Between Milieu and Vacuum: Organizational and Programmatic Development and Electoral Strategy of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) Reexamined

The starting point for this paper is a questioning of the conclusion reached by multiple studies in the comparative post-communist successor-party literature of the 1990s and 2000s that the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS, reformed in 2007 as Die Linke) in Germany and the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM) represent a successor-party type structurally incapable of programmatic reform and electoral success. Contrary to path-dependent explanations of successor-party electoral success as a function of organizational centralization and programmatic social-democratization, which are in turn variously linked to factors such as regime type, form of transition, and even the timing of industrialization and duration of democratization, this paper seeks to explain 1) the electoral stabilization (and even growth) and 2) the divergent development of the PDS and KSČM – two outcomes unforeseen by the established successor-party literature – through a (renewed) analysis not only of their organizational and programmatic development but also of their positioning in the party system. The party-system level, understood as the locus of an “iterative signaling game” between parties and voters, is held to be a crucial explanatory dimension particularly in post-communist contexts of high electoral volatility and “anti-incumbent bias” in elections. Seen in this light, it is argued that the PDS and KSČM were indeed confronted, albeit under fundamentally different party-system conditions of post-communist transformation, with a similar dilemma in the 1990s: namely, the discrepancy between a structural rootedness in a stable electoral “milieu” defined primarily by left-wing ideology and a strategic orientation toward occupying the “vacuum” opened up by the perceived rightward drift of the Social Democrats in government. It is argued that the PDS and KSČM responded differently in both organizational and programmatic respects to this dilemma, corresponding to the fundamentally party-system contexts: the PDS was able to expand its electoral reach westwards through a merger with the WASG, which was in turn made possible by a belated process of organizational centralization, while the KSČM has made inroads into the Social Democratic electorate – especially since the first “third-generation election” in 2002 – sufficient to maintain a stable level of electoral support in spite of a remarkable degree of organizational and programmatic continuity as well as a heavy age imbalance in its electorate.