Political Parallelism in Central and Eastern Europe

The aim of this paper is the transmission of the concept of political parallelism on some states in Central and Eastern Europe. The concept compiled by Seymour-Ure (1974) and adapted by Blumler / Gurevitch (1995) and Hallin / Mancini (2004) is statistically quantitatively analyzed regarding the parallelism between the use of the media and the preference of a party in a cross-national comparison. In previous papers (Van Kempen 2006, 2007) Western European states were examined. Based on survey data from 8 Central and Eastern Europe Countries the analysis shows that there is a variance in the dimension of political parallelism between the examined countries. With this three groups of states can be identified and arranged in the ideal-typical media systems of Hallin / Mancini.