Brothers in Arms? Party Blocs in Post-Communist Politics

Is party politics more like individual or like team sport? What is the role of cross-party cooperation in determining the outcome of party competition? What do we gain by treating party systems as composed of blocs of parties? These questions are particularly relevant in systems where most of the parties do not represent well-organized social groups. In these contexts the stable alliances of parties can play an important role in the stabilization of the patterns of party competition, while the break-up of the alliances can directly contribute to electoral volatility. Contemporary post-communist countries are cases in point. The paper investigates the relationships between party alliances at the level of government-coalitions and various indicators of party system stability. The quantitative analysis is based on a data–set that contains all governments in Eastern European countries since the regime change, and on the usual indicators of party system stability such as aggregate electoral volatility and the success of new parties. The qualitative part of the paper considers instances of radical changes in coalition-preferences of major parties and estimates the impact of these changes on the party system as a whole. The overarching ambition of the paper is to identify elite level factors (party agency) that can substitute for the missing bottom-up structuring forces in the post-communist political environment. The paper also investigates the hypothesis that both the stability of alliances and the stability of the party systems are functions of the complexity of the issue-space, crosscutting issues leading to feeble party alliances, high electoral volatility and the frequent success of new parties.