Societal and Political Cleavages

Abstract

The founding elections of 1989 and 1990 were primarily anticommunist plebiscites. In the Czech and Slovak Republics and Poland, though not in Hungary, they introduced the second stage of party building: the organizational differentiation of ideologically heterogeneous and hitherto largely unstructured “civic movements” (Mangott, 1992: 104). Despite the crystallization of milieu parties, especially among Catholic subcultures (Enyedi, 1996), most political parties were weakly rooted in society and suffered from internal factionalization. Party systems were, on the whole, highly fragmented (Segert and Machos, 1995). Riviera (1996) tested the two hypotheses of party building in postauthoritarian systems: the “defreezing” of earlier, fundamental societal cleavages latent or frozen under the communist regime vs. “modes of transition” away from authoritarian systems. He concluded that both factors were less important in East-Central Europe than in Western and Southern Europe. “Rather it is the legacy of the communist authoritarian period — the command economy, the decomposition of civil society and the imposition of one-party rule — that seems to have the greatest effect on the early stages of party formation” (ibid.: 195). Kitschelt (1995a, b) developed a multifactor model for ideal typical conflict configuration in the various postcommunist societies.