solid programmatic
structure, these parties have rarely survived for long, and the closer they have gotten to
power the more fragile they proved to be, since once in office they have often proven to
be just as corrupt as the parties they railed against.
Structure: How Do Parties Organize and Build Relationships with Voters?
Relationships between parties and voters depend not only on issues but also on how
parties organize themselves to draw in potential supporters. As with civil society, the
organizational structures in Central and Eastern European parties are somewhat weaker
than those of Western Europe, but the lower average levels of membership and member
activity conceal a wide variation. Parties in Central and Eastern Europe follow every
possible organizational style from the deep, extensive organization of former communist
parties (carried over from when they were in power) to the intangible webs of social
media and celebrity marketing that characterize some newer party efforts. These organizational
methods are not all created equal. The lightweight celebrity and social media
method offers a recipe for short-term electoral success but this usually only works once
and, according to a long-term study by Margit Tavits, a party’s long-term survival and
sustained influence still is greatest if they have more traditional organizations with paid
employees, office spaces, and frequent membership activities.35
Some new parties have
110 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
begun to understand the advantages of organization “on-the-ground,” but then have
found that they cannot build such structures without diverting their already strained
human and financial resources away from the difficult work of becoming an effective
party in parliament or government. Many of these pay the price in the next election and
find themselves replaced by even newer parties that then face the same dilemma.36
Even the parties that have succeeded in establishing deeper societal roots have not
necessarily followed expected patterns. Traditional ideas of “class” voting—laborers
voting for left-wing parties, for example—have remained weak since the fall of communism
despite increasing social inequalities, but parties have found other ties that can
connect them to social groups. Ethnic voting patterns in particular are so strong that
nearly all members of minority populations vote for ethnically defined parties such as the
“Democratic union for Integration” supported by ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, the
“Movement for Rights and Freedoms” supported by ethnic Turks in Bulgaria, and various
parties supported by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia and by ethnic Russians
in the Baltics. Religious patterns also shape party support (especially in Roman Catholic
countries) because frequent churchgoers give strong support to parties with clear positions
on cultural morality. They sometimes refer to themselves as Christian Democrats. Major
differences in party choice have also emerged between younger city dwellers with high
education and potential for advancement who support parties such as Slovakia’s “Freedom
and Solidarity” or Slovenia’s “Party of the Modern Center” and older voters living in the
countryside with few opportunities to get ahead who support parties such as Poland’s
“Law and Justice” and the Croatian Democratic union.
Impact: How Do Political Parties Turn Values and Votes into Policy?
The main way that parties shape their surroundings is by winning elections and using
their power to determine government policy. The question of where to focus their electoral
efforts is made easier by the fact that almost all the constitutions of the region create
centralized, parliamentary systems of government. This means that political power in the
region rests mainly in national-level legislatures and in prime ministers and cabinets that
are chosen by the parliament and serve only as long as they can maintain parliamentary
support.37
Furthermore, since proportional representation means that few parties win
majorities in parliament, prime ministers are usually forced to depend on coalitions of
several parties that have agreed to work together. The impact of parties thus depends
on their ability to work with other parties and at the same time maintain their own
internal unity.
Coalitions are difficult work, and finding one or more appropriate partners for the
long run is difficult. Most of the region’s coalitions parties share values on at least one of
the major dimensions, whether economic, cultural, or national. No combination is easy
but some governments found common cause or pliant partners that received support for
specific issues: in Hungary, for example, the nominally left-leaning Hungarian Socialist
Party could agree on morality issues (and some economic ones) with the culturally liberal
Free Democrats, while in Poland the pro-market Civic Platform was willing to take
care of some of the rural interests of the Polish Peasants’ Party. But the lure of power has
even brought bitter enemies into the same government, such as the decision of the Slovak
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 111
National Party to join with the “Bridge” party of ethnic Hungarians in the 2016 coalition
of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico. These combinations face constant challenges,
however, and the increasing importance of other dimensions where the partners do not
agree can break a government, as can scandals, and other factors such as the illness or
death of a leader. On average, governments in the region have served out only about half
of their possible terms before a crisis in cooperation among parties has led to a new prime
minister, a new coalition, or new elections that shuffle the parliament and cause the whole
process of coalition building to start over again.38
Civil Society and Political Parties Looking Forward
Communism in Central and Eastern Europe lasted for four decades. Postcommunism is
now approaching the same age. Whether it lives longer than its predecessor will depend
in no small part on the functioning of civil society and political parties. At the moment,
those two intertwined sectors look reasonably healthy in most of the region. Civil society
organizations and parties have not fully replicated their counterparts in Western Europe,
either in form, density, or strength, but in most cases, they bear a fair resemblance to the
institutions of successful democracies elsewhere in the world.
But that does not mean that there is no reason for concern. Some of the dangers are
immediately familiar, most notably the Hungarian example of what happens when one
organization—in this case a political party—becomes both strong and ambitious enough
to drive its rivals—both parties and civil society organizations—into submission. Strong
civil society and robust party systems cannot alone prevent the return of chaos or autocracy
(especially when promoted by powerful foreign interests such as Russia), but they
are the best hope.
Other challenges stem not from the region’s history and geography but from elsewhere
in the rapidly changing world. Civil societies and parties re-emerged in Central and
Eastern Europe just as the world was rushing to an entirely new model of communication
and organization that was both more flexible and more fragile. In older democracies, these
innovations faced inertia from well-entrenched organizations, but in Central and Eastern
Europe the fall of communism meant that alternatives were much weaker. The resulting
loose organization of civil society and rapid turnover of political parties may not pose an
immediate threat, but the region must figure out how to ensure stability and plan for the
future despite with organizations that do not expect to survive the next election or the
next funding cycle. Though this next revolution lacks the drama of 1989, the decisions of
parties and organizations of Central and Eastern Europe still deserve our close attention.
Study Questions
1. What functions do civil society and political parties have in common? How are they
different?
2. How have civil society organizations changed from their role under communist rule
to their role in the political change of the 1990s to their role in today’s democracy?
112 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
3. How do civil society organizations differ geographically across Central and Eastern
Europe? Which countries stand out as different from their neighbors and what is
different about them?
4. How do electoral laws and electoral systems shape what political parties are like in
Central and Eastern Europe?
5. What kinds of value conflicts shape the competition among political parties in Central
and Eastern Europe? How do these differ from (or resemble) the competition in your
own country?
Suggested Readings
Anheier, Helmut K., and Lisa Carlson. The Civil Society Diamond: A Primer. CIvICuS: World
Alliance for Citizen Participation, 2001. Available online: http://www.civicus.org/view/media/
CDMethodologyPrimer2.pdf.
Berglund, Sten, Joakim Ekman, Kevin Deegan-Krause, and Terje Knutsen. The Handbook of
Political Change in Eastern Europe. 3rd ed. Cheltenham, uK: Edward Elgar, 2013.
Ekiert, Grzegorz, Jan Kubik, and Michal Wenzel. “Civil Society and Three Dimensions of
Inequality in Post-1989 Poland.” Comparative Politics 49 (April 2017): 331–50.
Foa, Roberto Stefan, and Grzegorz Ekiert. “The Weakness of Postcommunist Civil Society
Reassessed.” European Journal of Political Research 56 (2017): 419–39.
Howard, Marc Morjé. The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 2003.
Mudde, Cas, and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser. Populism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
university Press, 2017.
Post, Robert C., and Nancy L. Rosenblum, eds. Civil Society and Government. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton university Press, 2001.
united States Agency for International Development (uSAID). The 2015 CSO Sustainability Index
for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. 2015. Available online: https://www.usaid.gov/sites/
default/files/documents/1861/Europe_Eurasia_CSOSIReport_2015_update8-29-16.pdf.
Ware, Alan. Political Parties and Party Systems. Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1996.
Websites
varieties of Democracy (v-Dem) Project, https://www.v-dem.net
Party Systems and Governments Observatory, https://whogoverns.eu
Political Data yearbook Interactive, http://www.politicaldatayearbook.com
Notes
1. Helmut K. Anheier and Lisa Carlson, The Civil Society Diamond: A Primer (CIvICuS: World
Alliance for Citizen Participation, 2001), 3. Available online: http://www.civicus.org/view/media/
CDMethodologyPrimer2.pdf.
2. Roberto Stefan Foa and Grzegorz Ekiert, “The Weakness of Post-Communist Civil Society
Reassessed,” European Journal of Political Research 56 (2017): 421.
CIvIL SOCIETy AND POLITICAL PARTIES 113
3. Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1996), 5.
4. Nancy L. Rosenblum, “Primus Inter Pares: Political Parties and Civil Society,” Chicago Kent
Law Review 75, no. 2 (2000): 493–529, available at http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cklawreview/
vol75/iss2/9.
5. Grzegorz Ekiert, Jan Kubik, and Michal Wenzel, “Civil Society and Three Dimensions of
Inequality in Post-1989 Poland,” Comparative Politics 49 (April 2017): 335.
6. See Michael Coppedge, et al., “v-Dem [Country-year/Country-Date] Dataset v7.1,” varieties
of Democracy (v-Dem) Project, 2017. Measurements conducted by the international nongovernmental
organization Civicus and the united States Agency for International Development (uSAID)
tell similar stories.
7. Anheir and Carlson, The Civil Society Diamond, 6.
8. See Robert C. Post and Nancy L. Rosemblum, eds., Civil Society and Government (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton university Press, 2001), 8–12.
9. united States Agency for International Development (uSAID), The 2015 CSO Sustainability
Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 2015. Available online: https://www.usaid.gov/
sites/default/files/documents/1861/Europe_Eurasia_CSOSIReport_2015_update8-29-16.pdf.
10. János Kornai, “Hungary’s u-Turn,” Capitalism and Society 10, no. 1 (2015): 6. Available
online: http://www.kornai-janos.hu/Kornai_Hungary's%20u-Turn.pdf.
11. Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 2003), 10.
12. Ekiert, Kubik, and Wenzel, “Inequality in Post-1989 Poland,” 339.
13. Ekiert, Kubik, and Wenzel, “Inequality in Post-1989 Poland,” 339.
14. Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein, “Bad Civil Society,” Political Theory 29, no.  6
(2001): 844.
15. uSAID, The 2015 CSO Sustainability Index.
16. Ekiert, Kubik, and Wenzel, “Inequality in Post-1989 Poland,” 334.
17. Ekiert, Kubik, and Wenzel, “Inequality in Post-1989 Poland,” 333.
18. Ekiert, Kubik, and Wenzel, “Inequality in Post-1989 Poland,” 335.
19. Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Megan A. Haddock, and Helen S. Tice, The
State of Global Civil Society and Volunteering (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins university Center for
Civil Society Studies, 2013), 2–3.
20. Christine Mahoney and Michael J. Beckstrand, “Following the Money: European union
Funding of Civil Society Organizations,” Journal of Common Market Studies 49, no. 6 (2011): 1339.
21. World Economic Forum, The Future Role of Civil Society, 2013, 9. Available online: http://
www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_FutureRoleCivilSociety_Report_2013.pdf.
22. uSAID, The 2015 CSO Sustainability Index.
23. viktor Orbán, Prime Minister viktor Orbán’s Speech at the 25th Bálványos Summer Free
university and Student Camp. Website of the Hungarian Government, 2015. Available online:
http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-
viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp.
24. Much of the work in this section derive from a chapter written with Zsolt Enyedi on “voters
and Parties in Eastern Europe” that is forthcoming in Adam Fagan and Petr Kopecký, eds., The
Routledge Handbook of East European Politics (uK: Routledge, 2017).
25. Fragmentation is tied to the number of parties but it is not just of a matter of counting the
number of parties on the ballot. The formula for fragmentation weighs both the number and size
of parties so that a few big parties will register low fragmentation while many small parties will
register high fragmentation and a mix will register a level in between.
26. Marijn van Klingeren, Margarita Orozco, Joost van Spanje, and Claes de vreese, “Party
Financing and Referendum Campaigns in Eu States, European Parliament Directorate-General for
114 KEvIN DEEGAN-KRAuSE
Internal Policies.” Available online: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STuD/2015/
519217/IPOL_STu(2015)519217_EN.pdf.
27. Fernando Casal Bértoa and Ingrid van Biezen, eds., The Regulation of Post-Communist Party
Politics (uK: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).
28. Pippa Norris and Max Grömping, “Populist Threats to Electoral Integrity:  The year
in Elections 2016–2017.” Electoral Integrity Project, 31–35. Available online:  https://www.
electoralintegrityproject.com/data/.
29. Herbert Kitschelt, Clientelism and Party Competition. Lecture delivered at Central
European university, March 8, 2017. Available online: https://sites.duke.edu/democracylinkage/
files/2014/12/2.5.Kitschelt.pdf.
30. Some countries such as Poland, Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, and Serbia formally reserve a
small number of seats for representatives of small ethnic minorities that otherwise might not be
able to pass the parliamentary threshold, though these often sided with the parliamentary majority
in the hope of gaining tangible benefits for the group.
31. Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield, The Strain of Representation (Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 2012).
32. Jan Rovny and Erica Edwards, “Struggle over Dimensionality:  Party Competition in
Western and Eastern Europe,” East European Politics & Societies 26, no. 1 (2012): 56–74.
33. Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford university Press, 2017).
34. A similar phenomenon has subsequently had a profound effect on political competition in
Italy (Five Star Movement), Spain (We Can and Citizens), Greece (The River), and France as well
as in Asia, Latin America, and the united States.
35. Margit Tavits, Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization (New york: Cambridge
university Press, 2013).
36. Tim Haughton and Kevin Deegan-Krause, “Hurricane Season:  Systems of Instability
in Central and East European Party Politics,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 29, no.  1
(2005): 61–80.
37. Although many countries in the region have popularly elected presidents, most of those
presidents have relatively weak positions in the overall political system.
38. Courtney Ryals Conrad and Sona N.  Golder, “Measuring Government Duration and
Stability in Central Eastern European Democracies,” European Journal of Political Research 49
(2010): 119–50.