Czech Party Congresses: Insuring Democracy or Reinforcing Leadership?

The party congress is presented by all the parties as the highest level of intraparty democracy, the moment when the party gather and solve or define the most important aspects of its life. In this paper we will analyse Czech parties congresses during the last decade, focusing mainly on the actual parliamentary parties. Namely we will analyse congresses of the Conservative-liberal party (ODS), the Social-democratic party (CSSD), the Communist party (KSCM), the Christian-democratic party (KDU-CSL), the Greens (SZ) and the Movement of unsatisfied citizens (ANO 2011). The main hypothesis will be that even each party will emphasise the importance of the congress in terms of intra-party democracy, nevertheless the congresses tend to be more formal spaces, where the delegates can only marginally influence the decision-making process (candidate selection, leadership selection, policy formulation). The limitations of the delegates capacities are not only the actual dominance of the party in public office or the party in central office through the duration of the congress, but also some more practical difficulties (knowledge and knowhow of the delegates, the importance of regional structures, the weight of extra-party actors, notably the medias, and so on), depending on the specific intra-party organisational layout. It has also to be placed in the context of the decline and transformation of the parties, trying to find new attractive formulas (for instance the call to independent candidates), but by doing that they seems to forget the impertance of the traditional linkages. Party congress is one of the moment when the party seems to present a concrete figure, a summary of it reality, and also a moment when some discrepancies should appear more intensively. We will analyse and compare not only statutes and discourses but also results of our own qualitative research (interviews and questionnaires) and findings gathered during personal direct observation of parties congresses during the last decade.