Cleavages in Eastern European Party Competition

The academic literature documents notoriously high levels of electoral volatility, high levels of new party entry and party system de-institutionalisation in the Central and Eastern European region. However, content-based accounts of the main issues and cleavages in party mobilisation are rare. The present paper takes a dynamic perspective to examine the development of the issue agenda and the axes of competition in party competition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Using media analysis of two newspapers from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Latvia, in a two-month period before national elections, the paper takes a cleavage perspective and examines the supply side of political mobilisation. The four countries were chosen to represent the diversity within the Eastern European region. The analysis presents issue-specific salience, polarisation and politicisation, as well as the overall political space in each country. The paper finds significant country differences in the development of the main cleavages. In countries like Poland and Hungary, the cultural dimension constitutes a fully-fledged cleavage that appears more important in structuring the partisan landscape, than the economic left-right dimension. In contrast, in countries like Latvia and Romania, the cultural dimension is less important, and cultural issues coexist with economic ones. The paper highlights the stability of the main cleavages and demonstrates that new parties do not change the existing dimensions of political mobilisation. By taking a dynamic, content-based perspective, the paper contributes to the literature on cleavages, party competition, and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.