Toward a Typology of Post-Communist Successor Parties in East-Central Europe and an Explanatory Framework for their Success

This paper revisits the phenomenon of post-communist successor parties – defined as the legal successor organizations of pre-1989 ruling parties – in East-Central Europe three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and nearly two decades after the most recent period of sustained academic interest in the topic. The paper begins with a critical re-examination of the late 1990s and early 2000s comparative politics literature on successor parties, noting in particular its reliance on path dependency as well as subsequent empirical developments that cannot be explained by established approaches. From here, the paper proposes a two-dimensional typology of successor parties based on 1) programmatic orientation and 2) size and coalition potential as an indicator of degree of success within the party system. It is argued that changes in the electoral fortunes of a number of successor parties since the mid-2000s cannot be explained on the basis of ideological/programmatic or organizational change alone, as assumed by the previous literature, but rather require a relational perspective on the structure of party competition and interactions with competitor parties in the respective party systems. Drawing on a combination of qualitative case analysis, expert survey (CHES) data, and post-election studies on voter flows, the paper proposes three types of competitive interactions – outflanking, crowding out, and a combination of both – that explain the precipitous decline of successor parties at certain electoral conjunctures, which can also be understood as critical junctures in which the path dependencies assumed by the previous literature lose their explanatory force. The paper thus seeks to contribute to a “normalized” understanding of successor-party success in terms of party-system interactions that are applicable to the study of party competition more generally.