Nowe partie w systemach partyjnych państw Grupy Wyszehradzkiej

Abstract

The presented book provides a comparative analysis of new political parties in the party systems of the Visegrad Group countries. The primary aim of analysis is to define the factors which have impact on gaining parliamentary representation by new parties in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Research on new political parties in these countries seems to be especially important for at least two reasons. Firstly, due to differences in social and political conditions, it is impossible to uncritically adapt the theoretical models made in western democracies. This stems from short tradition of functioning of democratic institutions in Central and Eastern Europe (also in V4 countries) which shaped the specific pattern of emerging of new political parties, diametrically opposed to patterns formed in consolidated democracies. On the basis of this pattern, two types of groupings can be distinguished: Old Regime parties and New Regime parties. The first type has personal or organizational ties to the previous communist regime, while the second one descends from anti-communist opposition. Secondly, in the case of the former Eastern bloc, indicators describing the party systems (e.g the electoral volatility index or the effective number of parties) do not provide full information about their real dynamics, because in conditions of weak institutionalization of political parties, changes in configuration on the political scene usually occur within the party system (as a result of mergers, splits or transformations of political parties). For this reason, it is worth analysing changes in the parliamentary arena resulting from the transfer of electoral preferences to new extra-parliamentary political entities.