Patterns of Stability: Party Competition and Strategy in Central Europe since 1989

During the decade and a half since the collapse of communism in 1989, the four Central European states have achieved a remarkable degree of party system stability, confounding pessimistic predictions about unstable competition, weak parties and limited institutionalization. This stability, and variations within the region, raises important questions about party system stability and change. The present article explores the patterns of party competition in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and finds that party system stability is largely a function of party strategy. The broadly successful strategies of former communist and new social democratic parties have stabilized the left wing of the systems in the first three cases, whereas the Slovak left has struggled. However, while efforts to define and dominate the centre–right have yielded some stabilization in Hungary and the Czech Republic, similar efforts in Poland have been less decisive. In Slovakia, the struggle against Mec .iar has eclipsed other bloc-building strategies, and accounts for much of the instability. In both Poland and Slovakia, relatively open electoral systems in the early years worked against unitary strategies, at least for some parties. However, apart from this, constraints on party strategy were weak in the first decade, and many strategies were attempted. In such a context, party strategy therefore becomes a particularly powerful explanation of differences in patterns of party system stability.