Casal Bertoa Parties - Regime - and - Cleavages - Explaining

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Parties, regime and cleavages:

explaining party system
institutionalisation in East Central
Europe
a
Fernando Casal Bértoa
a
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and
Behavioural Sciences, University of Leiden, Leiden, The
Netherlands
Version of record first published: 24 Oct 2012.
To cite this article: Fernando Casal Bértoa (2012): Parties, regime and cleavages: explaining party
system institutionalisation in East Central Europe, East European Politics, 28:4, 452-472
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East European Politics
Vol. 28, No. 4, December 2012, 452– 472
ARTICLE
Parties, regime and cleavages: explaining party system institutionalisation
in East Central Europe
Fernando Casal Bértoa∗
Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Leiden,
Leiden, The Netherlands
(Received 14 December 2011; final version received 20 April 2012)
Downloaded by [University Of Pittsburgh] at 12:21 28 April 2013
Party system institutionalisation has traditionally been viewed as a necessary, but not sufficient,
condition for the healthy functioning of democracy; yet the question of why some of these
competitive party systems managed to institutionalise at the end of the second decade of
party politics while others have not has not received the necessary attention. In order to
begin to fill this gap, this article tackles the above-cited issue by trying to discover what
have been the ‘causal mechanisms’ explaining the different levels of institutionalisation
observed in East Central European party systems. In order to do so, and contrary to the
predominant literature, it constitutes a serious attempt to bring together both institutional
and sociological approaches.
Keywords: Central Europe; elections; political parties; post-communism
Introduction
Party system institutionalisation (PSI) has traditionally been viewed as a necessary, but not suffi-
cient, condition for the healthy functioning of democracy (Pridham 1990, Mainwaring 1999).
However, and notwithstanding the burgeoning interest in its consequences, little has been done
to discover what institutionalises party systems in the first place.1
Building on the theoretical approach proposed by Mair (1997) and empirically developed in
Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (2010), this article aims at providing an answer to the question of how
such institutionalisation occurs and why it varies so much across countries through a comparative
analysis of the process of PSI in East Central European (ECE) democracies, defined for the pur-
poses of this study as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Bearing in mind that ‘if
the concept of area is to be operationally meaningful for the purpose of comparison, it should cor-
respond to some uniform political patterns against which differences may be studied compara-
tively and explained’ (Macridis and Cox 1964, pp. 102 – 103), their similarities in terms of
historical past, political– economic transition and democratic consolidation reinforce the argu-
ment for treating the Visegrad countries together as a compact case study of PSI.
The first section of the article develops an analytical perspective on the operationalisation of
PSI. The degree of institutionalisation in ECE party systems is captured in the second section. The
next section briefly looks at the different sources of systemic institutionalisation as well as dis-
cusses the methodology applied. The fourth section examines the impact of institutions and
∗
Email: f.casal.bertoa@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
ISSN 2159-9165 print/ISSN 2159-9173 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2012.720569
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East European Politics 453
cleavages on partisan competition as more or less successful inducements to institutionalisation.

Finally, the last section concludes with a summary of the main findings.
PSI: conceptualisation and operationalisation

Despite the substantial body of literature devoted to the concept (see Meleshevich 2007 or
Randall and Svåsand 2002), the notion of PSI has no established definition. Briefly summarising
a discussion sketched out elsewhere (Casal Bértoa 2011), most authors dealing with the concept
have simply proposed a series of ‘dimensions’, without paying much attention to the conceptu-
alisation itself.
Notwithstanding the latter, all conceptualisations of PSI contain the idea of stability and per-
sistence in the rules and nature of inter-party competition (Mainwaring and Scully 1995). As a
consequence, and bearing in mind that the core of a party system is to be found in the patterns
of interaction among its subunits (i.e. political parties) (Mair 2006), I consider PSI to be the
process by which the patterns of interaction among political parties become routine, predictable,
and stable over time (Mair 2001, Bakke and Sitter 2005a). In other words, a system of parties can
be said to be institutionalised when political parties cooperate, collaborate, and colligate in a stan-
dardised and structured way (Mainwaring 1998). If this is not the case, and political parties fail to
present voters with clearly stable political alliances and, therefore, predictable governmental
alternatives, party systems are considered to be under-institutionalised (Mair 2001, p. 39).
In order to assess the level of institutionalisation in new post-communist party systems, I will
rely on Mair’s framework for party system analysis which can determine whether a party system
is or not institutionalised by focusing on the patterns of inter-party competition (for government).2
Putting it briefly, party systems are considered to be institutionalised if (1) alternations of govern-
ments are either total or none; (2) governing alternatives are stable over a long period of time; and
(3) some parties (‘outsiders’) are permanently excluded from participation in national government
and weakly institutionalised when there are (a) partial alternations of governments, (b) no stable
compositions of governing alternatives, and (c) access to government has been granted to all rel-
evant parties (Mair 1997, 2001).
In order to minimise subjective judgements and opinions in the measurement of PSI, I quan-
titatively operationalise each of the factors suggested above. First of all, the degree of governing
alternations of political parties is captured by the so-called index of government alternation (IGA),
which simply adapts Pedersen’s (1979) well-known index of electoral volatility to the measure-
ment of a nation’s ministerial volatility (MV). In particular, the latter is calculated by adding the
net change in percentage of ministers (including the prime minister) gained and lost by each party
from one government3 to the next and then dividing by two. However, if the MV initial score
obtained according to the formula described above is lower than 50 (i.e. ideal partial alternation),
the former figure will be subtracted from 100, because wholesale alternation (both total and none)
can be reflected by scores at both extremes of the MV scale (both 100 and 0, respectively). If MV
is higher than 50, the IGA will be equal to the initial MV score.
The second criterion, based on assessing whether or not the party or combination of parties
has governed before in that particular format, is captured by the index of familiar alternation,
which measures the percentage of ministries belonging to familiar combinations of parties.
Finally, in clear contrast to the previous two factors, access to government is measured by the
index of closure which simply takes into consideration the percentages of ministries belonging
to ‘old governing parties’.4
Because time is particularly important when trying to measure the level of PSI in a country
(Mair 1997), I also consider all years a particular cabinet has lasted, understanding that if there
have been two or more cabinets in one year, then the averages of the scores for the different
454 F. Casal Bértoa
above-cited government features characterise the year better than any of such individual factors
(Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2010, p. 20). Finally, I use the standardised (z-) score of the three vari-
ables in order to avoid measuring incompatible scores. The addition of all these three z-scores
gives the final degree of system institutionalisation in what I have named ‘composite index of
PSI’ (iPSI). Such an index has the clear advantage of paying due attention to stability as the
sole dimension of institutionalisation.
PSI in East Central Europe

Kostelecký, echoing the conclusions of the majority of scholars, has suggested that ‘the party
systems of East-Central Europe resemble those of Western Europe much more now, in the begin-
ning of the new millennium, than they did in the early 1990s’ (2002, p. 177; see also Birch 2003,
Bakke and Sitter 2005a). Although this is largely true, the comparison with the West should not be
exaggerated: even though two of the most institutionalised party systems in the region can be found
in Hungary and in the Czech Republic, the patterns of inter-party competition of the other two ‘Vise-
grad’ democracies are still very far from becoming well established (especially in Poland).
Hungarian scholars argue that ‘still qualifying as volatile according to the standards of later
twentieth-century Western politics, Hungary has produced one of the most consolidated party
systems in the post-communist world’ (Enyedi 2006, p. 178, Tóka and Henjak 2007). This
observation is certainly correct even when compared to other highly institutionalised new
Western European democracies (e.g. Greece and Spain). Thus, in Hungary, where the mechanics
of competition for government took shape rather quickly in a ‘left’ (i.e. MDSZ and the liberals)
versus ‘right’ (FIDESZ plus other minor conservative parties) contest, the patterns of inter-party
competition for government have shown remarkable stability. Almost from the very beginning
and certainly from 1998, the Hungarian party system has been the most institutionalised in
post-communist Europe, in general, and in East Central Europe, in particular (Casal Bértoa
and Mair 2012; see also Figure 1).
The Czech Republic’s party system is more institutionalised than the other two, but definitely
less than Hungary’s. Interestingly, while there have been fewer governments in the Czech
Figure 1. ECE party systems in comparative perspective (1990–2011).

Note: According to the Freedom House political and civil liberties index, all post-communist countries
included in the figure are to be considered democratic (i.e. score of 2 or lower) for the periods displayed.
Despite being a democracy since 2009, Montenegro has been excluded from the sample due to the lack
of at least one government alternation.
Republic (all of them after elections) than in the other three countries, the Czech party system dis-
plays a rather mixed picture in relation to the first criterion examined here. Thus, while govern-
ment alternations were wholesale during the first 10 years of democratic politics, the current
tendency is towards more and more partiality. In the same vein, governing formulae (certainly
familiar until 2002) have opened up due to the formation of new parties, although never as exten-
sively as the levels experienced in both Slovakia and Poland. Extremist parties, including the
Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, continue to be systematically excluded from partici-
pating in government.5 Notwithstanding this recent wave of destabilisation, the direction of com-
petition in the Czech Republic, as much as in Hungary, continues to point to a ‘bipolar structure’
(Lewis 2006, p. 570) opposing with two opposing camps: the social-democrat (ČSSD) and the
liberal-conservative (ODS), with some minor parties (the Christian Democratic Party until
2010 and TOP09 as well as Public Affairs since then) in the role of ‘swing parties’ or kingmakers.
In comparison with the previous two cases, the Slovak party system is still weakly institutio-
nalised. In clear contrast to Hungary and the Czech Republic, government alternations in Slovakia
have often taken place between elections, with a clear tendency towards partiality.6 Unlike the
previous two cases, however, the degree of formula familiarity has been rather low, with up to
11 different combinations of political parties. Likewise, access to executive positions can be con-
sidered to still be open, as all ‘relevant’ parties – including the radical right, the parties of the
Hungarian minority, and various other newly formed parties – have had the opportunity to
enjoy office at least once.
Finally, government alternation has been predominantly irregular and partial in the Polish
party system, even if some instances of wholesale alternation (especially after elections) are
also observed. Moreover, and with the minor exception of Tusk’s second cabinet, innovative
coalition governments have been the norm (e.g. socialists with peasants, conservatives with lib-
erals, conservatives with populists, or liberals with peasants). Finally, in terms of access to power,
the Polish party system can also be considered to be particularly open. If we take into account all
the parties with parliamentary representation between 1993 and 2011 (14 in total),7 only two
parties (KPN and ROP) have not formed part of the government at least once.
Figure 1 presents an overview of the level of stability in the structure of inter-party compe-
tition for government in ECE democracies in relation to other new post-communist party
systems during the period 1990 – 2011. The most evident conclusion derived from these
summary data is that post-communist party systems have institutionalised at different rates and
in different ways.8 Among the Visegrad countries, it is possible to distinguish two opposite para-
digms: highly institutionalised (iPSI.2) Hungary and under-institutionalised (iPSI≤ 22)
Poland. Both the institutionalised Czech party system (iPSI.1) and its weakly institutionalised
Slovak counterpart (iPSI,0) are to be found in between. The rest of the article will attempt to
explain this variation.
Sources of PSI: methodology

Comparative political theory offers different possible (co-)explanations for the distinct levels of
PSI observed in new and old democracies, namely: institutional, sociological, historical, econ-
omic, temporal, and international (see the appendix). In this article, where the number of alterna-
tive explanatory variables (16) clearly dwarfs the sample of cases available for analysis (4), I will
make use of a ‘most-similar-systems’ design, a methodology particularly well suited for ‘area
studies’ (Przeworski and Teune 1970) and, on the whole, extremely useful for analyses which
focus on the systemic level (Anckar 2008, p. 4) and present researchers with the so-called
small N, many variables problem (Lijphart 1975, p. 163). Therefore, the idea is that by carefully
matching all the cases under study across the different (potential) explanatory factors found in the
institutionalisation literature, I can reduce the number of (possible) ‘causal linkages’ to the
minimum and thus be able to achieve a more ‘focused’ comparison which simply centres on
relevant ‘independent’ variables that might account for the differences in degrees of systemic
institutionalisation observed (Landman 2003, Anckar 2008).
In this context, the natural experiment produced by the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993
and the comparison of its two former federal states, characterised by identical (not just similar)
‘background conditions’, will be exceptionally useful when trying to hold constant certain
crucial independent variables (the length of previous democratic experience, authoritarian
break, and the year of political transformation). Likewise, the fact that both Hungary and
Poland display completely opposite degrees of systemic institutionalisation despite sharing a
common communist legacy (i.e. national-authoritarianism) allows me to exclude historical
‘path dependence’ as a possible explanatory variable. Moreover, because we are dealing with
countries which match closely in terms of system of government (all are centralised states), elec-
toral system (all are proportional, except Hungary, which is mixed), party funding regulations
(both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary parties are state-funded), political culture (as heirs
of the Habsburg empire, all belong to the Catholic sphere), and the time of transition (all demo-
cratised during the so-called Third Wave), as well as their proximity to the Western European
region (all joined the European Union on 1 May 2004), I am able to exclude five alternative
‘causal’ factors (i.e. nature of the state, electoral system, party funding, sequence/time of tran-
sition, and international). A similar decision can be adopted in relation to polarisation due to
the obvious mismatch between ideological distance and systemic institutionalisation: namely,
neither the more (i.e. Czech Republic) nor the least polarised (i.e. Slovakia) party systems corre-
spond with the more and least institutionalised states. Finally, the four countries analysed here
share not only a common economic past based on centralised planning, but also a rather
similar economic development since the time of transformation in 1989 – 1990. As a result, econ-
omic structural differences (e.g. GDP, inflation, and unemployment) are not enough to explain the
distinct levels of systemic institutionalisation observed.
The synopsis given in Table A1 (see the appendix) sums up the previous findings, pointing to
the fact that, after leaving aside the ‘similar’ variables mentioned in the previous paragraph, I am
able to reduce the number of potentially ‘causal’ factors by 75%.9 Using the four remaining inde-
pendent variables (i.e. party institutionalisation, parliamentary fragmentation, type of regime, and
cleavage structuration), I will proceed – using ‘process tracing’ – to examine the impact that each
factor has had on the process of systemic institutionalisation for each of the countries under analy-
sis, providing some interesting conclusions on the ‘causal mechanisms’ of PSI.
Sources of PSI in East Central Europe: institutional, sociological, or both?

Party institutionalisation
According to the majority of scholars, few institutional developments are more critical to the insti-
tutionalisation of a country’s party system than the development of institutionalised political
parties (Dix 1992, Toole 2000, Lewis 2006). The logic is that if PSI as a process is about stabilis-
ing patterns of interaction among a ‘manageable’ number of political parties, then party institu-
tionalisation – understood as the process by which parties form consistent patterns of mass
mobilisation and internal organisation – certainly constitutes a necessary, but not sufficient, con-
dition for the institutionalisation of the party system as a whole (Casal Bértoa and Mair 2012). In
other words, electoral stability and organisational continuity allow political parties to manage
their wider environment successfully, generating an air of permanence and durability which is
in itself conducive to predictability in the actual patterns of inter-party competition. Comparative
political theory points to a number of reasons why the institutionalisation of individual political
parties may foster the institutionalisation of the party system as a whole.
First of all, for the patterns of partisan interaction in a particular country to become stable and
predictable over time, the subunits of the system (i.e. political parties) need to be relatively con-
tinuous (Moser 2001, p. 36, Rose and Munro 2009). The idea is that political elites act in a struc-
tured way only when political parties are fairly constant, as elites can rely on the expected
behaviour of the actors they already know. Thus, only when the same parties interact within
the different arenas of competition, that is, when the same parties contest elections, get into par-
liament, and participate in the formation of governments, the structure of competition (mainly in
terms of governing formula and access) can become closer over time and, therefore, institutiona-
lise. In other words, (party) continuity bolsters (systemic) stability.
In order for the latter to occur, parties need to have stable roots in society, as it will affect the
party’s ability to deliver voters and, consequently, its ability to enter parliament and its chances
of joining office. The logic behind the previous statement is twofold. On the one hand, because
they are characterised by an enduring core of (homogenously distributed) electoral supporters,
socially rooted parties can avoid the kind of massive electoral shifts that lead to unexpected
swings in the balance of parliamentary power, which is detrimental for the stability of the pat-
terns of competition in the process of government formation. On the other hand, because the
close identification of the parties with their faithful followers (both member and voters)
prompts a certain continuity in their ideological positions (Mainwaring and Zoco 2007), socially
rooted parties contribute substantially both to the formation of familiar (ideologically proximate)
governing coalitions and to the closing of the electoral market (i.e. access).10 In other words,
parties’ stable roots in society help to provide the routinisation of partisan competition
implied by (systemic) institutionalisation by offering predictability in electoral outcomes and
ideological platforms.
The development of strong partisan organisations is equally important for the institutionalisa-
tion of the structure of inter-party competition. The main reason for this is that only parties with
well-developed organisations can guarantee their presence in the next election, thereby offering
the system predictability and institutionalisation. Indeed, when parties come and go in different
formats (i.e. split and/or merge), PSI tends to suffer due to the massive electoral and coalition-
related shifts that organisational uncertainty creates. In other words, because neither voters nor
political elites are sure about the ideological stance of the different ‘changing’ party labels,
both electoral and coalitional behaviours become unpredictable. In sum, paraphrasing Sartori
(1990 [1968], p. 75), it is possible to conclude stating that one of the critical factors in bringing
about the institutionalisation of a party system is the appearance of institutionalised political
parties which, acting as a ‘lock-in’ mechanism of organisational change and political behaviour,
help the structure of competition to settle into a predictable and stable equilibrium.
In order to try to capture the degree to which ECE political parties have themselves institu-
tionalised, I have opted to use the average age of the parties which have obtained 10% or
more of the votes in the last legislative elections as an indicator in this article, which is a standard
indicator of party institutionalisation.11 The idea is that ‘the older an organisation is, the more
likely it is to endure even longer’ (Dix 1992, p. 491).
Figure 2 offers an overview of the level of institutionalisation achieved by ECE political
parties in the period under study. Assessing the data presented there, it is obvious that there
are striking variations in the extent to which political parties have been institutionalised in the
different ECE party systems. Indeed, while most of the ‘relevant’ Hungarian and Czech parties
were founded at the beginning of the transition (e.g. Fidesz, MSZP, KSCM, CSSD, and ODS),
the current ‘core’ parties in both Slovakia and Poland started to take shape only at the beginning
of the century (e.g. Smer in 1999, SDKÚ in 2000, and PO and PiS in 2001).
Figure 2. Party and PSI in ECE.

Note: Political parties with at least 10% of the votes in the last parliamentary elections.
This is not to say that there was no space in the party system for the appearance of new
political forces, since the difference in terms of organisational stability among the four cases
under consideration is straightforward. Thus, while there were no more than five or six parlia-
mentary parties in both Hungary and the Czech Republic, the degree of parliamentary turnout
in both Slovakia and Poland has been significant (Bakke and Sitter 2005a, p. 249). Indeed,
while the number of ‘new’ parliamentary parties is as low as three in the first two countries
(i.e. MIÉP, Jobbik, and LPM in Hungary; US, TOP09, and VV in the Czech Republic), in
the latter two it reaches up to nine (i.e. Smer, SDKÚ, SaS, OKS, Most, SOP, KSS, ZRS,
and ANO in Slovakia; PO, PiS, RP, SdPL, SO, LPR, BBWR, ROP, and UP in Poland).12
Moreover, up to nine of these cases of party creation (four in Poland and five in Slovakia)
were the product of internal splits in existing political organisations, making the patterns of
inter-party cooperation less stable and less predictable over time.13 Indeed, mainly due to per-
sonal clashes, parties have come and gone in different formats in both Poland and Slovakia,
forcing voters to shift allegiances and, in turn, making partisan interaction and coalition for-
mation uncertain. This has clearly contrasted with the organisational strength displayed by
Hungarian and Czech political parties, where parties are not only more socially rooted
(Lewis 2006) but, with few exceptions (e.g. MIÉP, US, and TOP09), have remained organisa-
tionally untouchable (van Biezen and Caramani 2007).14
If the idea is that systemic stability can only take place when the same parties contest elec-
tions, get into parliament, and participate in the formation of governments (Toole 2000, Moser
2001, Rose and Munro 2009), it seems that variance in the degree of institutionalisation of
ECE political parties associates perfectly with the differences observed at the systemic level,
suggesting a ‘causal’ relationship between these two variables.
Party system format

In what can perhaps be considered one of the most important contributions to the study of party
systems, Sartori (1976, p. 120) suggested that the number and size of parties may give us a gauge
not only of the fragmentation/concentration of political power and the number of possible inter-
action streams, but also of the likely tactics of partisan competition and opposition as well as gov-
ernment formation possibilities in a country. Departing from this idea, scholars started to use the
number of parties as an indicator of PSI (e.g. Morlino 1998, Bielasiak 2002, Horowitz and
Browne 2005, etc.).
Unfortunately, the fact that ‘relationships [among parties] depends on numbers’ (Wolinetz
2006, p. 60) does not mean that the number of parties reflects those relationships (and inter-
actions). For example, at point A, the ‘relevant’ number of parties in a party system is three
and is also three at point B (e.g. four or eight years later). According to the above-cited scholars,
such a party system should be considered stable. However, the reality could be very diverse as, on
the one hand, political parties could be interacting in completely different ways: for instance, ‘1
vs. 2’ (e.g. Portugal) or ‘1 vs. 1 vs. 1’ (e.g. Great Britain in the 1920s) or ‘1 vs. 1, with the third
performing the role of a hinge party’ (e.g. Germany). On the other hand, we may be dealing with
three completely different political parties (e.g. fascists, Christian democrats, and communists at
point A; and conservatives, agrarians, socialists, and liberals at point B). Moreover, a change from
three to four or more parties over a given period of time would not tell us whether the level of
systemic stability has really decreased as a system with four relevant parties grouped in two com-
pletely inimical ideological blocs (e.g. Italy in the 1990s) could be considered to be more stable
than a system where three parties alternate in power following each of the previously mentioned
patterns in turn.
All in all, beyond the above-cited ‘initial’ information, the number of parties in a system tells
us nothing in itself about how political parties interact (Mair 2006, p. 65, Wolinetz 2006, pp. 57,
59). This is not to say that the number of parties alone does not matter for the stability of a party
system. In fact, because it contains a ‘statement of mechanical tendencies [predispositions]’
(Sartori 1976, p. 173 [128]), the format of a party system should be considered one of the
most important sources of systemic stability. The logic is that by indicating the numbers (and
strength) of ‘streams of interaction’ (Sjöblom 1968, p. 174), the number (and size) of parties
winning seats in legislative elections clearly affects the ease with which parties interact and gov-
ernments can be formed. In other words, ‘the greater the number of parties (that have a say), the
greater the complexity and probably the intricacy of the [interactions will be]’ (Sartori 1976,
p. 120).
In order to test the previous argumentation as well as to examine the ‘causal mechanisms’
linking the number of legislative parties and the level of party system stability in a country, a dis-
tinction between the different party system types is needed. ‘Two-party systems’ are the most
inclined to display a higher level of stability by definition as only two parties (1) have the oppor-
tunity to enjoy the spoils of office, (2) are replaced alternatively, and (3) are in cabinets of the
single-majority type. The relationship between parliamentary fragmentation and party system
stability in the other three Blondel – Sartorian types (i.e. two-and-a-half, limited, and extreme plur-
alism) is not straightforward and needs to be explained with more details.
First of all, it is important to note that in contrast to highly concentrated party systems where
single-party cabinets tend to be the norm, the probability that cabinets contain parties from the
immediately previous government will be higher in legislatively fragmented systems where no
party controls close to a majority of seats and the need for large inter-party coalitions increases.
Second, because the number of parties in parliament shapes the menu of choices which parties and
their leaders face when interacting, the higher the legislative fragmentation, the greater the ‘inter-
action streams’ and, therefore, the number of relevant party relations that must be observed and
considered in the process of inter-party competition (for government). In other words, because
three parties allow for seven possible combinations, four for 10, five for 25, and so on
(Sjöblom 1968, Sartori 1976), the higher the number of parliamentary parties, the higher the
level of innovation the process of government formation will be. Finally, because access to gov-
ernment remains open as long as certain parties keep their chances of joining the executive, the
probability that new parties enjoy the spoils of office is higher in legislatively fragmented party
systems than in parliamentary concentrated ones. Indeed, because closing access to parliament
equals closing access to government (Toole 2000, p. 456), low parliamentary fragmentation
fosters the stabilisation of the structure of partisan competition. In sum, when party leaders must
follow manoeuvres among a large number of parties, predictability and stability in the structure of
inter-party competition will be obviously hindered (Lane and Ersson 2007, p. 94, Mainwaring and
Zoco 2007, p. 2007).
Comparison among the four cases analysed here clearly suggests that the number of parlia-
mentary parties in a system, measured according to Laakso and Taagepera’s (1979) index,
offers a very powerful explanation of the variance in the degree of institutionalisation between
the different party systems (Table A1), with low levels of fragmentation being associated with
high mean institutionalisation (Hungary and the Czech Republic) and high fractionalisation
being associated with low systemic institutionalisation (Slovakia and Poland). The strength of
such a relationship is also visible when comparing these two variables within countries over
time (Figure 3).15
As shown in the preceding figures, in all the countries under analysis, and in more than 70% of
the elections examined,16 parliamentary fragmentation and PSI are inversely related. That is,
when the former decreases, the latter increases, and vice versa. Interestingly, both variables
tend to fluctuate not only in the same direction but also to the same extent, confirming my pre-
vious expectations about the strength of the relationship between the two. Thus, the Hungarian
and, to a lesser extent, Czech cases show how low parliamentary fractionalisation has reduced
not only the number of parties with a minimal chance of enjoying the spoils of office but also
the number of possible partisan combinations in government as well as the probability of
partial alternations taking place. Conversely, in both Slovakia and, most noticeably, Poland,
the relatively high number of parties acceding to parliament in every election primarily increased
the number of parties with access to the executive. As a consequence, with the exception of the
Polish cabinet formed after the 2011 legislative elections, not one of the governments appointed
after elections displayed the same combination of parties.17 The implication here is that inno-
vation has been mainly caused by the openness of access (to cabinet) in these two countries,
which is a consequence of the large amount of parties in parliament.
Figure 3. Parliamentary fragmentation and PSI in ECE.

Note: For comparative reasons, parliamentary fragmentation has been measured according to Rae’s (1967)
index: F ¼ 1 2 Ssi, where si is the proportion of seats of the ith party.
All in all, the previous analysis demonstrates that because the number of parties has ‘mech-
anical predispositions’, in the sense that it gives us information on certain functional properties
(e.g. interaction streams, coalition potential, etc.), the relationship between party system format
and stability is ‘path dependence’ and responds to the following pattern: the lower the parliamen-
tary concentration, the higher the number of ‘interaction paths’ and, hence, the greater the com-
plexity of the patterns of cooperation and collaboration (Groennings 1970, p. 457).
Type of regime
Building on Elgie’s definition,18 a critical departure of semi-presidentialism from parliamentarism
is the presence of a ‘double electoral process’ (Bartolini 1984, p. 227) which introduces a poten-
tial for instability in the patterns of inter-party competition certainly absent in parliamentarian
regimes. However, as explained elsewhere (Casal Bértoa 2011), while in parliamentary
systems the election of the head of state – usually appointed either by the sole governing coalition
parties (if disposing off the generally required ‘qualified majority’) or as the fruit of a compromise
among the majority of political forces which see this ‘almost compulsory’ collaboration as totally
ad hoc – has no (negative) effect on the patterns of partisan interaction, the popular election of the
president has a direct negative impact on the structure of inter-party competition itself in semi-
presidential regimes. Because presidential candidates need to appeal to a wider segment of the
electorate and cannot afford to ignore any more or less significant segment of the population,
‘broad’ coalitions – most of the time across ideological lines – are likely to be formed. The
main implication of this might be that, as a reward for their support in elections, ‘one or more
of them can plausibly claim to represent the decisive electoral bloc in a close contest and may
make demands accordingly’ (Linz 1990, p. 58), namely: participation in government, future
electoral cooperation, etc. In this context, an element of instability in the structure of inter-
party competition is introduced as the majority of leading presidential candidates will be
‘forced’ to seek the cooperation of forces with which they would otherwise not be ready to col-
laborate, giving way to previously unseen cabinet coalitions or to the inclusion of a party excluded
from government up to that time. This is clear in single-round elections, where electoral plurality
might depend on even the small number of voters those ‘unusual partners’ might be able to
provide, but this is especially evident in two-round elections (like in Poland or Slovakia, since
1999), where political alliances come closer to the process of coalition formation in a parliament
in search of a prime minister.
Moreover, because ‘the [presidential] “majority” generated might not represent a politically
more or less homogeneous electorate or a real coalition of parties’ (Linz 1994, p. 21), these alli-
ances of ‘presidential’ parties tend to be very fragile and short-termed, since ideological and
policy differences among heterogeneous member parties of a loose (pre-)electoral presidential
coalition are likely to broaden with time. Therefore, parties in parliamentary regimes occupying
different electoral niches normally compete against one another, and the coalition of ideologically
‘close’ parties generally takes place after the election and is binding. By contrast, the majoritarian
character of the presidential elections in semi-presidential regimes not only may change the exist-
ing structure of inter-party competition, but may also tend to impregnate the new patterns of inter-
action with a loose and temporary character.
A second way in which party system stability can be hampered by the mode of the election of
the head of state derives from the higher status of the latter in semi-presidential regimes when
compared with the position of the president in parliamentary countries. In fact, even if the
formal prerogatives of popular elected presidents are rarely much greater than those of parliamen-
tary heads of state, they have often been able to use their greater ‘political legitimacy’ prestige to
stretch their influence in the making and breaking of governments and/or parliamentary
coalitions. This is not to say, however, that the head of state cannot play an active role in the
formation of governments and/or the interaction of political parties in some parliamentary
regimes. However, because the president is not independent of the assembly, he/she cannot
claim to be ‘tribunes’ above the partisan fray (Baylis 2007, p. 89). Thus, the head of state will
tend to follow the existing patterns of interaction among political parties in parliamentary
systems, strengthening, rather than weakening, the stability of the system of competition as a
whole. On the other hand, the popular election of the head of state in semi-presidential
regimes is likely to imbue presidents with a feeling that they, ‘although initially the choice of a
small proportion of the electorate, [. . .] represent a “true and plebiscitary” majority’ (Linz
1994, p. 21) and that, consequently, they do not need to respect the ‘usual’ process of coalition
formation and partisan cooperation, introducing a potential for unpredictability and instability
(see also Duverger 1980, Bartolini 1984) which, on the other hand, will be higher the ‘fresher’
the presidential mandate (Protsyk 2005, p. 737, Shin-Goo 2009).19
A quick look at the four cases under study provides strong support for the negative relation-
ship between PSI and type of regime (Table A1): namely, that semi-presidentialism has been more
damaging for the institutionalisation of party systems in Poland and, to a lesser extent, in Slovakia
(see below) than for that of the party systems in parliamentarian Hungary and Czech Republic,
where the head of state has been elected in the majority of cases either by the super-majoritarian
governing coalition (e.g. Göncz in 1995, Mádl in 2000, or Schmitt in 2010 as well as Havel in
1993) or as a result of a compromise (either formal, e.g. Göncz in 1990 and Havel in 1998, or
informal, e.g. Klaus in 2003) among governing and opposition forces. Moreover, even in those
two cases when the election of the president did not respond to any of the previous patterns
(e.g. Sólyom in 2005 and Klaus in 2008), the existing structure of competition was by no
means threatened.
In contrast to the previous two countries, the composition of the electoral alliances as well as
of governmental coalitions in Poland has been determined from the very beginning by the pat-
terns of inter-party collaboration established at the time of presidential elections. Thus, the
November 1990 presidential elections, won by Solidarity founder and Nobel laureate Lech
Wałe˛sa in the second round, played a critical role in the definition and shaping of the structure
of competition in two different ways: on the one hand, they reinforced the pattern of fierce
opposition between Solidarity and anti-Solidarity forces already present in the 1989 (semi-
free) parliamentary elections; and on the other hand, they constituted the last straw in the
decomposition of the ‘Solidarity’ camp into Christian-democratic/conservative (heirs of those
who supported Lech Wałe˛sa) and liberal-democratic (heirs of those supporting Mazowiecki)
political forces, whose interactions, since then and with few exceptions, have been characterised
by a severe political enmity and lack of will to cooperate. The following two presidential elec-
tions also had important consequences for the process of PSI in Poland. Thus, while Wałe˛sa’s
defeat against Kwaśniewski in November 1995 prompted the parties of the right to ‘temporally’
unite in the so-called solidarity electoral action (AWS) in order to contest the parliamentary elec-
tions in 1997 (Szczerbiak 1999) and to collaborate ‘ephemerally’ with the liberal Freedom
Union (UW) up to June 2000, Kwaśniewski’s victory five years later brought forward the
formal collaboration between the post-communist Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD) and
post-Solidarity Labour Union (UP) in both an electoral (Millard 2002, p. 362) and, later on,
a governmental alliance in 2001. However, no presidential contest had such a strong influence
on the pattern of competition like the 2005 elections, after which Jarosław Kaczyński (Law and
Justice’s leader) decided to cooperate – in parliament first, then in government – with Self-
Defence and the League of Polish Families (LPR) in compensation for the support received
by his twin brother (Lech) during the presidential race. The inclusion of these two anti-
establishment parties gave way to a new structure of partisan competition, that is, one based on
economic rather than on cultural divisions (Jasiewicz and Jasiewicz-Betkiewicz 2006, Szczer-
biak 2007).20
Like in Hungary and the Czech Republic, the first presidential elections in Slovakia21 had
an indirect character and clearly responded to the already repeated demand for extraordinary
consensus among the political parties: Michal Kováč, a former speaker of the last Czechoslo-
vak Federal Assembly, was elected in the second ballot with the support of the two governing
parties (i.e. the Movement for a Democratic Slovakia, HZDS, and the Slovak National Party,
SNS) and the main opposition party (the Party of the Democratic Left) (see Malová 1994,
p. 416).
After the introduction of semi-presidentialism in 1999, the (negative) impact of presiden-
tial elections on the stability of the patterns of partisan interaction became visible only
gradually. Hence, on the one hand, the 1999 presidential contest only contributed to keep
alive the structure of competition between Mečiarists and anti-Mečiarists, which would
have otherwise disappeared earlier as the result of simply partisan contestation in parlia-
ment.22 On the other hand, the April 2004 presidential elections were the spark for a new
structure of competition, as the rapprochement between nationalistic (SNS and HZDS’ splin-
ter parties) and left-leaning (Smer) forces would have been inconceivable without Smer’s
support to Gašparovič’s candidature. A similar relationship could be established, in principle,
between the support of SDKÚ, SaS, KDH, and Most to Radičová’s candidature during the
last (2009) presidential elections and the formation of her cabinet in July 2010. Figure 4,
which displays the degree of institutionalisation over time trying to discover if the change
from parliamentarism to semi-presidentialism has had any impact on Slovak party system,
clearly confirms my previous hypothesis: namely, the level of systemic institutionalisation
not only increased exponentially during parliamentarism, but also immediately decreased
after 2001, when the direct elections of the president started to exert its (negative) impact
on the structure of partisan competition.
It follows from all the above that, in contrast to parliamentary Hungary and the Czech Repub-
lic, semi-presidentialism in Poland, and in Slovakia since 1999, has ‘provided the potential for
new axes of conflict without the mediating effect of long-established relationship among political
parties’ (Millard 2000, p. 59).
Figure 4. Type of regime (change) and PSI in Slovakia.

Cleavage structuration
Cleavages are also closely related to the development of party systems. In a recent article, the
author (Casal Bértoa forthcoming) maintains, contrary to previous scholars, that the degree to
which party systems institutionalised is not so much determined by the number, type, or strength
of a country’s cleavage(s) but also determined by the way the different cleavages structure in
relation to each other. Thus, when cleavages are cross-cutting, it will be difficult for parties to
find ideologically contiguous partners with which to cooperate, as being close in one dimension
may be accompanied by irreconcilable differences in another. Being forced to interact in a
multiplicity of non-coinciding directions diminishes the ability of parties to adapt to the cross
pressures and stabilise the structure of competition. By contrast, when cleavages are cumulative
(i.e. coinciding), parties will tend to interact only with other parties within the same side of the
cleavages, rejecting any cooperation that would lead them to cross such a line. In this sense,
cumulative cleavages, similarly to one-dimensional cleavage configurations, help to simplify
the structure of competition in two different (and separate) blocs of parties, making the patterns
of interaction more predictable and stable. In fact, when looking at the eighth column in Table A1,
a striking finding appears: the lower the degree of cleavage ‘cross-cuttingness’, the higher the
level of institutionalisation observed in a party system. We will now apply the previous analytical
framework to each of the four countries.
According to a majority of scholars, three different but reinforcing cleavages (i.e. post-
communist, religious, and urban – rural) have structured the Hungarian party system since 1994
(Figure 5), dividing the political spectrum into two different and stable political camps: ‘a socially
conservative, religious, somewhat nationalist, and anti-communist camp [. . .] and [. . .] a secular,
morally permissive and generally less nationalist camp’ (Tóka 2004, p. 322, Enyedi 2006). This
has led to an almost two-party system where parties of the centre-left and centre-right have col-
ligated among themselves (even in different combinations), but never in a manner that would
mean cooperation across the ideological boundary (centre-left with centre-right).
In a similar vein, the predominance of an unique (i.e. economic) cleavage in the Czech Repub-
lic (Kitschelt et al. 1999, p. 230, Brokl and Mansfeldová 2003) has facilitated the ‘crystallisation
of the “traditional” left – right political spectrum’ (Mateju et al. 1999, p. 235) with the Christian
democrats in the centre playing the role of a hinge party (Figure 6). On the contrary, the predo-
minance of two cross-cutting cleavages (axiological23 and economic) in Poland and Slovakia has
led to the formation of ideologically very heterogeneous and, consequently, short-term political
alliances.
In particular, and with the exception of Mečiar’s fourth cabinet, every Slovak coalition
government since 1994 has always included political forces from at least two different political
camps. This was the case of the 1994 Moravčik and the 1998 Dzurinda ‘rainbow’ cabinets
which comprised five political parties/groups ranging from the centre-right to the centre-left of
the political spectrum (Szomolányi 2003). In fact, each of these two governments was so ideologi-
cally heterogeneous as to bring together the conservative DS with the liberal DÚ (AD and APR in
Figure 5. Cleavages and approximate placement of Hungarian political parties (1994 to present).
Source: Casal Bértoa (forthcoming).
Figure 6. Economic cleavage and approximate placement of Czech political parties.

1994) and the religious KDH (all of them anti-communists) on the right and the post-communist
SDL and the historical social democrats (SDSS) on the left, together with the populist SOP, the
ethnic SMK, and the environmentalist SZS. Dzurinda’s and Fico’s cabinets in 2002 and 2006,
respectively, followed a similar pattern, although the level of ideological homogeneity increased
to a certain extent. Thus, while the former coalition again included the Christian democrats
(KDH) with the Catholic Hungarian SMK (itself divided along liberal and populist strands),
together with the liberal-secular SDKÚ (DÚ’s successor) and the neoliberal-anti-clerical ANO,
the latter coalition brought together parties from two different camps, namely the national-author-
itarian (with the religious HZDS and SNS) and the socialist (secular) Smer (Szomolányi 2003,
Rybář 2006, Hloušek and Kopecěk 2008). In a similar vein, Radičová’s government united the
more religious and socially protectionist KDH and Most with the more secular and economically
liberal SDKÚ and SaS. This is not to say, however, that the national-authoritarianism-based gov-
ernment constituted an ideologically homogeneous ‘oasis of peace’. In fact, the parties forming
Mečiar’s cabinets in 1993 and 1994 also quarrelled over the economy (ZRS/HZDS vs. SNS)
as well as religion (ZRS vs. HZDS/SNS). However, the fact that they shared a common view
on the way the process of nation-building (in terms of both identity and institutions) should
develop certainly helped to make the patterns of partisan interaction at the beginning of the
1990s more predictable, although not as stable, than afterwards (see Figure 7).
In Poland, where the social protectionist camp (socialists – SLD, SdPL, and UP – and
populists – PSL, Samoobrona, and LPR) differs from the pro-market camp (liberals – PD and
Figure 7. Cleavages and approximate placement of Slovak and Polish∗ political parties. ∗ In bold.
PO – and conservative PiS) in terms of economy, the secular camp (socialists and liberals) from
the religious camp (populists and conservatives) in terms of religiosity, and the post-communist
successor parties (mainly SLD, SdPL, and PSL) from all the other parties in terms of ‘nostalgia’
for the previous (communist) regime (Jasiewicz 2007), parties have found it very difficult to
establish stable governmental coalitions and/or electoral alliances. As a rule, cabinets have
been short-lived and the only one to endure the whole legislature (SLD –PSL from 1993 up to
1997) was characterised by its quarrels rather than by its cooperation. What is more striking is
that not even one of the coalition governments in Poland managed to unite all parties from the
same political field,24 in the majority of cases, not even two parties from the same political
field (with the exception of Suchocka’s seven-party cabinet). This would certainly explain the
lower level of PSI observed in Poland in comparison to Slovakia.
Conclusion
Since Mainwaring and Scully (1995) championed the important consequences that PSI may have
for the consolidation of democracy in young political systems, much has been written about the
level of systemic institutionalisation in new democracies; yet the question of why some competi-
tive party systems institutionalise while others do not has not received the necessary attention. In
order to begin to fill this gap in the literature, this article has provided an analysis of the ‘causal
mechanisms’ of PSI in East Central Europe, producing some clear conclusions (see Figure 8).
First of all, the analysis indicates that party institutionalisation plays an essential role in PSI.
As individual political parties institutionalise (i.e. develop stable roots in society and build solid
organisations), they are likely to remain consistent in terms of ideology and interact only with
other like-minded parties. By making party choices more stable and coherent for the electorate,
parties and their leaders help voters to express their political preferences more consistently,
thereby avoiding unexpected consequences in terms of the balance of power as well as instability
in the patterns of inter-party competition for government. Second, party system format also has an
important impact on PSI. Low levels of parliamentary fragmentation allow a relatively small
Figure 8. PSI in East Central Europe: ‘causal mechanisms’.

number of possible interactions, making the patterns of partisan cooperation and collaboration
more predictable and, hence, stable over time. Third, in clear contrast to parliamentarian
regimes, semi-presidentialism seems to affect the process of PSI in two ways: directly and
indirectly. The direct effect of popular election of the president is to require a broader electoral
base from any presidential candidate, one that may cut across ideological lines and introduce
the potential for instability (and unpredictability) in the patterns of interaction among the different
political forces. The indirect effect is that semi-presidentialism has a negative impact on both
party institutionalisation and fractionalisation, as discussed above.
Last but not least, PSI also depends on the mode cleavages form and develop. Thus, institu-
tionalisation will be enhanced in systems with a one-dimensional or cumulative-coinciding clea-
vage structure. Political parties and voters will be structured by the coinciding line(s) of division
into two clearly defined alternative blocs, making the structure of partisan competition stable and
predictable over time. By contrast, in systems where cleavages have a cross-cutting character, PSI
will suffer as parties will have to cooperate across dividing ideological lines, converting any poss-
ible alliance into ad hoc, ephemeral, and unpredictable. In this sense, this article builds a bridge
between scholars counterpoising arguments that emphasise sociological dependence and those
making arguments that emphasise the incentives created by formal institutions, and vice versa.
All in all, the findings show complementarity rather than conflict between these two approaches.
In conclusion, PSI in new ECE democracies has been enhanced by both supportive insti-
tutional structures and strong cleavage structuration. The next step should be to extend the
cases beyond the ECE region in order to, with the application of a more sophisticated and
dynamic methodology, permit greater generalisation.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Florian Grotz (ZDEMO, Leuphana University), Zsolt
Enyedi and Dorothee Bohle (Central European University), Kevin Deegan-Krause (Wayne State University),
Max Bader (University of Munich), Tim Haughton (University of Birmingham), Peter Učeň (International
Republican Institute), Wade Jacoby (Brigham Young University), Peter Mair, and Carolien van Ham (Euro-
pean University Institute) for their useful comments on earlier versions of this work.
Notes
1. Horowitz and Browne (2005), Tavits (2005), and Mainwaring and Zoco (2007) are clear exceptions.
2. For previous applications of Mair’s framework in a similar context, see Casal Bértoa and Mair (2012),
Müller-Rommel (2005), O’Dwyer (2006), Rybář (2004), and Toole (2000).
3. For distinguishing between cabinets, I consider new governments to be only those which include a
change in the partisan composition of the cabinet and/or those immediately constituted after new
elections have been held (Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2010, pp. 13–14).
4. Building on Sikk (2005, p. 399), old governing parties are considered to be all parties which have
already been a constituent part of a previous government, both under similar and under different
names (but not structure).
5. It should also be borne in mind that from 1992 until 1998, the extreme right-wing SPR-RSČ was also
repeatedly excluded from participating in office, despite having more seats than the Civic Democratic
Alliance (ODA), a permanent member of the governing coalition until 1998.
6. Interestingly enough, government alternations occurring immediately after elections have had a
‘mixed’ character.
7. German minority (MN) excluded.
8. While East Central European party systems have become more institutionalised over time in general,
after the last parliamentary elections – with the exception of Poland – this trend has been reversed
(see Figure 3 below). I am thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this particular suggestion.
9. It is important to note here, however, that for the sake of simplicity, but also due to space reasons, this
article focuses only on variables with a ‘proximate’ impact on the dependent variable. This is not to
deny, however, that some of the excluded variables might have an indirect impact on party system insti-
tutionalisation. Indeed, as explained in detail elsewhere, the parliamentary fragmentation in East
Central Europe is a function of the electoral system itself (Casal Bértoa 2011, pp. 178–194), rather
than of the cleavage structure (Casal Bértoa forthcoming).
10. If a party does not have a stable core of voters, it will be free to move along the political spectrum in
order to find electoral support. As a consequence, both citizens and politicians will have trouble when
trying to locate the party as well as identifying what it represents. This will render any kind of stable
cooperation extremely difficult, if not impossible.
11. Average party age has been widely regarded by scholars as the most important measure of an organ-
isation (Janda 1980, Dix 1992, Jin 1995, Roberts and Wibbels 1999), with old parties considered to
be more organisationally institutionalised than new ones.
12. Coalitions (or mergers) of pre-existing parties (e.g. SDK, UW, LiD, or AWS) are not considered here.
13. With the exception of Smer and ZRS, all took place after the year 2000.
14. Similar differences can also be observed using other indicators of party institutionalisation such as
party switching (Bakke and Sitter 2005b), party nationalisation (Boschler 2010), and organisational
systemness (Jungerstam-Mulders 2006).
15. The overall correlation (n ¼ 25) between the ENPP and iPSI is 20.707 (significant at the 0.01 level).
16. This percentage increases to 82.4 when the first ‘founding’ elections are left out since institutionalisa-
tion (i.e. behavioural predictability) is also a matter of time.
17. In fact, up to 2010, all the Slovak and Polish cabinets formed after legislative elections contained at
least one ‘new’ party (two in the case of Slovakia in 1998 and 2010 as well as Poland in 1993).
18. According to Elgie (1999, p. 13), semi-presidential regimes are characterised by the presence of ‘both a
popularly elected fixed-term president and a prime minister and a cabinet responsible to the
legislature’.
19. The logic is that the most recent electoral legitimacy of the president provides him/her with additional
political leverage in the process of government formation, even in the case when his/her formal powers
are severely restricted (e.g. Bulgaria or Ireland).
20. In September 2001, needing a coalition partner in order to secure a governing majority in the Sejm, the
SLD considered a coalition with the populist-agrarian party Self-Defence led by Andrzej Lepper,
although it was finally rejected in favour of SLD’s old coalition partner instead: the agrarian PSL. Pre-
viously, other extreme political forces such as KPN and ROP had suffered the same fate.
21. Slovakia, parliamentary until 1999, constitutes a real ‘natural experiment’.
22. It should not be forgotten that the 1998/1999 anti-Mečiar coalition comprised the conservative SDK,
the socialist SDL, the ethnic SMK, and the populist SOP.
23. While the cleavage takes the form of the classic centre vs. periphery (Rybář 2006) in Slovakia, it is
characterised by religiosity and communist ‘nostalgia’ in Poland (Szczerbiak 2006, Jasiewicz
2007).
24. The only exceptions were the AWS (2000–2001) and PiS (2005 –2006) minority governments, which
required the parliamentary support of political forces from different ideological fields (ROP in 2000 or
Samoobrona and LPR in 2005).
Notes on contributor
Fernando Casal Bértoa is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Leiden working on Prof. Ingrid van
Biezen’s led large-scale research project on the “Legal Regulation of Political Parties in Post-war Europe”
(funded by the European Research Council – ERC). He studied Law and Political Science at the University
of Pamplona and the University of Salamanca, respectively. After specialising in Eastern and Central Euro-
pean Studies (Jagiellonian University), he obtained his PhD at the European University Institute (Florence)
with a dissertation titled The Institutionalization of Party Systems in East Central Europe: Explaining Vari-
ation. His work has been published (or is forthcoming) in Party Politics, Acta Politica or the Hungarian
Journal of Political Science, as well as in various edited volumes on party systems in Eastern Europe.
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F. Casal Bértoa
Appendix
Table A1. Sources of PSI in East Central Europe: ‘MSSD’.
Systemic Institutional Sociological Temporal

Historical Economic International
Country PI ENPP ID LSq.a ToR NoS PF Cleavageb PC LoC GDPc LoPD LoA ToT YoD EU cond.
Hungary 17.7 3 0.49 11 P C 1 0.83 21.2 Bur.-author. 13253,2 2 42 Third wave 22 7
Czech R. 15 4.2 0.53 6.7 P C 3 0.87 0.4 Nat.-accom. 17368,7 23 42 Third wave 21 7
Slovakia 8.3 4.6 0.28 6.7 Spd C 3 0.89 20.4 Patrimonial 13632 23 42 Third wave 21 7
Poland 6.7 5.5 0.37 8 Sp C 3 0.90 20.1 Bur.-author. 11329,8 8 44 Third wave 22 7
Difference Yes Yes No No Yes No No Yes No No No No No No No No
a
In order to measure the degree of disproportionality produced between the shares of votes and the shares of seats gained by each competing party, I employ here Gallagher’s (1991)
‘least-squared’ (LSq.) index, by now a long-standing measure (see Lijphart 1994, p. 139).
b
Hungary: religious and regional (i.e. urban vs. rural); Czech Republic: economic and religious; Slovakia: ethnic and economic; Poland: religious and economic. For more details, see
Casal Bértoa (forthcoming).
c
Other economic indicators (e.g. inflation, unemployment, etc.) were also used, but showed no relationship at all with differences in the levels of PSI.
d
Slovakia became semi-presidential only after the constitutional amendment of 14 January 1999; before it was parliamentary.
Sources: Party institutionalisation (PI): average party age based on the year of foundation; parliamentary fragmentation (ENPP) and electoral disproportionality (LSq.): own
calculations; ‘left –right’ polarisation (ID): Döring and Manow (2011); type of regime (ToR): Elgie (1999); party funding (PF): Party law in modern Europe [online dataset]
(2011); cleavages (cross-cuttingness): Selway (2009, pp. 79–81); political culture (PC): Inglehart and Welzel (2005); legacies of communism (LoC): Kitschelt (2001); GDP per
capita, PPP, lagged (GDP): World Development Indicators Online (2010); length of previous democracy (LoPD), length of communism (LoA), time of transition (ToT), and years
of democracy (YoD): own calculations; EU conditionality (EU cond.): years in the EU; Bureaucratic-authoritarianism (Bur.-author.); National-accommodative (Nat.-accom.).

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East European Politics

Parties, regime and cleavages:

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cleavages on partisan competition as more or less successful inducements to institutionalisation.

PSI: conceptualisation and operationalisation

PSI in East Central Europe

Figure 1. ECE party systems in comparative perspective (1990–2011).

Sources of PSI: methodology

Sources of PSI in East Central Europe: institutional, sociological, or both?

Figure 2. Party and PSI in ECE.

Party system format

Figure 3. Parliamentary fragmentation and PSI in ECE.

Figure 4. Type of regime (change) and PSI in Slovakia.

Figure 6. Economic cleavage and approximate placement of Czech political parties.

Figure 8. PSI in East Central Europe: ‘causal mechanisms’.

Institute of Public Affairs, 25–44.

Table A1. Sources of PSI in East Central Europe: ‘MSSD’.

Systemic Institutional Sociological Temporal

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