Seán Hanley

Economy, corruption or floating voters? Explaining the breakthroughs of anti-establishment reform parties in eastern Europe

This paper discusses a new group of parties that we term anti-establishment reform parties (AERPs), which combine moderate social and economic policies with anti-establishment appeals and a desire to change the way politics is conducted. We analyse the electoral breakthroughs of AERPs in central and eastern Europe (CEE), the region where AERPs have so far been most successful. Examples include the Simeon II National Movement, Movement for the European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) (Bulgaria), Res Publica (Estonia), New Era (Latvia), TOP09 and Public Affairs (Czech Republic) and Positive Slovenia. We examine the conditions under which such parties broke through in nine CEE states in 1997–2012 using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). We find five sufficient causal paths combining high or rising corruption, rising unemployment and party system instability. Rising corruption plays a key role in most pathways but, unexpectedly, AERP breakthroughs are more closely associated with economic good times than bad.

Getting the right right: redefining the centre-right in post-communist Europe

Existing literature on the centre-right in Eastern and Central Europe is small and fragmentary, in contrast with the voluminous, detailed and often sophisticated comparative literatures on the Left and the Far Right in the region. A review and synthesis of the existing literature suggests the possibility of a definition of the Right and Centre-Right in the region, which can both accommodate its diversity and provide a shared framework for analysis. The Centre-Right should be understood as neither an atavistic throwback to a pre-communist past nor a product of the straightforward assimilation of Western ideologies. Rather, it is a product of the politics of late communism, domestic reform, European integration and post-Cold War geopolitical realignment, which has powerfully reshaped historical influences and foreign models.

Dynamics of new party formation in the Czech Republic 1996–2010: looking for the origins of a ‘political earthquake’

The stable and closed nature of the Czech party system and the failure of most new political parties have been among the most salient features of Czech democracy over the past two decades. The results of the 2010 parliamentary elections seemed to mark a break with this pattern: support for two main parties slumped to historically low levels and two new parties, TOP09 and Public Affairs (VV), entered parliament. This article seeks to put the ‘political earthquake’ of 2010 into perspective by mapping the development of new parties in the Czech Republic from the mid-1990s and relating them to comparative literature and typologies of new party emergence. It concludes that of the two successful new parties in 2010, Public Affairs was, by far, the more novel and important phenomenon.

The Emergence of Pensioners’ Parties in Contemporary Europe

Party politics in contemporary Europe often exhibit marked generational biases. Older voters are both more likely to turn out to vote to support political parties at elections and also to be members of political parties (Goerres 2009). Conversely, younger voters are increasingly disinclined to participate in formal party-electoral politics leading to concern over the ‘greying’ of party democracy and of socio-political organizations (Henn et al. 2002; Phelps 2006; Goerres 2009; and Robertson 2009). Certain (types of) parties are disproportionately supported by older age groups. Indeed, in certain cases – as with the members of the British Conservative Party during 1990s (Whiteley et al. 1994) or the electorate of the Czech Republic’s Communist Party (Hanley 2001) – older age cohorts can find themselves in the majority, significantly affecting the way such parties understand, prioritize and respond to issues of the day and often tending to narrow their political appeal over time.

Introduction: Understanding the Politics of the Right in Contemporary East–Central Europe

Despite their importance in contemporary European politics, parties of the centre-right remain a strikingly under-researched area in both West European and, in particular in, post-communist Eastern European comparative politics. Compared with the voluminous literature on the left-wing communist successor parties or on the extreme right, little has been written on post-communist centre-right formations in terms of either empirical case studies or attempts to develop explanatory frameworks. In addition to the vague boundaries between far right and centre-right in Eastern Europe, liberal and agrarian parties, which have been absorbed into consolidated centre-right blocs in most West European democracies, often appear as small ‘centrist’ groups in a post-communist context. Further unresolved questions concerning the origins of the post-communist centre-right; its social bases, ideologies and responses to the new challenges of Europeanization and globalization combine to make it a particularly rich, if complex, vein of comparative research that has so far gone largely unaddressed. This article presents a discussion and overview of these issues as an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics on the centre-right in Eastern Europe

Understanding the illiberal turn: democratic backsliding in the Czech Republic

ABSTRACT Democratic backsliding in Central Europe has so far been most acute in Hungary and Poland, states once considered frontrunners in democratisation. In this paper, we explore to what extent developments in another key frontrunner, the Czech Republic, fit initial patterns of Hungarian/Polish backsliding. Our analysis centres on the populist anti-corruption ANO movement, led by the billionaire Andrej Babiš, which became the largest Czech party in October 2017 after winning parliamentary elections. We find that while ANO has more limited electoral support than illiberal governing parties in Poland and Hungary and lacks a powerful nationalist narrative, common tactics and forms of concentrating power can be identified, albeit with crucial differences of timing and sequencing.

The Development of Pensioners’ Interest Organisations in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparison of the Czech and Slovene Cases

Abstract Studies of organised interests in Central and Eastern Europe have overlooked constituencies shaped by the welfare state such as retired people. The article compares the development, structure and strategies of pensioners’ interest organisations in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. It finds that sizeable, if poorly resourced, membership-based pensioners’ interest organisations have emerged, largely independently of trade unions, and integrated into interest representation systems. Although lack of resources and organisational problems hamper lobbying capacity, these groups retain mobilisation potential. Comparison suggests that legacies and modes of transition still shape pensioners’ interest organisations more than institutional structures or new population ageing strategies.

Rethinking “democratic backsliding” in Central and Eastern Europe – looking beyond Hungary and Poland

ABSTRACT This essay introduces contributions to a special issue of East European Politics on “Rethinking democratic backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe”, which seeks to expand the study of democratic regression in CEE beyond the paradigmatic cases of Hungary and Poland. Reviewing these contributions, we identify several directions for research: 1) the need to critique “democratic backsliding”, not simply as a label, but also as an assumed regional trend; 2) a need to better integrate the role of illiberal socio-economic structures such as oligarchical structures or corrupt networks; and 3) a need to (re-)examine the trade-offs between democratic stability and democratic quality. We also note how insights developed researching post-communist regions such as Western Balkans or the post-Soviet space could usefully inform work on CEE backsliding. We conclude by calling for the study of CEE democracy to become more genuinely interdisciplinary, moving beyond some narrowly institutionalist comparative political science assumptions.

Legitimacy and the Paradox of Technocratic Government in Newer European Democracies: The Fischer Administration in the Czech Republic Revisited:

The creation of technocratic caretaker governments in several European countries in the wake of the Great Recession (2008–2009) and the Eurozone crisis led to renewed academic interest in such administrations. Although such governments are often assumed to be illegitimate and democratically dysfunctional, there has been little empirical consideration of if and how they legitimate themselves to mass publics. This question is particularly acute given that, empirically, caretaker technocrat-led administrations have been clustered in newer, more crisis-prone democracies in Southern and Eastern Europe where high levels of state exploitation by parties suggest a weak basis for any government claiming technocratic impartiality. This article uses Michael Saward’s “representative claims” framework to re-examine the case of one of Europe’s longer-lasting and most popular technocratic administrations, the 2009–2010 Fischer government in the Czech Republic. The article maps representative claims made for Fischer and his government, as well as counterclaims. Claims drew on the electoral mandate of sponsoring parties, the government’s claimed technocratic neutrality, and on Fischer’s “mirroring” of the values and lifestyle of ordinary Czechs (echoing some populist framings of politics). The article argues that the Fischer government benefited from multiple overlapping representative claims, but notes the need for robust methodology to assess the reception claims by their intended constituency. It concludes by considering the implications of actors’ ability to combine populist and technocratic claims, noting similarities in technocratic governments and some types of anti-establishment party.

Reconfiguring Post-Communist Comparisons

TWO DECADES AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF STATE SOCIALISM IT HAS become a truism to say that, although starting from broadly the same point of departure, post-socialist states have moved in radically different political directions. While parts of Central and Eastern Europe have integrated with Western Europe, achieving levels of political stability and democratic quality which compare favourably with established democracies (Roberts 2009; EIU 2009), some post-Soviet states descended into new forms of authoritarianism or semi-authoritarianism. More controversial is the question of which factors have pulled the countries of the former socialist world in such different directions. A bewildering array of factors ranging from regime legacies to political culture, economic development, geography, modes of transition, institutional choices, and EU leverage all find committed supporters in the literature on post-communist transformation (Kopstein & Reilly 2000; McFaul 2002; Kitschelt 2003; Vachudova 2005; Fish & Choudhry 2007; Way & Levitsky 2007). Such limited levels of agreement are puzzling. Comparative analysis is more often characterised by an uneven, but steady accumulation of knowledge (Mahoney 2003), and, while the causes of democratisation remain contested (Geddes 2007), many scholars have seen regionally bounded comparisons as offering a promising way forward (Bunce 2000, 2003; Geddes 2003). Moreover, post-communist states seem to offer a ‘natural laboratory’, with multiple cases of regime change occurring in the region over the same period against similar background conditions. EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 63, No. 8, October 2011, 1489–1499