Party Systems in Central and Eastern Europe. Is there a Baltic Exceptionalism?

Most of the studies on the party systems in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been predominately concentrated on the big countries in the region (the Visegrad countries: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia). Scholars usually extend the results drawn form the Visegrad group to the whole CEE and thus often neglect smaller countries, which patterns of party competition are often different and more diverse. Particularly the Baltic countries tend to be distinct from the CEE mainstream in various key dimensions. The proposed paper puts forward the argument that particularly two Baltic counties, Latvia and Estonia (but not Lithuania), stand out as quite special cases in CEE and therefore the question will be raised, whether we can really talk about the Baltic exceptionalism. Latvia and Estonia are the only countries among the new EU member states in which post-communist successor parties didn’t survive or play utterly marginal role in today’s party politics. Even left-wing parties and social democrats are quite puny– an additional feature, what makes in Latvia and Estonia dissimilar with the big CEE countries, which party competition is usually ideologically more balanced. Many distinctive features of Latvia and Estonia could be explained by the idiosyncratic cleavage constellations in which ethnic cleavage is combined with communist-anti-communist cleavage – rather a unique combination in CEE with its own particular implications. Because Estonia and Latvia are the only protestant countries in the region the church-state cleavage is not accentuated in the party politics, which is also uncommon in the post-communist world, where church-state is often regarded to be very prominent. In the end of the paper it will be discussed, in what extent we can really talk about the Baltic exceptionalism, because in several other key dimensions (party system fragmentation and stability) two Baltic counties fit very nicely with the general patterns of CEE party politics.