Political Entrepreneurs, Business-Firm, or Something Else? Organizational Strategies of Genuinely New Parties in Slovakia, 2000-2016

In recent years many European party systems have witnessed success of new political parties of various ideological persuasions. These new players often use different organizational strategies, unorthodox communication techniques, and novel ways to engage with their support base. Some scholars even argue a new type of party has emerged, often labeled as business-type or political entrepreneur parties. While there are several widely discussed cases of such parties in West European countries, new Central and Eastern European democracies provide an exceptionally fertile ground to explore how these new parties organize and function. In our paper we explore the pattern of party organizational behavior in Slovakia. Previous research has demonstrated that after the breakdown of communism, most parties attempted to build traditional "mass-party-like" structures. However, most parties that emerged after the first decade of democratic competition seem to abandon such an effort and instead engaged in innovative party-building techniques. We focus on genuinely new parliamentary parties that emerged since about 2000 in Slovakia. By studying the key aspects of their functioning such as leadership style, party organization building, the role and position of ordinary members, and the overall nature of party-voter linkages, we attempt to shed some light on these new parties. We demonstrate that while most of the new parties do not fit neatly into any of the established organizational types, their organizational strategies clearly differ from the more traditional parties.