Abstract
Party membership is one of the most important indicators of political participation level in Western democracies. After the fall of the communist regimes in East central Europe, the newly established democracies in the region were included into the comparative research of party membership showing important differences from the practices within the traditional democratic states. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the level and quality of party membership development in East Central Europe, employing throughout the political participation model. At the same time, the chapter analyses closely related issues such as party-state relations development, overparticisation and alternative methods that might revitalise the political communication between the state and the citizen.
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Notes
- 1.
In this context, we do not consider it analytically significant whether the Communist party in a particular country was complemented by so-called satellite parties (e.g. Czechoslovakia and Poland) or was really the only political party (e.g. the Soviet Union).
- 2.
E.g. Poland 2005–2007 with the League of Polish Families and the Self-Defense, or Slovakia, where between 2006 and 2010, the Slovak National Party participated in the government.
- 3.
Ehrke continues: “Parties are less predictable. Naturally, their practical political options are restricted, too, but by external factors, not by their own traditions and the self-restraint to which they give rise … In both versions of peripheral nationalism, which mirrors the old debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles, backwardness counts as an advantage” (Ehrke 2010, p. 4).
- 4.
“The second distinction … is that between large and small democracies. The relationship between size and democracy was first theorized by Dahl and Tufte (1973, p. 43), who hypothesized that ‘the larger the citizen body … the weaker the incentive to participate’ – a proposition which has obvious implications for party membership” (Biezen et al. 2012, pp. 26–27).
- 5.
Interview with the Vice-Chairman of TOP09, Dr. Marek Ženíšek, December 17th, 2011.
- 6.
This reason was also given by Estonian political scientists in interviews carried out under the research project Political Parties in Central and Eastern Europe – Interview with Dr. Petr Jurek, 3 January 2012.
- 7.
Out of 23 surveyed countries, membership grew in six – Estonia, slightly in Austria (2.28 %) and the Netherlands (3.40), markedly, by one third, in France (32.24), Italy (32.89) and Spain (35.32) (Biezen et al. 2012, p. 32).
- 8.
For a current and detailed analysis of political party funding in Slovenia from public subsidy and other sources, see (Krašovec and Haughton 2011).
- 9.
Schmitter (2001, p. 71) continues: “Interest associations seek to influence the direction of policy so that it will benefit particularly … their own members, without competing in elections or being publicly accountable for these policies. Social movements are also in the business of trying to exert influence over policy without competing in elections … but the benefits that they typically seek would accrue, not specifically to their own members, but to a broad spectrum of the citizenry – even to foreigners, plants, animals …”
- 10.
Let us illustrate this phenomenon with the example of the Czech Republic. In a situation where there are more than 6,000 autonomous municipalities, the largest political parties are not capable of creating a candidate list in more than half of them (and concentrate on competition in the several largest cities, which largely mimics the competition at the national level, including the topics and strategies used in the campaign). In local elections, the traditional winners are then the formations of independent candidates that may occupy even more than 50 % of all seats offered by the municipalities (Vodička and Cabada 2011, p. 393).
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Cabada, L. (2013). “Parties with No Members?”: How to Ensure Political Participation in East Central Europe. In: Demetriou, K. (eds) Democracy in Transition. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30068-4_5
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