Abstrakt: | 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. |