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Sticking Together

Explaining Comparative Centre—Right Party Success in Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe

School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, Gower Street, London, SW1E 6BT, UK, s.hanley{at}ssees.ucl.ac.uk

Aleks Szczerbiak

Politics and Contemporary European Studies/Sussex European Institute, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, UK, a.a.szczerbiak{at}sussex.ac.uk

Tim Haughton

Centre for Russian and East European Studies, European Research Institute, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, BT15 2TT, UK, t.j.haughton{at}bham.ac.uk

Brigid Fowler

Foreign Affairs Committee, Committee Office, House of Commons, London SW1A 3JA, UK, fowlerb{at}parliament.uk

In this article, we attempt to explain varying patterns of centre—right success between 1990 and 2006 in three post-communist states — Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Success is understood as the ability to construct broad and durable parties. Both macro-institutional explanations, focusing on executive structures and electoral systems, and historical—structural explanations, stressing communist regime legacies, have limited power to explain the observed variance. The introduction of a more sophisticated framework of path dependence, stressing the role of choices and political crafting at critical junctures, adds some insight, but the lack of strong `lock-in' mechanisms required by such approaches makes such a model unconvincing when applied to Central and Eastern European centre—right party development. Other explanations that stress the importance of elite characteristics and capacity are needed to supplement the shortcomings of these approaches, in particular: (a) the presence of cohesive elites able to act as the nucleus of new centre—right formations; and (b) the ability of such elites to craft broad integrative ideological narratives that can transcend diverse ideological positions and unite broad swathes of centre—right activists and voters.

Key Words: centre—right • Czech Republic • Hungary • parties • Poland

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