Women’s Parties in Post-Communist Politics

Despite a growing interest in party development in post-communist politics, relatively little work has specifically examined the development of women’s parties in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Two questions motivate this research: (1) Why did women’s parties emerge in some of the post-communist states and not in others? (2) Do parties with different origins appeal to different kinds of women supporters? This article finds that, first, political/institutional factors rather than socioeconomic or cultural factors better explain the emergence of women’s parties, and, second, that the women’s parties attracted different voters than other parties and that they differed from each other as well. This in part was due to the very different origins of parties such as theWomen of Russia, the Shamiram Women’s Party, and the Lithuanian Women’s Party.