Power Dispersion and Its Consequences: Three Models of Post-Communist Parliamentarism

This paper provides a comparative assessment of the institutional arrangements that characterize the parliamentary systems of the ten post-communist member states of the European Union. It shows that although all ten states adopted essentially parliamentary systems of government, the degree to which political power is concentrated in their national legislatures, more precisely in a majority that controls the legislature, varies considerably. The relative level of power dispersion is determined by four sets of institutions (electoral rules; the structure of the legislature; rules of government formation and termination; and the powers of the presidency), which in turn constrain and influence political parties’ coalitional choices. Based on a comparative review of the institutional arrangements of the ten states the paper identifies three groups of post-communist parliamentarism with regard to their concentration of power: i) states with the most favorable conditions for power concentration (Bulgaria, Estonia, Hungary and Slovenia); ii) states with mixed conditions (Latvia and Slovakia); and states with the least favorable conditions (Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland and Romania). The paper shows that institutional choices have been sticky and that no state moved across these categories of institutional design. As such, the distribution of bargaining power between the communist elite and its opposition, which determined the nature of the basic institutional choices at the time of the regime transitions in the early 1990s has left a powerful and lasting legacy on the development of post-communist parliamentarism. The second section of the paper assesses the impact of the three models of post-communist parliamentarism on government formation and cabinet duration. The central hypotheses are i) that minority governments are more likely under institutional conditions that disperse political power; and that ii) cabinets durability positively varies with the degree of institutional power dispersion.