Puzzling Over Party Organisation in East Central Europe:

Some Thoughts from the Czech Case

Seán Hanley

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This paper is approximately 30 pages long when printed

Paper presented at the Conference of the PSA Specialist Group on Communist and Post-Communist Politics, 10 February 2001, SSEES

1. Introduction

There is broad consensus that the new democracies of East Central Europe are consolidating around ‘programmatically structured’ party systems (Kitschelt et al 1999). However, while considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to researching emerging patterns of cleavage and inter-party competition (Kitschelt et al 1999) in the region, research on East Central European parties as organisations linking state and society have, as Szczerbiak (2000) notes, remained relatively underdeveloped. Moreover, attempts to apply models of party organisation developed in a West European or North American context to East Central Europe have often proved problematic when confronted with detailed empirical findings from the region (Lewis 1994; Kopecký 1995; Szczerbiak 1999, 2000). Such difficulties have fed a wave of recent academic scepticism about the applicability of existing political science theory to post-communist East Central Europe (Kubicek 2000; Kopecký and Mudde 2000)

In this paper, however, I would like to address such broader topics by considering, and to some extent challenging, one aspect of current thinking on party formation and party organisation in post-communist East Central Europe: the expectation that optimum, most efficient, and therefore most likely, model of party organisation will be a rough approximation to the elite-based ‘electoral-professional’ or ‘cartel’ type party said to be emerging in Western Europe. Using a detailed examination of party organisation and party development in the Czech Republic after 1989, I will argue that the difficulties in applying this model arise not only because of the inherent complexity of empirical data or because of the difficulty of exporting models developed for West European democracies, but because, despite the caveats introduced by many analysts, the path dependent process of party organisational development in the region has been neglected.

On the basis of the Czech case, I will then suggest that pattern of party organisation we might expect to find in East Central Europe is less a dichotomous split between small ‘new’ parties roughly following the ‘electoral-professional’ model and ‘old’ former regime parties preserving elements of traditional ‘mass’ party organisation, than path dependently formed hybrids based on the transformation of pre-existing political organisation. Bt pre-existing political organisation we should understand not only mean the ‘mass’ legacy of former ruling and ‘satellite’ parties, but also the ‘organisational capital’ (Grabowski 1996) embodied in short-lived transitional mass movements such as Civic Forum or the Solidarity Citizens’ Committees and resources passed to ‘historic parties’ by political exiles and actors such as the Socialist International. Such ‘path dependent’ development implies that few, if any, viable real-life parties in East Central Europe will closely resemble the rational-efficient ‘electoral professional’ or ‘cartel’ party models. I will conclude by briefly reflecting on the implications of these findings for the use of party models in the region. I will argue that of the existing established literature on parties, it is perhaps Kirchheimer’s (1966) seminal essay on the ‘catch-all party’ that offers ‘model’ of party organisational development, less because it anticipated trends towards the ‘electoral-professional’ or ‘cartel’ party than because it intuitively captures the path dependent character of party organisation. Finally, I note a number of factors other than path dependency that may also offer insights into the limited and loose fit ‘electoral-professional’ and ‘cartel’ models of party in a region such as East Central Europe, where prevailing social and political conditions imply that it would be highly likely to emerge in very clear form.

2. Towards The ‘Electoral-Professional’ Party in East Central Europe?

Most specialists agree that there are a number of historical, structural and conjunctural factors, which make the context of party organisational emergence in post-communist East Central Europe quite different from that in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These factors include: an inherited ‘anti-party’ culture and a suspicion of politics and political organisation; lack of clear (or clearly understood) social identities and socio-economic interests; the weakness of civil society and organised interest groups and, correspondingly, the relative importance of the state as a resource base for parties; the fluid nature of post-communist electorates and a tendency for electoral markets to be ‘open’; the trend for parties to founded from above (‘internally’) by transitional parliamentary or governmental elites, rather than ‘externally ‘on the basis of social movements; the growth in the reach and importance of the electronic media; and the greater need of parties to control and occupy the state given the politically-led nature of post-communist transformation. (Kitschelt 1992; Kopecký 1995; Lewis 1994; Lewis and Gortat 1995; Perkins 1996; Mair 1996; Szczerbiak 2000; van Biezen 2000).

There had also been broad and consistent agreement among scholars in deducing the type of party organisation that such a set of ‘opportunity structures’ should logically imply: small, low-membership organisations dominated by office-holders, political professionals and party elites, which would neither have (nor seek) any real presence in civil society, but would instead rely on the state, the media and the electoral nexus to link with voters. Kitschelt, for example, in an early and influential article, anticipated ‘loose associations of professionals with little local entrenchment and no transmission belts into target constituencies’ (1992: 42). Mair (1996: 12, 13) writing in the mid-1990s, spoke of ‘ ‘the maintenance of ‘elitist party organisations, even in the medium to long term’. Kopecký (1995: 517) hypothesised ‘formations with loose electoral constituencies, in which a relatively unimportant role is played by party membership, and the dominant role of party leaders’. Szczerbiak in his study of Poland postulates ‘[parties] characterised by a weak grounding in civil society arising from a low membership base and the low priority assigned to building up local structures and a high level of dependence for financial and material resources ... a centralised pattern of decision-making alongside a high level of autonomy given to basic and intermediary structures on local decisions’ (Szczerbiak 1999: 526)

The development of parties in post-communist East Central Europe has been almost exclusively conceptualised using theoretical models first developed to study parties and party systems in Western Europe. This literature (for an overview see Mair 1990) traces the development of West European parties from the loose ‘caucuses’ of notables organised through parliamentary factions and elite social networks to the ‘branch-mass’ party (Duverger 1954) or ‘party of mass integration’ (Neumann 1956) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries;, through an intermediate stage of the more loosely organised, less class-based post-1945 ‘catch-all party’ (Kirchheimer 1966); to the more streamlined ‘electoral-professional’ party’ (Panebianco, 1988) , ‘cartel party’ (Katz and P Mair 1995) or ‘business-firm’ (Hopkin and Paolucci (1999) models characterised by fluid and fragmented electorates, low memberships, elite domination, and a reliance on state resources, the electronic media and externally purchased professional expertise.

It is to this final, most contemporary set of models of party that the type of party organisation implied by East Central European political and social conditions is usually linked. Indeed, it has even been suggested that, unencumbered by the historical, organisational and ideological baggage of by long-established parties in Western democracies, East Central European parties will ‘leapfrog’ West European parties by developing ‘purer’, more advanced ‘electoral-professional’ forms of organisation (Perkins 1996; Olson 1998)..

How do such expectations square with empirical findings from the region? At a high level of generalisation they are broadly confirmed. Leaving aside the exceptional cases of the Czech Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSÈM) or the Hungarian Christian Democrats (Enedyi 1996), no truly ‘mass’ parties exist either in terms of size or encapsulation of distinct social constituencies. Moreover, it is clear that levels of party membership, organisational density, voter-party identification and social implantation in East Central Europe are in almost all cases significantly inferior to those in Western and Southern Europe, (Kopecký 1995: 524; Mair 1996; 14). In many cases, there is significant concentration and overlapping of party and state/parliamentary elites, who seem to enjoy significant autonomy (Kopecký 1995; Szczerbiak 2000; van Biezen 2000). It would seem therefore that, as Szczerbiak (1999: 535) remarks of Poland, parties generally ‘exhibit more of the characteristics evident in contemporary models of party organisation - catch-all, electoral-professional and cartel - than those of the traditional mass party’ .

However, when empirical data on party membership and organisation in East Central European states is examined in more detail a more complex picture emerges. While most ‘new’ parties descended from pre-1989 opposition groupings or formed after 1989 seem to conform closely to the ‘electoral-professional’ or ‘cartel’ model, former regime parties seem to retain significant aspects of traditional mass party organisation. Lewis (1996: 16), for example, notes ‘the relative strength, organizational resilience and relatively high membership levels of former communist parties and allied organizations’ as well as their good financial and material resource base. Similar conclusions are reached by Kopecký (1995) in his detailed survey of party organisation in the Czech Republic, where both the Communist Party and the Christian Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People’s Party, a former satellite party, stand out because of the size and density of their organisational networks and the loyalty and stability of their electorates( see also Kroupa and Kostelecký 1996). Szczerbiak’s regionally-based analysis of Polish party organisation in 1997 too reveals ‘a sharp contrast between the two ‘successor’ parties and the three ‘new’ parties’ (1999: 527) with the former enjoying ‘a relatively robust level of membership, organisation and material resources compared with those completely ‘new’ parties that have emerged since 1989’ (1999: 526).

Although, analysts disagree over the scope and importance of organisational dissimilarities between ‘successor’ and ‘new’ parties,[1] the anomaly seems a relatively simple one explainable in terms of the ‘organisational inheritance’ and cultural continuity from the communist regime, in some cases, the pre-communist period (Waller 1996). Such organisational legacies, as Kopecký (1995: 532) suggests, might in a limited number of cases simply ‘mask or simply work against’ a general, underlying tendency for East Central European parties to evolve towards the ‘electoral professional’ model. Szczerbiak too concludes that such successor parties are ‘partial exceptions’ (1999: 535) to the general tendency of parties in post-communist Poland to approximate to the ‘electoral-professional’ and ‘cartel’ models. However, both analyses shy away from even a qualified generalisation about their usefulness in the region: Kopecký concludes that the six Czech parties he examines ‘do not display characteristics which would point to a distinctive model of party organisation’ (1995: 529). Szczerbiak (2000: 31-4) introduces a significant number of ‘caveats and qualifications’ - relating to, for example, absence of cartel type behaviour among political elites and weakly established notions of ‘party’ - to his general conclusion, which lead him too to question the applicability of Western-derived models of party as more than ideal types. Van Biezen’s recent (2000) work on the internal power dynamics of parties in Hungary and the Czech Republic which, while highlighting the overlapping of parliamentary and party elites, suggests that party head offices not parliamentary elites are the most powerful actors notes the ‘limited values of established models of party formation and organization’ (2000: 410). This uneasy relationship between detailed empirical research and existing models of party suggests that some degree of re-thinking may need to take place. In the next section, I would like to consider, through a detailed re-examination and reinterpretation of the Czech case, some possible lines along which such a rethinking might occur.

3. The Czech Case Revisited:

As in many Central European democracies, Czech party politics has moved from a state of flux and instability following the collapse of communist rule to a semi-consolidated, programmatically-structured party system with 5-6 key actors (Kitschelt et al 1999). In terms of party organisation and party-society links, the Czech case exhibits the same loosely ‘electoral-professional’ tendencies seem throughout the region (Kopecký 1995; Kroupa and Kostelecký 1996) but is unusual in that the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSÈM) has retained a communist identity and mass organisation allowing the ‘historic’ Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) to emerge as a key force. In the following analysis, I will therefore exclude KSČM and focus on the development of three more mainstream parties, which by the late 1990s had emerged as the most powerful actors in the party system, between them accounting for 69% of votes cast and 76% of deputies at the most recent (1998) legislative elections.[2] These three parties are: the Czechoslovak People’s Party (ČSL),[3] a centre-right Catholic party with roots going back to the 19th century which was a ‘satellite’ under communist rule; the Social Democrats (ČSSD), a ‘historic’ party banned under communist rule; and the powerful centre-right, Civic Democratic Party (ODS) led by Václav Klaus, a ‘new’ party formed in 1991. The analysis will trace the process of party formation and organisational development from 1989, paying particular attention to the ‘genesis’ (Panebianco 1988) of the three parties in 1989-91.

Table 1: Organisational data on the Czechoslovak People’s Party (ČSL) (later Christian Democratic Union - Czechoslovak People s Party (KDU- ČSL) ) 1990-1999.

Date	Direct members	No. of party basic units
1990 (1 Jan)	48 037*	1448
1990 (1 Apr)	87 237	2324
1990 (1 Sept)	96 372	no data
1990 (Dec)	95 435	2387
1991 (Feb)	95 056	2403
1991 (Aug)	94 377	2401
1992	88 737	2437
1993	100 000 (est)	no data
1995 (Nov)	80 000	no data
1999 (Feb)	60 396	no data

Source: Hanley 2000, data from nternal party bulletins and Czech press

* Later estimates imply a membership of 50 958 on 1 January 1990

A detailed examination of this period immediately raises a number of question about the accepted account of post-communist-party development. The first point suggested is that the notion of ‘organisational inheritances’ needs extending to embrace not only historical party tradition and ‘frozen’ organisational resources built up under communism, but also the ‘hot’ organisational legacies of political and social mobilisation in and around the ‘transition’ period in 1989-90 This can be illustrated by examining the impressive growth in 1989-90 in the memberships and organisational networks of the Czechoslovak People’s Party (ČSL), the former satellite party, and the revived ‘historic’ Czech Social Democrats Party (see tables 1 and 2).[4] In the course of 1990, the Czechoslovak People’s Party (ČSL) more than doubled both its membership and the number of local branches, creating what can reasonably be termed a mass organisation of almost 100, 000 members from a ‘satellite’ party of approximately 20, 000 members. Even if we take into account a fall in membership to around 60, 000 by the late 1990s and allow for the fact that as a ‘satellite’ party, ÈSL’s membership and organisation were kept artificially low compared to the levels of identification with it, it is clear that its ‘organisational inheritance’ was effectively realised in 1989-90.

The case of Czechoslovak Social Democracy reveals a similar pattern. ČSSD was officially merged with the Communist Party in June 1948, but continued to exist in the West throughout communist rule as a network of political exiles. Although it had no real organisational resources in place in Czechoslovakia in November 1989, its status as a ‘historic’ party did give ČSSD a ‘legacy’ of resources to draw on. Its leaders were, for example, successful in reclaiming the party’s pre-1948 Prague headquarters building - a valuable asset - from the Communist Party in January 1990. They were also able to translate the exiled ČSSD’s associate membership of the Socialist International, which it had enjoyed since the 1950s, into significant donations from otherwise cautious SI parties. More significantly, however, in the first half of 1990, although it failed to create anything approaching a mass organisation, ČSSD’s did succeed in creating a nationwide political organisation of 10,000 - 11, 000 members and a professional national apparatus which was to employ almost 200 staff by mid-1991. While, as with the People’s Party, geographical patterns of support and analysis of party membership by age group and region (Hanley 2000: 308-310), suggest ČSSD was drawing on historic reservoirs of support and identification, once again it was unleashed and, to some extent augmented, by the wider political mobilisation of the transition period.

Table 2: Organisational Data on Czechoslovak Social Democracy (later Czech Social Democratic Party) (ČSSD) 1990-1999

Year	Direct members	No. of party basic units
1990 (Apr)	8 640 (Est. 9-10, 000]	est. 76 (Jan)
1990 (Sept)	11 823 (est. 13, 000)	501 (est. 550-580)
1991 (Mar)	12 734 (est. 13, 000+)	no data
1993	17 000	no data
1995 [Nov]	est. 12 500	no data
1997 [Dec]	est. 14 000	no data
1999 [31.1.99]	18 762	no data

Source: Hanley 2000, data from internal party bulletins and Czech press (estimates from party sources)

A second key point that emerges is that ‘organisational inheritances’ should be seen is a general phenomenon affecting most if not all viable parties that have developed in East Central Europe. While imperfectly understood, the operation of such inheritances for ‘historic’ and ‘successor’ parties like ČSSD and ČSL has been widely noted. However, it also seems the case successful and organisationally viable ‘new’ parties also draw on substantial organisational inheritances. This can be seem through an analysis of origins of the most powerful - and, in the long-term, only sustained ‘ new’ Czech party: Václav Klaus’s Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and its origins in Civic Forum (OF), the broad-based social and political movement formed in November 1989 in opposition to the communist regime, which headed both the interim administration after 1989 and - after contesting and winning elections the June 1990 election in the Czech Lands - the newly elected Czech and Czechoslovak governments.

.Much academic writing and much of ODS’s own rhetoric has stressed that the party’s formation represented a radical break with OF. Kopecký (1995: 528), for example, claims that ODS ‘started to develop its organisaztion from scratch’. However, while the break-up of Civic Forum may have represented an important change of political in organisational terms ODS received a substantial inheritance from Civic Forum. This inheritance, took the form of material resources, personnel, activists and organisational networks and structures[5] and was to be crucial for the viability of the newly-founded party which did not receive state funding in its own right until after the June 1992 elections.

Despite the looseness and inherent instability of its structures, Civic Forum was organisationally a substantial mass political organisation with significant material and human resources, in addition such state-funding and the political visibility and powers of patronage that electoral success and incumbency implied. The exact extent of the OF organisation is unclear, as the movement had no formal membership or centralised record of supporters. In a poll in May 1990 8.86% of Czech respondents claimed to be ‘members’ of Civic Forum, implying a ‘membership’ of 650, 000 (Boguszak, Gabal and Rak 1996), however estimates prepared for the movement’s leadership in late 1990 suggested a lower figure of 300, 000 ‘supporters’ were in some way involved with the movement (Klaus 1991b). What is clear, however, is that Civic Forum enjoyed substantial mass participation and that by the end of 1990 (and probably earlier) it had created a nationwide organisational network with approximately 1600 local groups, a well-resourced headquarters and professionalised regional structures, which rivalled the mass organisation of the Communist Party (KSÈM) (Hadjiisky 1996; Kostelecký and Kroupa 1996; Hanley 2000).

By early 1991, Civic Forum (OF) was riven with political disagreements over issues such as economic reform, decommunisation, Czech-Slovak relations, internal democracy and the future of the movement. When plans by the Forum’s right wing, led by Václav Klaus, who had been elected its Chair in October 1990, to transform the movement into a centre-right party brought these to a head in it agreed to divide the movement and its assets into two ‘successor parties’: a right-of-centre party led by and a looser centrist grouping, Civic Movement (OH) (Hanley 2000a). On 23 February 1991 a special Civic Forum Assembly agreed that Civic Forum’s assets at national level would be split evenly between ODS and OH, but would exclude all other political groups within the Forum. Local and district Civic Fora were to agree their own arrangements for the division of their property. Given Klaus’s considerable grassroots support, most agreed that most or all of their assets would be passed to ODS. Moreover, in almost every district a majority of Civic Forum’s full time professional district ‘managers’ (officials) - nationally approximately 3/4 of the total - joined ODS, many beginning the ‘pre-registration’ of ODS members even before Civic Forum had formally been dissolved. (Hanley 2000: 188-214, 347-8).

Table 3: Organisational Data on the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) 1991-1996

Year	Direct members	No. of party basic units
1991 (April)	est. 20 000	803 (Nov)
1992 (Mar)	‘up to 30 000’	1000+
1993	22 000	no data
1994 (Dec)	23 489	1405
1995 (Aug)	21 365	1395
1995 (Nov)	21 803	1391
1996 (Nov)	23 434	1385

Source: data in ODS party bulletins and estimates in Czech press, Hanley 2000

Contrary to suggestions that it ‘developed from a parliamentary club (Kopecký 1995: 529), therefore, the formation of ODS had considerable impetus at both elite (parliamentary) and district and grassroots level (Hadjiisky 1996; Hanley 2000a). More significantly, however, it seems clear that without the Civic Forum movement and its organisational legacy, it is unlikely that ODS would have come into existence as an organisationally viable political force. It is also notable that ODS membership (see table), which reached 20, 000 shortly after the party’s foundation and has remained remarkably stable thereafter, corresponds very closely to the 3 % of Civic Forum voters polled in November 1990, who said they would ‘definitely’ join Klaus’s new party (Svobodné slovo 1990). The party’s grassroots membership network measured in terms of the number of basic organisations (roughly 1400) also closely corresponds to the number of local Civic Forum groups (1600).It is also notable that other longer-established right-wing groups with roots in the pre-1989 opposition, such as the Christian Democratic Party (KDS), the Liberal Democratic Party (LDS) and Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA which gained little or no resources from Civic Forum and failed to draw on the ‘organisational capital’ of the grassroots have all become politically insignificant by the late 1990s.

The third striking point that emerges from re-examining the ‘genesis’ period of the three parties is that the organisational legacies built up during the transition period were, at least in part, fostered by quite explicit, if ultimately unsustainable, strategies of creating viable mass organisations. It is therefore not strictly accurate to assume with scholars such as Mair (1996: 13) that ‘little effort is being made or has been made to build strong popular organizations’ (my emphasis) in East Central Europe. The vision of leaders of both of the Social Democrats and the People’s Party in the early 1990s was of the traditional mass-branch party based historic identity, mass organisation and encapsulating distinct historic social constituencies. Czechoslovak People’s Party (ÈSL) Chairman, Josef Bartonèík, for example, stated in January 1990 that he aimed ‘to build an influential and fairly large (poèetnou) party surrounded by a widely developed spectrum of loosely affiliated structures and the widest possible circle of sympathisers..’. (Lidová demokracie, 1990). In his view, the party would represent a distinct constituency of Christian voters and defend the interests of the Catholic Church. Similarly, Social Democrat leaders envisaged their party as ‘a traditional workers’ party’ representing ‘popular strata’ (ČSSD 1990: 1) and planned their party’s organisation and apparatus accordingly ‘with its own night schools, travel agency and publishing house’ (Lindstrom 1991: 248) as well as women’s and youth organisations and sections for work in trade unions, supposedly following the blueprint of the Austrian SPO.

Civic Forum too, despite its very different loose ‘movement’ style of organisation and eschewal of hierarchy, the trappings of ‘party’ had an ‘external’ organisational strategy intended to promote mass citizen participation The Forum’s (in)famous 1990 slogan that ‘Parties are for party hacks, Civic Forum is for everyone’ is therefore not just representative of a broad anti-political electoral appeal, but also an aspiration to create mass participatory grassroots movement (Hadjiisky 1996; Hanley 2000).

What is striking in this period is that, although the concept of the electoral-professional framework party - usually referred in Czech to as the ‘electoral party’ (volební strana) - was widely discussed in Czechoslovakia from at least late 1990 Klaus 1991a), it was, with one exception, not consciously adopted by any important party. Moreover, the leaders of the Civic Democratic Alliance (ODA), the one party which did consciously seek to be a small, low membership formation based on parliamentary elites did so not from considerations of ‘electoral-professional’ organisational rationality, but because of Burkian notions of representation, reflecting a neo-conservative ideology developed as dissidents before 1989.

As is well-known organisational strategies of all three Czech would-be mass organisations quickly floundered. The two historic parties’ early strategies, while partially successful in recreating elements of the mass parties organisation, proved wholly unrealistic and unsuccessful as a means of capturing significant loyal electorates. In the June 1990 elections the Social Democrats polled less than 5% and failed to enter the Czechoslovak or Czech parliaments. The People’s Party gained only a disappointing 8%. The two parties were even less successful in their efforts at gaining organised social implantation. The People’s Party, despite mass membership and socially and geographical concentrated bases of support, failed to create affiliated organisations with more than skeleton structures or memberships of a few hundred or a few thousand. Both ČSSD and KDU- ČSL’s party-oriented newspapers quickly ran into financial difficulties through lack of readers.

Civic Forum, by contrast, while highly successfully electorally and as a vehicle for mass participation also saw its founders ‘mass’ organisational strategy crumble in 1990. Here, however, the problem lay with a lack of traditional party-mindedness on the part of its ex-dissident leaders, whose belated appreciation of the scale of the political divisions, internal ‘democratic deficit’ and need for party discipline and a paid officials contributed to its continual instability and ultimate failure of political institutionalisation (Hadjiisky 1996; Hanley 2000, see also Hopkin 1996). As suggested above, however, both also handed organisational legacies, which were to enable and constrain the subsequent development of the three parties discussed. Before examining, this development, however, let us first consider the notion of organisational legacies more closely.

4. Party Organisational Development and Path Dependency,

The ‘locking in’ of aspects of initial organisation in a party’s later development is, of course, something which has widely noted in relation to the historical formation of West European parties. It is implicit for example in Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) thesis about the ‘freezing’ of West European party systems or in Panebianco’s (1988) account of party institutionalisation. More recently a number of US scholars, drawing on the burgeoning literature of the ‘new institutionalism’ (Koelbe 1995; Hall and Taylor 1996; Peters 1999), have attempted to theorise such party organisational development more fully in terms of ‘path dependency’ (Aldrich 1995; Kalyvas 1996; Perkins 1996),

The literature on post-communist East and Central Europe has seen widespread discussion of ‘legacies’, most relating to socio-cultural factors or regime types (Jowitt 1992; Hanson 1995; Schopflin, 2000, for overviews see Ekiert 1999; Kopecký and Mudde 2000). Such structural notions of legacies have been applied to party system formation (Cotta 1994; Kitschelt 1995; Kitschelt et al 1999). However, despite a number of attempts to trace ‘stages’ of party system evolution in the region, (Marody 1995; Bielasiak 1997), analysis of the path dependent development of party organisations in the region through the different ‘stages’ has remained largely descriptive and ad hoc. Moreover, as suggested by the preceding analysis of the Czech case, the nature and influence of the legacies left by early transitional organisational strategies in the region has been largely overlooked. Even Perkins (1996), the only author explicitly to relate a theoretically sophisticated concept like ‘path dependency’ to East European party organisation concludes that parties in the region are ‘essentially leapfrogging their Western counterparts’ (Perkins 1996:369) in becoming media-based cadre parties. Like other writers, however, he overlooks the fact that path dependent development is determined not only by not simply by external constraints (institutional, social or technological), but also by the pre-existing distribution of organisational resources. For as Stark (1992: 20-1) famously put it in another context, political actors in East Central Europe are

‘rebuilding organizations and institutions not on the ruins but with the ruins as they redeploy available resources in response to their immediate practical dilemmas. .... it is through adjusting to new uncertainties that new organizational forms emerge.’

The existence of significant ‘inheritances’ in the organisational ‘ruins’ of the transition period, however, is of more than purely historical importance. It has important implications for type of party organisation we should anticipate in contemporary East Central Europe. The key implication is, perhaps, that most viable parties develop on the basis of previously existing organisations, which have already choked off genuinely new parties by effectively monopolising most organisational ‘start-up capital’. Pure ‘electoral professional’ parties, therefore, were always unlikely to develop in the region. What we should, in fact anticipate, in East Central Europe and elsewhere (see Tossulti 1996) is the emergence of parties which are organisational hybrids, combining substantial elements of the organisations they evolved from and substantial elements of the ‘electoral-professional’ model, which the social and political conditions dictate to be most rational-efficient for normal inter-party competition. ‘Partial exceptions’ to the ‘electoral-professional’ type party will therefore be the rule. Let us now consider, how these how such hybrid ‘new organizational forms’ emerged in the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

5. Party Evolution in Czech Republic The Transformation of Failed ‘Mass’ Organisation

All three Czech parties developed into stable and successful actors in the mid-late 1990s after the transformation along broadly ‘electoral-professional’ lines of mass or would-be mass organisations established during the transition period. In all three cases, this took place after an internal crisis led to change of leadership. In all cases, however, the party organisations that emerged have been characterised by a tension between an ‘electoral-professional’ rationality introduced by the new leadership and the legacies left by the model on which the organisation was (re)founded after the collapse of communism.

In November 1990, the Czechoslovak People’s Party (ÈSL) elected Josef Lux as its new leader in place of Josef Bartonèík, who had been discredited both by the party’s poor electoral showing and by having been revealed as a former secret police informer. Lux’s leadership marked an important change in the party’s organisational and political strategy. Rather than an advocate for a Christian constituency. Lux wanted ÈSL to be ‘a conservative, popular .... genuinely right-wing party close to the centre’ which would ‘defend and embody the interests and needs of ordinary people’ (Lux 1990). While Bartonèík had assumed that the party could attract a large bloc of Christian-oriented voters relatively easily, Lux was aware that, beyond its limited traditional support bases, the party had little obvious appeal in a largely secular society, historically lukewarm towards Catholicism.

This implied that to attract a sizeable electorate the party have to appeal to voters in programmatic terms, rather than relying on the automatic and organised support of a loyal traditional constituency. This shift was visible in the greater weight the party gave to centralised policy formation as well as its adoption of a more explicit ideology (right-wing and conservative after 1990, centrist and social market after 1994). As part of broader policy objectives such as the creation of a civil society and the maintenance of ‘social peace’ however, the party also sought to advocate the interests of certain groups - families with children, pensioners and the disabled - (KDU- ČSL 1996, 1998) and, Lux later suggested, like the German CDU, the still embryonic, Czech middle classes (Lux 1995).

Under Lux, ÈSL also abandoned the idea of building up mass auxiliary organisations, a change in priorities visible in the party’s decline in membership from the heights of the 90 - 100, 00 recruited in 1990. By contrast, from 1996 the party moved towards centrally-run media-based campaigning centring around the personality of its leader and projecting the party as a ‘tranquil force’ in Czech politics. Despite enjoying much more limited electoral success compared to the Social Democrats and ODS, KDU- ČSL did nevertheless succeed in moving beyond its largely elderly rural Catholic ‘historic’ constituency[6] and establishing itself as the organisational and political core of the centre-right Four Party Coalition grouping that emerged in the late 1990s after Lux’s death.[7]

In 1993 Czech Social Democrats also elected a new leader, former Civic Forum MP Miloš Zeman. Zeman sought to accelerate the transformation of ČSSD’s from a political sect with significant organisational assets but little electoral support into ... a model of a broad (širokopasmové) pluralistic party, a party which is left-wing, but which reaches into the political centre...[8] which would capable of capturing around 30 per cent of the vote. This was to be achieved by offering an alternative vision of social transformation with broad appeal, rather than projecting a historic party identity, which excluded many potential supporters (for example, former communists). In November 1996 Zeman even stated that this implied that ‘because of our, to a certain extent, centrist position (středovou pozicí), we are what is termed in English a ‘catch all party’, ... a party that a very broad strata of people can vote for’ (Zeman 1996).

As in the case of the People’s Party,[9] ČSSD thus began to re-conceive its constituency less in terms of an established, pre-existing working class with a natural loyalty to Social Democracy and more in terms of prospective or emerging interests of likely ‘losers’ in transformation as carried out by the Right. From the mid-1990’s ČSSD programmes therefore increasingly stressed the idea of defending the life chances of working people and vulnerable groups (pensioners, the young, families with children etc.) as individuals in order to prevent transformation becoming a zero-sum game benefiting only ‘new power elites’. Rather than justifying its advocacy of particular interests on the grounds of history or tradition, these programmes related them to policies seen as beneficial to society as a whole or necessary to transformation. (ČSSD 1995, 1996, 1997). As far as party-society links were concerned, while in ČSSD did seek establish contacts with pensioners’, tenants’ and consumers’ groups, under Zeman these were seen more as a source of potential new party members, than a means of establishing mass social presence or a base in civil society[10] (Mladá fronta Dnes, 1997b). In organisational terms, Zeman abandoned the ‘Austrian’ model, calling merely for the extension of ČSSD organisation at local level and an increase of the party’s membership from 10 000 -15, 000 to 40 000.[11] However, as was the case with the transformation of Civic Forum into ODS, even this modest goal was to prove over-optimistic. Despite increasing somewhat in the late 1990s when ČSSD held government office, membership remained at 1990 levels, although factional disputes and the absorption of elites and activists from a variety of centrist and left-wing groups implied a degree of membership turnover. Nevertheless, the organisational and political model adopted under Zeman stabilised ČSSD and brought previously unattainable electoral success. ČSSD emerged as the main opposition party in with 26% of the vote in 1996 (compared with 4% in 1990 and 7% in 1992) and became the largest Czech party in 1998 with 32%.

If the transformation of the two ‘historic’ parties along more ‘electoral-professional’, implied broadening their electoral appeal beyond limited ‘historic’ constituencies and assigning a lower priority to ‘party building’ , the transformation of the bulk of Civic Forum into ODS implied narrower but clearer organisational and ideological boundaries. ODS leaders sought to create a smaller, more formalised formation with a distinct (anti-communist, neo-liberal) ideology, which would contrast markedly with the all-embracing mass movement-party that Civic Forum had (briefly) been (Klaus 1991a). ODS leaders’ vision was of programmatically-oriented, office-seeking party with an electorally mediated relationship to individuals and groups in society, rather than Civic Forum’s ‘corporatist’ desire to substitute for an absent civil society . They thus hoped to create a party with a membership of ‘tens of thousands’ whose estimated membership would be in the range of 20 - 60, 000 (Klaus 1991b) not a ‘mass Leninist party’ or a ‘boundless’ mass movement (Klaus 1991a). ODS founders also sought to impose a degree of centralised control and discipline absent in Civic Forum. Indeed in 1991-2, ODS local organisations were formally founded through the granting of ‘licenses’ by the national leadership, ‘licenses’ which can be (and sometimes are) revoked. In contrast to ÈSSD and ÈSL, for whom a paid party apparatus was self-evident, political professionalism was central to ODS’s internal structure both as an ethos and in the form of a powerful Head Office and network of regional ‘managers’ (Hadjiisky 1996; Hanley 2000).

In the 1990s, all three parties thus came to approximate much more to the ‘electoral-professional’ and ‘cartel’ models.

Memberships have remained low - below even limited goals set by party leaderships - and seem to have been largely static and, in the case of ODS stagnant, since the early 1990s. Indeed, in 1996 ODS officials have publicly noted that most party members do no more than pay dues and that most local party work was carried out by a handful of activists, holding multiple office (Novák 1996). Despite ritual appeals to increase party membership, it is also clear that, once incumbent, Czech party leaders gave a low priority to building or maintaining the party organisation. Indeed, Václav Klaus’s lack of interest his party work and party fund-raising after 1992 led some to remark that he would happily have dissolved ODS and re-founded it three months before the next election (Peèinka 1996). Moreover, as internal party critics in both ODS and ÈSSD have noted, on entering government in 1992 and 1998 policy formation in both parties was effectively transferred from the party to government, depriving both party members and party managers of any real influence (Zieleniec 1996; Kotrba 2001). In both parties the eventual overlapping (party), parliamentary and government elites has bolstered the autonomy of such political elites,[12] an autonomy sharply illustrated by the 1997 ODS party funding scandal which showed how informal sub-groups of leaders had routinely circumvented internal party institutions. There is also evidence of the development of fundamentally ‘stratarchic relationship’ (Kopecký 1995: 526) between elite and grassroots in the three parties, with ordinary members largely absorbed in local parish pump politics and ignorant of or uninterested in national politics (Mladá fronta Dnes 1997a). ODS officials, for example, have noted with frustration that even those members who were active often used the party’s local branches as little more than vehicles for personal or local interests (Novák 1996).

All three parties are heavily dependent on the state for resources (van Biezen 2000) Indeed as early as 1991 even ÈSL’s relatively large membership was insufficient to finance even the party’s district apparatuses. Since the mid-1990s, tacit agreements between ODS and ÈSSD to tolerate each other as minority administrations have increasingly led the two parties to act in an cartel-like fashion in ‘colonising’ public bodies and corporations by dividing senior posts in between supporters of the two parties.

However despite, such ‘electoral professional’ tendencies the three party organisations that have developed, nevertheless, embody significant legacies from the unsuccessful organisational strategies of the post-transition period that give them a more ‘hybrid’ quality than usually acknowledged. Firstly, however insubstantial they may appear by West European standards, the structures and organisational networks of the three parties surveyed extend considerably beyond what they require for national electoral competition or elite recruitment. Indeed, the effective redundancy of local and regional structures is arguably at the root of the ‘stratarchic’ tendencies and elite-grassroots tensions visible in all three parties. In the case of ODS in particular ‘stratarchic’ tendencies are clearly less a facet of electoral ‘professional model’ per se than a direct legacy from Civic Forum, whose grassroots and national headquarters were well-organised, but whose regional and intermediary structures were notoriously weak

Secondly, however removed from the day-to-day or month-to-month exercise of power, such path dependently inherited structures and/or grassroots memberships are far from merely passive appendages to powerful central leaderships. In 1997 Václav Klaus, for example, was moved to complain of ‘...insufficient understanding of internal loyalty in ODS, clearly motivated by fear of some kind of diktat from the political leadership’, criticising local and regional ODS organisations which ‘oscillate between passivity and a tendency towards oversimplified and somewhat radical views’. In October 1997, Miloš Zeman too complained that his the Social Democratic Party’s fractious regional organisations were constantly challenging the party leadership rather than recruiting new members. (Mladá fronta Dnes, 1997). In ODS, in particular, as in Civic Forum district managers as paid employees of party headquarters, responsible for running district ODS organisations, but not subordinate to them rivals and overlap elected district/regional leadership bodies, making the party’s regional organisations a complex and powerful ‘zone of uncertainty’ (Panebianco 1988).

Moreover, particularly at moments of party crisis, such regional and grassroots structures can exert a decisive influence on parties’ internal dynamics. In 1990-1 in KDU- ČSL the bulk of whose large membership and organisation is concentrated in its Eastern region of Moravia, its historic heartland, regional organisation is a still more important factor, the generally more conservative Moravian wing of the party, briefly succeeded in bifurcating the party into separate Moravian and Bohemian ‘Land’ organisations as the price of supporting the Lux leadership. More recently, regional KDU- ČSL party organisations played a key role in the struggle to succeed Josef Lux as leader in 1999 and more recently have also been an important factor obstructing elite plans efforts to make the KDU- ČSL -led Four Party Coalition a more integrated political formation.

In ODS on several occasions in the 1990s, grassroots delegates had used Congresses to veto Klaus’s proposals (over, for example, his choice of candidate Deputy Chairs). However, in 1997-8, in the wake of the explosive party financing scandal, when he found himself politically isolated within the ODS leadership and parliamentary group, Václav Klaus was able use his charismatic authority to mobilise grassroots support to defeat his political opponents via the party’s limited, but functional, democratic mechanisms at a special party Congress. ČSSD regional organisations are a key resource for those seeking to build or challenge the ‘dominant coalition’ within the party. The party’s Central Bohemian organisation, for example, has proved an important base for a faction challenging the leadership of Miloš Zeman, whose leaders would otherwise be dependent on his prime ministerial largesse. The fate of former ČSSD Deputy Chair, Karel Machovec, who challenged Zeman in 1997, but was then dropped as a parliamentary candidate by his regional organisation is instructive in this respect.

Indeed, the dynamics of candidate selection in the Czech Republic, often taken as an approximate gauge of power relations within parties, are highly revealing. As Saxonberg’s (1999: 14-21) detailed analysis of Czech parties’ nomination procedures for parliamentary candidates for the 1996 and 1998 legislative elections[13] shows, in all three parties regional and district party organisations played the key role in candidate selection. Although the dominant actors were usually regional and district executives, in some cases, as in some regions of the Social Democratic Party in 1996) there was direct balloting of grassroots members. Correspondingly, there was only a limited degree of intervention in the process by national leaderships, even where, as in the case of ODS, they had wide formal powers to do so. In only one case, that of KDU- ČSL in 1996, did the national leadership play a dominant role in candidate selection and, even here, a procedure based on regional ballots of members was introduced for 1998. Although the regional constituencies used in Czech legislative elections may partly explain the relative strength of regional organisations in candidate selection, it is clear that the internal dynamics of the three parties surveyed contrast with those of a purer ‘electoral professional’ or ‘business firm’ party like Italy’s Forza Italia, where the ‘grassroots’ can be effectively and continually bypassed by party elite s(Hopkin and Paolucci 1999).

Overall, therefore we could argue that from the early 1990s onwards there has been a tendency for major Czech parties to converge around a number of features, which amount to an organisational ‘model’ at one step removed from the electoral-professional type model usually deduced from the political ‘opportunity structures’ of post-communist East Central Europe. These features can be summarised as 1) a medium-large national organisation run by a professional bureaucracy at central and regional level originating in failed ‘mass’ strategies of 1989-90, which has a limited but effective social/local presence; 2) internal dynamics characterised by elite domination, to some extent, countered by ‘redundant’ regional and local structures; 3) a political appeal based on a detailed programme relating to post-communist socio-economic transformation; 4) a broad (but limited) electoral base of support defined in terms of social groups created by transformation amounting to no more than 30% of the electorate.

6. A Sideways Glance at Poland

There are clearly dangers in attempting generalise from one national case. There are clearly a number of factors, which may apply more to the Czech case than to other Central Europe states. Given Czechoslovakia’s strong interwar democracy, for example, ‘historic’ parties might loom larger politics than elsewhere in the region; transitional mobilisation in 1989-90 perhaps more marked in Czechoslovakia because of the long years of political quiescence during the ‘normalisation’ period (1969-1989). However, initial reflections on the case of Poland[14] suggest that as in the Czech Republic a number of the country’s main political formations can be seen as ‘path dependently ’ formed ‘hybrid’ organisations. This is most clearly the case for the successors to Poland’s former regime parties: the Democratic Left Alliance is based upon the reformed former Polish ruling party (Social Democracy of the Polish Republic) and the communist-era trade union federation and the Polish Peasants Party (PSL), which has retained many ‘mass’ party features (Szczerbiak 1999, 2000), has developed largely on the basis of a transformed former ‘satellite’ party.

‘New’ parties on the right and centre of the Polish political spectrum presents a more complex picture. However, it seems that the relationship between Poland’s transitional political movement, the Solidarity Citizens’ Committees and the fate of Poland’s small, unstable and fractious liberal and conservative parties provides a negative confirmation of the importance of path dependency for the evolution of viable party organisations. As Grabowski (1996) argues, in contrast to the political acumen of Václav Klaus and the founders of ODS into transforming the bulk of Civic Forum into a well-resourced and stable nationwide centre-right party, when the Solidarity Citizens’ Committees movement fragmented in 1990-1, its grassroots ‘organisational capital’ was largely dissipated. Subsequently, an electorally and organisationally solid right-wing force, Solidarity Election Action (AWS) was only able to emerge with the assistance of the resources and organisation of the Solidarity trade union in making up this ‘organisational deficit’ (Szczerbiak 1999: 535; see also Wenzel 1998)) In this light, the organisational weaknesses of the numerous ex-Solidarity parties could appear less a rational-efficient response to poorly defined social interests and a weak civil society, than a failure of political entrepreneurship on the part of potential party founders. However, a more detailed comparative analysis would clearly be necessary before this could be confirmed.

7. Party Comparison and Party Models in East Central Europe: Revisiting The Catch-All Thesis

Although the ‘electoral-professional’, ‘cartel’ or ‘business firm’ models remain useful ideal types, if the analysis outlined in this paper is accepted, there may , in some respects be a more useful point of reference: Otto Kirchheimer’s notion of the ‘catch-all party’. Kirchheimer (1966) famously argued that in post-war period traditional mass integration parties in Western Europe were transforming themselves into ‘catch-all’ parties, replacing mass memberships and the encadrement of a ‘classe gardée’ with loose links to a range of interest groups and programmatic appeals to wide electorates through the electronic media. This was particularly held to be the case for parties (re)-founded after long periods of dictatorship and/or fragile democracy, such as the West German Social Democrats, French Gaullists or Italian Christian Democrats. Since 1989 the notion of the ‘catch-all’ party has been used in relation to East Central Europe in a number of contexts. In the early 1990s, it was applied to broad transitional movements such Civic Forum, whose unstable and transitory character was initially not fully appreciated. More recently, the ‘catch-all party’ has been grouped alongside ‘electoral-professional ‘and ‘cartel’ party models - whose key features it anticipated - as one of a set of alternatives to the traditional mass party model (Szczerbiak 1999, 2000, see also Koole 1996). However, Kirchheimer’s model arguably differs from more contemporary models of party in its greater sensitivity to historically hybrid and path-dependent nature of party organisational development.

For, as Smith (1989: 159-60) notes, an important feature of catch-all ‘people’s parties’ identified by Kirchheimer is that ‘however ‘new’ such a party seemed to be: there is no case of one being simply stamped on the ground: .it was existing parties that were subject to change and where new parties were founded ... they drew heavily on pre-existing social traditions’.[15] There are clearly parallels between the post-war evolution of Western parties into ‘catch-all’ formations and the processes of party formation in East Central Europe suggested by this paper’s analysis. Many key formations in the region, seem to be path dependently built up ‘with the ruins’ not ‘on the ruins’ of communist-era and transitional political organisation and to have subsequently adapted imperfectly and partially to the imperatives of open electorates, technological change and the absence of a well defined class structure. The Czech case suggests that, as with Kirchheimer’s post-war West European ‘catch-all’ parties, the post-communist East Central European catch-all parties of the 1990s, have done so through a strategy seeking to combine vote-maximising electoral competition and interest group representation through alternative strategies for common ‘national societal goals’ (Kirchheimer 1966: 184), in this case the democratisation, marketisation and wider European integration. We might also note that the lack of fundamental ideological alternatives in the post-Cold War era - especially in a region as geo-politically constrained as East Central Europe - also echoes the ‘end of ideology’ perspective of 1950s and 60s that informs Kirchheimer’s essay (see Wolinetz 1991).

We should however bear in mind the very great differences of context. Czech Social Democratic Party of the 1990s, for example, is clearly a wholly different organisational and political entity from, say the German SPD of the 1950s. Moreover, the organisational legacies in the post-1989 East Central European context is clearly not only different, but greatly more limited and transient that that left by Western Europe’s parties of mass integration. What is suggested here, however, is that Kirchheimer’s classic text offers a historical analogy which illuminates processes of party formation and party organisational development in a way that more self-consciously abstract models of party do not. Given that ‘models of party’ in the literature have been elaborated from empirical observation of Western Europe, a strategy more explicitly-based on contextual and historical comparison may be more appropriate than one of simple model fitting.

8. Concluding Reflections

This paper has argued that the expectation that parties in East Central Europe can best be understood as rough approximation to models such as the ‘electoral-professional’ or ‘cartel’ party needs to be reassessed. It has suggested that a renewed focus on the by which party organisations have path-dependently evolved in the region may yield fresh insights. It has also suggested that it is to the ‘transition’ period to which we should look, as a unique episode of mobilisation and participation in the region’s recent history, as the source of organisational legacies and the organisational ‘start up capital’ that have created many of East Central Europe’s most viable parties. This is not to suggest, however, that hybrid 1990s post-communist ‘catch-all parties’ postulated by this paper would necessarily remain ‘frozen’. Given the weaker institutionalisation of earlier organisational forms in East Central Europe, it may, for example, be the erosion of organisational legacies by pressures towards ‘electoral professionalisation’, would be more pronounced and rapid than in contemporary Western Europe. It, nevertheless, seems to be the case that East Central European parties may not so much be ‘leapfrogging’ Western Europe as evolving in parallel. In both cases therefore the wholesale electoral-professionalisation of parties seems to lie in the future.

Finally, we should bear in mind a number of other possible factors beyond mere historical path dependency, may also explain why East Central European party organisations are not quite the lean elite-run electoral machines anticipated. For example, Hopkin and Paolucci’s (1999) suggestion that strongly ‘electoral-professional’ or ‘business firm’ parties achieve short-term electoral and organisational efficiency by trading off the longer-term organisational stability and cohesion brought by more ‘traditional’ elements of party organisation, requires careful consideration. The rhetorical use Czech politicians have made of nationwide organisational networks to legitimise their parties and delegitimise smaller rivals (Klaus 1991a), as well as the sense of loss expressed by some analysts of increasingly elite-based organisational forms (see Kirchheimer 1966; Panebianco 1988) suggest a second possibility: that while, ‘electoral-professional’, ‘cartel’ or ‘business firm’ parties might be formidable rational-efficient engines for electoral competition, party-voter linkage and even governance, they nevertheless still lack the deeper cultural and historical legitimacy associated with traditional mass party forms.

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[1] Kopecký’s analysis of the Czech case identifies them as significant (1995: 528), while Szczerbiak (2000: 31; see also 12-13)) sees differences in resources and membership terms as overridden by other factors such as parties’ participation in electoral or parliamentary blocs.

[2] The Czechoslovak People’s Party (later renamed the Czechoslovak People’s Party - Christian Democratic Union) is currently the dominant partner in the Four Party Coalition

[3] Later re-named the Christian Democratic Union-Czechoslovak People’s Party (KDU-ÈSL).

[4] Although detailed information on the membership of the second Czech satellite party Czechoslovak Socialist Party (ÈSS) was not available at the time this research was conducted due to the temporary closure of the party’s archive. However, it was reported that in the first six months of 1990 its membership rose by a third to approximately 15,000.

[5] Another important political ‘inheritance’ was arguably political prominence its leader Klaus had acquired as Finance Minister in the Civic Forum-led government.

[6]By the end of 1997 45 per cent of its voters were under 45 See remarks by head of the STEM polling organisation Jan Hartl in ‘Je to tøetí síla?’, Týden, no. 49, 1998.

[7] Lux resigned as party leader and left politics in 1998 after being diagnosed with leukaemia. He died in 1999.

[8] Press conference of 29 June 1993. ‘Parlamentní informaèní servis’, Zpravodaj, no. 7, 1993 [ÈSSD Archive, Fond 44 sl 42 ].

[9] Renamed the Czechoslovak People’s Party-Christian Democratic Union (KDU-+ÈSL) in 1992.

[10] The one exception was the party’s continued (but not highly successful) courting of the powerful Czech trade unions.

[11] See the appeal by Jana Volfová, ‘Výzva k zakládaní místních organiací’, Zpravodaj, no. 1 1993, p. 3 [ÈSSD Archive, Fond 44 sl 38. ].

[12] Until 1996, however, this was masked by the consequences of the division of Czechoslovakia. Many party leaders and government office-holders were not deputies in (previously subordinate) Czech parliament, but had been deputies in the Czechoslovak Federal Assembly which ceased to exist in 1992.

[13] Czech legislative elections use proportional representation based on regional constituencies, nomination therefore took the form of parties compiling regional lists of candidates

[14] Poland has been chosen as a point of comparison as a relatively well-known case on which substantial high quality research on party organisation is available in English.

[15] Indeed, this insight is present - if not explicitly stated - in Kirchheimer’s essay: the traditional mass party may have been ‘turning more fully to the electoral scene, trying to exchange effectiveness in depth for a wider audience’ (Kirchheimer 1966: 184, my emphasis), but there is no implication that it would turn fully or succeed entirely in these attempts.