The paper deals with the question of applicability of typologies of democratic regimes and suggests specification of a promising tool to compare democratic institutions and patterns. The most influential tool to compare modern democracies is probably the typology proposed by Arend Lijphart. This famous typology arranges democratic political systems along an axis with two extremes: 1. majoritarianism, characterized by concentration of power, and 2. consensualism, characterized by power sharing. However, there are important reservations which prevent application of the typology outside the usual set of typical, traditional cases. Some have been addressed by Lijphart himself, others are described by newer studies. Some scholars (Ganghof 2005; 2010; Vatter 2009) even contest the methodological foundations of Lijphart’s typology. I demonstrate these issues on the example of the democracies from the area of Central and Eastern Europe. In my paper, I attempt to operationalize the outlines of two alternative typologies of parliamentary democracies, those of Steffen Ganghof (2005; 2010) and André Kaiser (2002), which have been defined on institutionalist grounds. Those typologies are experimentally applied and “tested” on the data from the area of CEE. Finally, I try to develop the ideas from Ganghof’s proposal and suggest an interpretation of his arguments concerning the central role of institutional inclusion (to be tested in the following years). The point of the interpretation is that a universal way to compare democracies could be based on spatial analysis of parliaments, with special regard to the cohesion of parties and relations between governments and legislative majorities. Besides, such an analysis could also reveal the trends in party behaviour and their implications for modern democracies.
