European Party Federations and Alliances of National Parties in Central and Eastern Europe

This study seeks to understand how party confederations at the European (EU) level have affected the patterns of party cooperation in the formation of national-level electoral coalitions and mergers in 11 Central and Eastern European democracies since these countries democratized. The research builds on and contributes to the literature on cleavages and party systems in two ways. First, it examines the formation of the organizational element of cleavages (cf. Bartolini and Mair 1990) through the consolidation of multiple parties with similar ideologies. Mergers and electoral coalitions have been considered as a key aspect in the process of cleavage formation by Lipset and Rokkan (1967), but have been under-researched in the existing literature. This is the case despite the fact that, because mergers and coalitions are an important type of party instability, their study directly addresses the scholarly debate about how unstable party organizations impede the emergence of stable party systems in Eastern Europe on the basis of already-existing and relatively stable socio-demographic and attitudinal divisions in the electorate. Second, the study also examines if and in which way European party confederations, and Western European parties as their members, have been successful in their efforts to shape the structuring the party systems in Eastern Europe through the consolidation of ideologically similar but fragmented liberal, social democratic, conservative and Christian democratic party organizations. Specifically, building on the existing theoretical and case study literature, the research provides a comparative quantitative analysis of whether Europarties have been successful in facilitating the cooperation between ideologically close national parties. Also, the study draws on the rational-choice and sociological institutionalist models of Europeanization and the literature on electoral coalitions and mergers, to systematically derive hypotheses on the conditions under which the influence of Europarties on national party systems is most powerful.