Explaining the success of centre-right parties in post Communist East Central Europe: a comparative analysis

Abstract:

This paper attempts to explain varying patterns of centre-right success in three postcommunist states, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Success is understood as the ability to construct broad and durable parties. Macro-institutional explanations that focus on executive structures and electoral system design have limited explanatory power and it is often difficult to separate out analytically the processes of cause and effect. Although historical-structural explanations that focus on regime legacies can explain the ideological positioning of different centre right formations in our three cases, they do little to explain their relative success.

The application of a path dependent/critical junctures framework that stresses the role of political crafting and choices made in the immediate post-transition period and the aftermath of defeat by communist successor parties in the Hungarian and Polish cases adds some insight, but there is some doubt as to whether the success in founding broad centre-right party-type formations in these periods ‘locks in’ through self-reinforcing mechanisms and a logic of ‘increasing returns’.

Other explanations that stress the importance of elite characteristics and capacity are needed to supplement the shortcomings of these approaches, in particular: (a) the presence of cohesive elites able to act as the nucleus of new centre-right formations; and (b) the ability of such elites to craft broad integrative ideological narratives that can transcend diverse ideological positions and unite broad swathes of centre-right and right-wing activists and voters.