Parliamentarization as a Region-Specific Way of Democratization in East Central Europe

Abstract

In this essay I wish to present arguments for the concept that parliamentarization has been a region-specific way of democratization in East Central Europe (ECE). While it is obvious that ECE parliaments have been more decisive than those in the presidential systems of Latin America or Eastern Europe (on the distinction between parliamentary and presidential systems, see Strøm 2000), I assert that parliaments have played an even greater role in the ECE democratizations than was the case in the parliamentary democracies of Southern Europe (SE). Yet, in speaking of parliamentarization, one must first distinguish between the different interrelated meanings this term has come to have in ECE. First, it means the creation of a parliamentary democracy as opposed to the presidential type of democracy, which development was most pronounced and most decisive in the early nineties. This parliamentarization led to an extreme form in the initial stage of development that I have termed “over-parliamentarization”, a time when parliament and parties became so dominant as to appear to be the only venue and exclusive actors, respectively, in national politics. As ECE parliamentarization then came to take on a wider meaning — i.e. the extension of parliamentary forms and rules of the game to all other institutions — over-parliamentarization declined and finally disappeared completely. The second and narrowest meaning of parliamentarization connotes a particular period of party development — after the first free elections — during which parties undergo their institutionalization within and with the parliaments.