Party Crisis and Party Resilience in Central European Democracies

Abstract

Party politics in Central Europe has long been marked by instability, with frequent party disappearances, the cyclical rise and fall of new parties, and the persistence of a small number of exceptions that prove the rule (Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2015). In such a turbulent environment, party crisis (Cyr 2016) has been a significant and widespread phenomenon and has been usually assumed to be fatal. Closer examination, however, highlights that some parties – including long established mainstream parties - can survive crisis and continue as relevant actors. Such resilience in the face of crisis is a puzzle that has been relatively little explored. The few studies which do explicitly discuss the behaviour of parties in the face of crisis, and what their death or recovery depends on, focus on smaller parties which fail to cross the electoral threshold (e.g., Bakke and Sitter 2013), rather than larger formations. Drawing on national case studies, the panel addresses the following questions: • Which combinations of factors contribute to party survival and recovery (or, conversely, failure to recover), and what role do party cadres and leaders play? • How do strategies of parties primarily serving as the political projects of their leaders differ from those of non-personalistic parties? • Can we identify differences in parties’ anti-crisis strategies based on the time and pattern of formation, or the depth of crisis experienced? • How do the behaviours and strategies of party elites during crises affect intra-party democracy and the maintenance of democratic norms? • To what extent are party strategies in crisis shaped by the broader political context, including populism, democratic backsliding, and the rise of radical-right actors? The common theoretical framework for papers will be Cyr's (2016) concept of party crisis, and Hanley and Kopeček’s (2025) work on mainstream parties’ resilience in crisis, which emphasizes phase analysis, party organization and intra-party democracy, elite loyalty, crisis leadership, political appeals, and interactions with populist competitors. By applying this framework comparatively to parties that both survived crises and those that failed, the panel seeks to illuminate the conditions under which mainstream parties in crisis maintain legitimacy and stability in turbulent political environments, strengthening democratic resilience. Literature • Bakke, E. and Sitter, N. (2015). Where Do Parties Go When They Die? The Fate of Failed Parties in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary 1992–2013, East European Politics, 31, 1. • Cyr, J. (2016). Between Adaptation and Breakdown: Conceptualizing Party Survival, Comparative Politics, 49, 1. • Hanley, S., and Kopeček, L. (2025). Death of the Dinosaurs? Organisational Resilience and the Survival of Older Mainstream Parties in Czechia. Europe-Asia Studies, on-line first.  • Haughton, T. and Deegan-Krause, K. (2015). Hurricane Season: Systems of Instability in Central and East European Party Politics, East European Politics and Societies, 29, 1.

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