Political Orientation and Electoral Volatility in Central and Eastern Europe. Is This an Issue or Are All Part(ie)s the Same?

Party politics in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is generally considered characterized by instability, fragmentation and volatility. However, are these phenomena affecting all in the same way or can we see some differences among ‘blocs’ or ‘political families’? This paper aims to be a comprehensive assessment of the phenomena, based on empirical evidence from CEE. Confronting the main political blocs, and if and how they changed over almost two decades, the research contributes to the study of parties as well as on the general structure of political competition in CEE. It covers six Central and Eastern European countries that have joined the EU between 2004 and 2007 (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary). The time period will be from the democratic transition to 2015, covering all elections rated as “Free” by Freedom House and the OSCE. The paper will first provide a map of electoral volatility and the impact of government participation in CEE related to each political block. Here, building on recent works, I focus on a mid-range comparison of electoral volatility, (intra)bloc fragmentation, as well as the impact of governmental participation, which are considered among the main variables to assess whether there are differences among blocs and/or recurring trends within the systems. In particular, a logistic regression model will be used to search for correlations looking either at party level and at aggregate blocs. Indeed, regardless of the number and name of parties, looking at blocs can provide more comparable results, which, at least for a first scan, are simpler to manage than single parties and might provide insightful findings for further research. Building up from the findings of the previous stage, in a second part the paper will present a more in-depth studies of the most relevant (positive and negative) cases, which could be able to disclose context-specific aspects potentially neglected by broader comparisons and allow for some tentative causal explanations.