Post-Communist Transformations of Christian Democracy in Central Europe

Central European states entered the post-communist era from seemingly similar positions due to the shared Leninist legacy. However, three decades later, various internal and external shocks set these countries on different trajectories. Comparative politics provided multiple explanations for these divergent political outcomes, such as the immediate effect of institutional choices, the long-run historical legacies, the re-consolidation of conservative civil society, or the end of the imitation game. I offer a competing explanation that zooms in on the post-communist transformations from the perspective of political ideology. I focus on the region’s crucial but oft-neglected governing ideology, Christian democracy, its persistence, and change across time and space. I zero in on two critical historical turning points: the liberal democratic spin during the "great transformation" in the early 1990s when Christian democrats ran the first non-communist governments in Central Europe and the illiberal and ethnonationalist turn that followed the economic and refugee crises in the 2010s, that introduced a polarization within the Christian democratic party family. The available literature on Christian democracy focuses on institutional factors and screens out the ideological development and sway of Christian democracy in Central Europe, separating it from Western European development. My paper seeks to close this knowledge gap and supply conditions for further theory-building and cross-regional and cross-national variance. How to define the fundamental building blocks of Central European Christian democratic ideology across time and space? What are the key shifts in the Christian democratic ideological development post-1989? How the local ambassadors imitate, absorb, or eclipse the liberal democratic model of the "Western style" Christian democracy? I offer four working hypotheses. First, Christian democratic ideology has operated as one of the central proxies, alongside social democracy and neoliberalism, that transmitted the liberal democratic model to the post-communist space. Second, it is a hybrid shaped by Western-style political theory, confessional traditions, and distinctive historical legacies. Third, the post-communist Christian democratic ideologues are scattered across various political parties within a single state. Finally, the Christian democratic ideology in Central Europe is marked by convergence in the 1990s and pluralization and fragmentation in the 2010s. The paper's scope is limited temporally by the post-communist era and geographically by Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia. The units of analysis are clusters of Christian democratic ideologues and the shifting ideological composition. I situate my paper at the crossroads of comparative politics, political theory, and conceptual history. I cross-fertilize historical institutionalism to document the ideological carriers and the structural factors, the morphological approach to political ideologies to excavate the distinctive conceptual structures and the semantical meanings, and the theory of recanonization to study the corpora through which the ideologues (re)construct the ideological self-description and partisan identity. I supplement the literature on conservative political actors in (de)democratization, complicate generalizations on the relationship between religion, nationalism, and liberal democracy in Central Europe, and add to the research on the history of political ideologies in Central Europe writ large.