Elite homogeneity and party cohesion: The Success of ANO in the Czech Republic

The emergence of new parties is associated with the increasingly volatile European party systems. However, some new parties survive and become part of a party system they entered while other newcomers fade away even after they record major electoral success or gain government participation. How can we explain the contrasting fortunes of new parties? What explains their persistence and organizational survival? In this paper we try to find answer to these questions by linking organizational success of new parties to the composition of their elites. We hypothesise that the similarity in professional and career backgrounds as well as the shared political experiences contribute to parties' organizational success by increasing party cohesiveness, especially at the level of party leadership. We test these hypotheses empirically on the cases of three new Czech parties - Public Affairs, Dawn of Direct Democracy and ANO. While the two former disintegrated shortly after making an electoral breakthrough, the latter turned out to be organizationally successful and highly influential political player. We explain such difference in studied parties' political fortunes by presenting a picture of contrasting composition of their elites' backgrounds. Collected data on elites' career and political past indicate that, unlike ANO, Public Affairs and Dawn of Direct Democracy became victims of internal conflicts and scandals caused by background heterogeneity in their elites circles. Different political attitudes and behaviour resulting from such dissimilarity transformed into conflicts, which contributed to their failure in politics. In contrast, ANO managed to transform its initial electoral success into long-term party-organizational success by being immune to such scandals due to the cohesiveness of its elite network resulting from elites' common background. In addition the findings point out that there is a link between a proportion of ANO's elites' professional past and the business activities of party leader. We argue that such infiltration of elite structure with individuals dependent on party leader professionally alters the relationships within the party organization, creates a dual hierarchy within the leadership structure and demonstrates that ANO uses its leader's business network to secure its political success and goals. This finding, together with homogenous party elite network, makes ANO unique and different from the other two studied parties and does, as we argue, stand behind its survival.