Democratic Linkage Building in Western and Eastern Europe Agenda and Preliminary Results

Abstract

Political parties exert pivotal influence in ensuring democratic accountability. Performing this role is more difficult in Central and Eastern Europe where features of party, party system and voter behaviour still tend to create an environment that weakens the mechanisms of democratic linkage, e.g. as the result of weakly structured party systems coupled with weak partisanship.

In this research paper, we draw an agenda for research on linkage building between parties and voters in the region. We also report on preliminary results of a first paper which focused on parties’ party familial propensities as their presence indicates rather high levels of party system institutionalization. Our findings support the concept of party families across linkages for the West while there is mixed evidence for post-socialist countries.

We tentatively conclude that Central and Eastern European countries have not yet developed political landscapes similar to those existing in older Western democracies. Most essential, party competition here is dominated by the antagonism of clientelistic and programmatic parties.