Fluid Parties, Fickle Voters, Fixed Spaces: Assessing the Stability of Party Competition in Eastern Europe

The literature on party competition in Eastern Europe faces a seeming paradox. On the one hand, it finds increased political instability in the region in comparison to developed democracies, caused by weak organizations that appear and disappear, splinter and merge, with greater frequency, while electoral support for eastern European parties is more volatile, as voters have weaker party allegiances and support different parties in different elections. On the other hand, some authors demonstrate that party politics in eastern Europe is inherently stable. This paper aims to reconcile these two findings by suggesting that while political organizations come and go and voters alter their electoral choices, the policy preferences over which competition in various eastern European countries occurs are strikingly steady. We do this first by developing a number of different measures of the dimensional structure of party competition, and demonstrate their highly reliable and consistent nature -- suggesting the presence of stable party competition patterns. Second, focusing on the Czech Republic and Lithuania, we demonstrate that while parties come and go, they do so in similar positions in the ideological space, replicating a stable competition pattern. Eastern European party organizations thus may be fluid, and voters may be fickle, but the ideological spaces of the region are strikingly fixed.