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This paper analyzes the new institutional architecture of Eastern Europe. It extends Lijphart?s study of democratic institutions to fourteen new democracies in Eastern Europe. In his analysis of advanced democracies, Lijphart found that ten institutional variables cluster on two clearly separate dimensions. This clustering does not occur in the new democracies of Eastern Europe; they do not fall clearly into Lijphart?s consensus and majoritarian camps. On the executives-parties dimension, Eastern European countries are basically consensus except for highly majoritarian forms of interest group representation. On the federal-unity dimension, they are even more divided. While they tend to have unitary, unicameral governments (both majoritarian traits), they have adopted highly consensual modes of constitutional amendment, judicial review, and central banks. While Lijphart suggests that his two types of democracy have a logical coherence, this paper attributes these hybrids to the circumstances prevailing at the time when new institutions were adopted. In particular, communist legacies and international conditions have influenced the choice of new institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control over government portfolios is the key to power over policy and patronage and is commonly understood to lie with parties in European democracies. But since the democratic transitions of the 1990s, Europe has had nearly equal numbers of parliamentary and semi-presidential regimes, and there is evidence that the ability of parties to control government posts in these two regime types differs. As yet, political scientists have a limited understanding of the scale and causes of these differences. In this paper we propose a principal-agent theoretical explanation. We examine our account using data on 28 parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies in Europe, and show that differences in party control over government portfolios cannot be understood without reference to the underlying principal-agent relationships between voters, elected politicians, and governments, that characterize Europe's semi-presidential and parliamentary regimes. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the extent and duration of democratic politics in postcommunist Europe, paying particular attention to the possible impact of the European Union. It concludes with a brief discussion of why it is that the postcommunist democracies that are now members of the EU or soon-to-be members register such high levels of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works and distrust of government, parliament, and political parties. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is hardly any political actor that has come under more severe scrutiny and critique in contemporary democracies than political parties. Underlying of much of this critique is the notion that political parties no longer fulfil their central role in representative democracies: to represent the interests of their supporters. While the process of representation has various stages that pose different demands for parties, the first step of making sure that there is a high degree of congruence between parties and party supporters pre-electoral positions is arguably the foundation of the whole process. If parties and their specific supporters do not match ideologically in the run-up to an election, parties are logically not able to represent their supporters positions in parliament or government. I investigate the charge of an increasing disparity between parties and their supporters by employing an innovative measure of the quality of congruence. For the first time, this measure makes a single left-right party position comparable to the whole distribution of party supporters left-right positions. In order to achieve this goal, I create a theoretical distribution of a partys left-right positions over a point estimate and compare this distribution with that of the partys supporters. I employ this measure to a unique data set that matches party positions from the Manifesto Project's data set (former CMP) to voter positions taken from survey data (Eurobarometer and CSES) for Western European countries, resulting in data for 709 parties in elections between 1973 and 2009. The analysis explores whether certain parties show better congruence than others and why that might be the case. On the level of parties, I find that the parties belonging to the traditional Western European party families create the highest congruence with their supporters and larger as well as more right parties perform better than small and left parties. On systemic level, I find that the electoral system does not have an effect on congruence, which goes against much of the received wisdom in the representation literature (Powell 2000) but confirms newer findings by authors like Golder and Stramski (2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a theory about the institutional determinants and the political consequences of party systems. We look at a select number of cases drawn from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that the party system format is a central determinant of democratic quality. In turn, institutional engineering largely shapes the party system. Parliamentary systems and party list proportional representation are more conducive to a strong party system with competitive, programmatic and institutionalized political parties, and consequently to a better democratic quality. In order to show this, we take a closer look at a subset of post-Communist polities, those with a majority Orthodox population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]