Political Parties in New Democracies. Party Organization in Southern and East-Central Europe
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Book Review Political Parties in New Democracies. Party Organization in Southern and EastCentral Europe Ingrid van Biezen Palgrave, Houndmills/Basingstoke, 2003 ISBN: 1 4039 0307 7 Acta Politica (2004) 39, 106–108. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500051
In this book, which was based on her dissertation, Ingrid van Biezen seeks to determine the paths of organizational development of political parties in three institutional contexts: Western, Eastern and Southern Europe. These regimes offer different opportunities and constraints for organization building. The main hypothesis is that the institutional context of democratization for thirdwave democracies differs fundamentally from the Western experience. The plan of the book is as follows. The first part formulates the framework by distinguishing between three scenarios of party formation and organizational development. They are derived from Dahl’s typology of political regimes. New democracies have risen from all three non-democratic regime types: from competitive oligarchies that combined a reasonable level of public contestation with elite-rule (Western Europe); from closed hegemonies with little competition or political participation (Southern Europe); and from inclusive hegemonies that combined high levels of participation with a low level of political competition (Eastern-Central Europe). Van Biezen argues that it is impossible to distinguish a single path toward democracy since divergent trajectories exist. Nonetheless, whereas the Western European path to democracy started from competitive oligarchy, the third-wave democracies generally set out from hegemonic regimes. As a consequence, the parties in new democracies have to be built from scratch, which makes the sequence of organizational development of critical importance. Whereas in the older democracies mass parties originated as organizations of underprivileged segments of society, in the new democracies parties are not expected to become large membership organizations. The main reasons are that public funding and the presence of mass media provide parties with alternative means to arrive at their goals. Furthermore, parties have had little time to develop, which enhanced the position of public office holders, induced a top–down development of parties and high levels of centralization. In the second part of the book, Van Biezen investigates the membership organizations and party structures of four new democracies in Southern Europe (Portugal and Spain) and in Eastern-Central Europe (Hungary and the Czech Republic). All four chapters discuss the same features of party
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organizations: their position within party systems, the membership organization, the organizational structure and the internal distribution of power. The main goal is to identify the relevant political, social and institutional factors that influence the process of party formation and organizational development in ‘third-wave’ countries. Implicitly, these countries are compared with the long-established democracies of Western Europ
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