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Third Ways or New Ways? The Post‐Communist Left in Central Europe
Author(s) -
HOUGH DAN
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
the political quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-923X
pISSN - 0032-3179
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-923x.2005.00677.x
Subject(s) - successor cardinal , communism , ideology , elite , slovak , political economy , politics , political science , power (physics) , flexibility (engineering) , sociology , law , economics , czech , management , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , physics , mathematics , quantum mechanics
Communist successor parties in central Europe are not a homogeneous group of political actors. Processes of organisational reform undertaken in the immediate post‐1989 period placed them on a programmatic trajectory which has since proven difficult to successfully modify. Parties that centralised power around a small group of elite actors have enjoyed more flexibility in their attempts to maximise votes and remain ideologically broad. Parties that radically democratised by empowering their memberships and/or middle‐ranking officials have remained much more ideologically conservative and have tend to be neo‐communist in orientation. This has strongly affected not just their positions in national party systems, but also their attitudes and behaviour towards foreign actors/institutions. Some communist successor parties therefore remain side‐lined on the anti‐capitalist far‐left while others have developed into confident, outward‐looking centre‐left actors while one ‐ the Slovak SDL ‐ imploded on account of its own internal contradictions.