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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]

Processes of decentralization in Western Europe (and elsewhere) have increased the importance of the subnational political level. State-wide political parties have needed to adapt to this. In spite of various case studies and some recent conceptual work, we only have limited knowledge and understanding of the multi-level organization of political parties. This paper attempts to improve this situation by providing a delegation framework to study the interaction between the national leadership and regional branches in state-wide parties. It conceptualizes this interaction as a principal-agent relationship, in which the national leadership can obtain benefits from delegating tasks to the regional branch, but also faces possible costs in doing this. The rules and conventions regulating the multi-level interaction in parties can, then, be interpreted as mechanisms to control the actions and policies of regional branches. These rules and convention include formal party rules, informal party procedures and conventions, and state laws affecting party organizations. The possibility to endogenize these state laws is a particularly promising implication of this approach. This framework opens up a different perspective on multi-level dynamics in political parties than usually presented, and can serve as an agenda for future empirical research. This research should focus on crisis situations in parties and what regional branches cannot do, rather than simply documenting the autonomy of these branches in their everyday activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fear is a political tool employed by many radical right-wing parties to mobilize support. Using immigration as an omnibus issue has allowed many of these parties to translate popular concerns of the day into problems caused by foreigners in their societies. This gave them the dynamism in the 1980s and 1990s to establish themselves as a viable voice of opposition, standing against the ineptness of governments across Western Europe that were failing to solve pressing problems. They have been able to take all that is wrong in their societies and use it as a report card to evaluate governments and mainstream parties in power. This strategy has provided them with relative success. Given the waning of legitimate opposition in the political party system, the radical right wing has picked up support along both the ideological left and right sides of the political spectrum. Using careful issue framing and language, they have been able to promote racism across Western Europe. This paper investigates the strategic positioning of radical right-wing parties beginning in the 1980s. It presents a model of "issue entrepreneur" parties describing their agency in reinventing themselves. Finally, the model is applied with analysis of the effects of such parties in contemporary Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the conditions under which nationalist political parties in Eastern and Western Europe are able to attract meaningful electoral support in national elections. Our aim is to explore how certain objective political, social, and economic conditions that inform voters’ subjective appraisals of nationalist parties’ claims and promises drive overall electoral results. As a second order concern, we are interested in understanding if and how the dynamics of nationalist political support differ substantively as we move geographically from Western to Eastern Europe. Here, we explore whether the same kinds of variables matter for nationalist parties in the West and the East and, if so, whether these variables play the same kind of role or have the same degree of importance for countries with quite dissimilar economic conditions, political legacies, social experiences, and historical memories. We argue that a full account of the determinants of nationalist voting must take into account this breadth in nationalist political parties and the diversity of country settings; we employ two-rounds of pooled regression analysis for more than 160 political parties in 89 national election cycles in 33 countries across Eastern and Western Europe. Our preliminary findings indicate economic, institutional, social and historical variables have significant effects across Europe, but in different ways. Our findings suggest that nationalist political parties in Eastern and Western Europe do well under different conditions, and that the dynamics of nationalist electoral support are, in some aspects, geographically bounded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the patterns of party financing in relatively recently established democracies in Southern and East-Central Europe, with a particular emphasis on the relative importance of the state and society as financial resources for political parties. The analysis shows that public funds have become a critical source of income in all of the democracies considered here, and that the robust financial linkage with the state has left parties largely dependent on and firmly entrenched in the state ever since the early stages of the democratic transition. Parties in new democracies thus reflect the tendency observed in their older West European counterparts, by which parties increasingly become part of the state apparatus rather than the tools of civil society. Furthermore, since state subventions are defined in terms of electoral success or parliamentary strength, they enhance the parties' focus on elections and on short-term electoral linkages, which is further encouraged by the increasing importance of state subsidies for election campaigns. It is also argued that the importance of public money does not unequivocally rule out the importance of society. However, rather than as a structural flow of income secured through the channels of the party organization, through membership subscriptions for example, societal funding has primarily taken the form of ad hoc contributions of private business to electoral campaigns. In addition, society seems to have acquired a special relevance as an illicit source of party financing. This money accrued from corrupt sources, however, may actually serve to reinforce rather than to counterbalance the strength of the linkage with the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between political campaign and party finance laws and corruption. Several problems with campaign and party finance have been cited, including politics does not respond to the laws of supply and demand. It also outlines some of the most common mechanisms that have been proposed to deal with the problems pertaining to financing parties and politicians in some European states such as spending limits on campaigns for public office and the public financing of election campaigns.

Presents a study on coalition governance and communist successor parties in Eastern Europe. Success of CSPs in elections; Effect of CSPs on coalition formation; Treatment on CSPs in government formation; Government participation of CSPs; Allocation of portfolios to parties in a governing coalition.

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]