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Rethinking Political Continuity in East Central Europe
Institute on East Central Europe
March, 1997
The "return of history" in East Central Europe, the idea that with the fall of state-socialism these countries would somehow re-enter interrupted historical trajectories, made a brief appearance during the euphoria of the early transition before the profound economic, social, and political consequences of state-socialism became apparent. In this essay, I claim that we have prematurely dismissed the possibility of political continuity with the pre-communist past, and that at least in partisan political terms the chasm separating contemporary East Central Europe from its own pre-socialist history may be bridged.
Political continuity has long been a peculiar feature of democratic systems. As early as 1913, André Siegfried marveled at the extraordinary similarities in support for the left and the right between the Western France of his own time and that of the late Revolutionary period. The Southern United States remained a bulwark of Democratic support for decades after the end of the Civil War. In Italy, regions of persistent Christian democratic and socialist affiliation characterized politics throughout much of the postwar period. In Britain, "safe" Tory and Labour parliamentary seats are well-known, while in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, stable partisan oppositions were long fixed within more comprehensive institutional arrangements. 2 Identifying such continuity in East Central Europe is difficult because of the profound economic, social, and political transformations enacted in these societies by state-socialism. Unlike in the older democracies of Western Europe and North America, where the relatively slow evolution of political alternatives rendered unproblematic the choice of political groups or tendencies against which partisan continuity is interpreted, in East Central Europe the political systems that replaced state socialism bear little outward resemblance to those of their pre-communist predecessors. This essay addresses how continuity may be understood in the context of such extensive disruption. In particular, it argues that current approaches, in limiting their conception of continuity to identification with revived pre-communist parties, neglect attachments to underlying political traditions that old and new parties alike may represent. The essay then discusses how parties should be aggregated into political traditions, concluding by offering three different empirical indicators of continuity. For expository purposes, the majority of evidence offered will be from Hungary, although the argument is applicable to any country that enjoyed some multi-party democracy before state-socialism.
Conspicuous Continuity
The formal, symbolic aspects of continuity were readily apparent with the collapse of state-socialism and the resumption of national self-determination. Among the most visually stunning spectacles of late 1989 was the sight of waving flags with their communist insignias cut out. Throughout East Central Europe, cities, streets and squares assumed their pre-communist names. The new republics were launched with great fanfare and national symbolism. The formal return of parliamentary democracy and the consequent resurrection of old political roles made historical comparisons virtually inevitable. In Poland Lech Wa__sa was compared to the much revered interwar commander and head of state Marshal Pi_sudski, while in Czechoslovakia Václav Havel was likened to the Europe is difficult because of the profound economic, soci interwar philosopher and Czechoslovak president Tomáö Masaryk. Some Hungarians considered Dr. József Antall, their new Prime Minister, to be continuing the legacy of Ferenc Deák, hero of 1848. Others felt he personified István Bethlen, the liberal-conservative Prime Minister of the early interwar period. 3 Negating communism was the order of the day. Lech Wa__sa received his presidential insignia not from the president of the Polish People's Republic, but from a representative of the so-called "London" Poles, who formed a free Polish government in exile after the Nazi invasion, and who considered themselves the legitimate representative of Poland long after the Polish communists had become entrenched. 4 In Czechoslovakia, the new parliament deemed it necessary to declare the communist regime "illegal." 5 Some Hungarian legislators went to the first meeting of the National Assembly directly from St. Stephen's Basilica, thus reviving a tradition of attending Mass before a legislative session. 6 There was also parliamentary debate in Hungary on whether the national flag should display the Crown of St. Stephen, the symbol of a millennium of Hungarian Christianity and statehood. All of the above were means of underscoring the break with communism that these new regimes attempted to represent. Communism was portrayed as alien to national traditions and cultures, an unwelcome detour from normal historical and social development.
References to pre-communism are also seen in the rhetoric of party politics. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel in 1993, Gyula Horn (then leader of the Hungarian Socialist Party and now Prime Minister) declared: "In Hungary today a right-wing, conservative, new opposition has come to power, whose behavior is characterized by empty moral preaching and pseudo-religious rituals, and that wants to continue things from where they left off in 1948, or rather 1938." 7 Lech Wa__sa's suggestion in the 1992 Polish presidential election that Tadeusz Mazowiecki "reveal himself" was a sinister allusion to an earlier period in Polish history. "Ustasha" and "Chetnik" are not just epithets to refer to fascists, but resonate with historical meaning.
Another feature of these new democracies is the emergence of so-called "historic" parties. These are parties that existed in the pre-communist period and were revived -- typically by septuagenarians and octogenarians who were active in the 1940s -- to compete in the first post-communist elections. They attempted to use the slogans and symbols of their pre-communist predecessors as evidence of their own authenticity and long-standing commitment to the nation, in some cases adopting chunks of their predecessor parties' programs. The Independent Smallholder's Party in Hungary, for example, declared as still valid the main points of their 1930 program. Other historic parties include the peasant-oriented PSL in Poland (a satellite party during the socialist period), the Liberal and National Peasant Parties in Romania, the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party and Czechoslovak Socialist Party in the former Czechoslovakia, and in Hungary the Christian Democratic People's Party and the Hungarian Social Democratic Party. Even "new" parties are seen to have historical precursors. Some maintain that the intellectual origin of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, the leading member of the first post-communist ruling coalition, lies in the populism of the interwar period. This tradition of thought, stressing a "Third Road" between communism and capitalism, is thought to have lived on in Hungarian literature even during state-socialism. 8
Consequential Continuity?
On evaluating these phenomena, some conclude that pre-communist historical legacies are weak or non-existent in these societies. 9 I will argue that such a conclusion is premature for two main reasons. First, the baseline against which the revived parties should be compared is incorrectly assumed to be only the state of affairs at the pre-communist status quo ante. Second, it is incorrectly assumed that support for historic parties is the only meaningful evidence of partisan continuity.
There are two ways in which analysts use inappropriate baselines. First, revived parties are not considered to be "true" successors because the contemporary versions differ in many ways from their pre-communist predecessors. These arguments appeal to the pragmatic or strategic considerations that often motivate the elites that head these parties. Thus, they argue that the reemergence of historic parties is little more than a calculated strategy by elites to ensure their continued legitimacy. In this model, historical symbol and tradition help secure at least the passive loyalty, if not outright support, of voters who are paying an increasingly heavy price for their liberation from state-socialism. Where terror and intimidation are no longer legitimate mechanisms for ensuring social peace, and where promises of a higher standard of living ring hollow for so many, elites strive for stability through the claim of historical authenticity. 10 Another, related claim, is that the reemergence of historical parties does not constitute "real" political continuity because behind the name and the rhetoric lie strategies that bear little relation to those of their predecessor parties. Knowing that historical traditions provide ready-made, easily recognizable, and potentially very powerful identities with which to mobilize voters, elites are thought to "mimic" tradition as a way of covering up their own confusion and lack of any solutions for the problems facing the societies they hope to govern. 11 For example, the revived Independent Smallholder's Party in Hungary, which since 1989 has evolved from a one-issue party concerned primarily with the reprivatization of land seized by the communists into a magnet for the disaffected that flirts with the extreme right, is seen to share little affinity with its immediate postwar predecessor, representing as it did not only the peasantry but the middle-class and intellectuals in a broad center-right coalition opposed to the rising left. 12 Likewise, the Czech Agrarians went from having defended farmers against nationalization in the pre-communist period to protecting cooperatives faced with privatization as a member of the contemporary Liberal Democratic Union. 13
The problem with these arguments is that they equate continuity with stasis. How different can revived parties be from their predecessors before they are considered "different" parties? Conceived of as a literal return to the status quo ante conditions of the pre-communist period, it is easy to dismiss the idea of continuity as a fancy of romantic historians, the dream of aspiring demagogues, or the nightmare of fearful liberals. As more than one observer has pointed out, the pre-communist past is not some unitary period with agreed-upon political characteristics. There are many conflicting traditions to choose from. In Hungarian history, for example, there were enormous differences between the center-right coalition of the immediate postwar years, the quasi-authoritarian interwar period, and the era of liberal dominance in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire. Even if one of these periods were chosen the requirements of a literal return would be preposterous. The re-creation of a God-fearing, politically passive and uneducated peasantry is no more possible today than the deindustrialization and massive urban-rural migration that such a condition would require.
Continuity-as-stasis is a very strong form of continuity, but ultimately flawed because change is inevitable. As David Lowenthal has put it, "the most faithful followers of tradition can not avoid innovating, for time's erosions alter all original structures and outdate all previous meanings." 14 In other words, the baseline against which a revived party may be compared with a predecessor (whatever it is) cannot be the characteristics of the predecessor party at the onset of state-socialism. If revived parties have different policies or target different constituencies than their pre-communist predecessors, it is because the society these parties must make sense of is radically different from that of a half century ago. In communist East Central Europe, the modernizing and industrializing party-state fundamentally altered previous structures, emasculating or destroying most preexistent networks and forms of work-organization. The region underwent massive social and economic change between the mid 1940s and 1989. Many of the problems these countries face today are historically unprecedented. It is thus wholly natural that revived parties, like their "new" counterparts, attempt to adapt to the changed circumstances. In the more mature party systems of Western Europe and North America, parties often adjust their appeals in response to their perceptions of the electorate and their own changing goals. They do not thereby become "different" parties, at least in the sense of becoming incomparable with themselves at the earlier time. The West German Social Democratic Party, for example, formally abandoned its Marxian revolutionary dogma in 1959, yet few have argued that the pre- and post-1959 versions of the party cannot be usefully compared.
The second way in which an inappropriate baseline is used is in empirical evaluations of continuity. On the whole, historic parties did fail to recapture the electoral support of their pre-communist predecessors, a fact not lost on critics of the continuity thesis. In the first post-communist elections in Czechoslovakia, for example, the Czechoslovak Socialist Party (with roots going back to the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) garnered just three percent of the vote, well below an average of nine percent during the interwar period. Likewise, the Czechoslovak Social Democracy Party received only four percent, down from nine percent or more before World War II. Only the Czechoslovak People's Party, which got eight percent in 1990 as the dominant member of Christian Democratic Union, managed to more or less reproduce its pre-communist successes (around nine percent). 15 In Hungary, the Hungarian Social Democratic Party received under four percent of the vote, a drop from the nearly 15 percent received in 1947 and over 17 percent in 1945. The Christian Democratic People's Party, heir to the old Democratic People's Party, received under seven percent of the vote in 1990 compared to over 16 percent in 1947. The Independent Smallholder's Party came closest to reproducing its pre-communist support, receiving nearly 12 percent of the vote in 1990 and over 15 percent in 1947. 16
Although this data refutes the continuity-as-stasis hypothesis, it is not inconsistent with other types of continuity. First, when viewed in light of the transformation undergone by the constituencies of these parties during state-socialism, the decrease in these parties' electoral support may not seem so drastic. For example, the Smallholder's Party vote decreased by only two percent, in spite of the fact that agricultural collectivization eliminated the primary source of their pre-communist strength. Second, aggregate discontinuity at the national level may conceal continuity at the regional or local level. In the former Czechoslovakia, for example, an analysis of the 1990 and 1992 election results has found that for the Christian Democratic Union (the core of which is the People's Party), Social Democracy, the Czechoslovak Socialist Party, and the Communist Party there are regions where these parties have shown relative strength since the founding of the Republic in 1920. 17 In Hungary, regional continuities have been found for the Independent Smallholders' Party and the Christian Democratic People's Party. 18
My purpose, however, is not to give a strong argument for limiting our notion of historical legacies to the revival of pre-communist parties. Although they are more legitimate indicators of political continuity than their critics would allow, there are in fact good theoretical reasons to doubt their efficacy as loci of mass attachment. There are two reasons for this. First, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, every country in the region experienced periods of authoritarianism during the interwar or immediate postwar periods. This meant that few parties could boast of an unbroken existence upon which to build a stable constituency. For example, the Hungarian Smallholder's movement, founded in 1906, was absorbed into the ruling Government Party in the early 1920s, only to reemerge as an independent party again in 1930. Its political activities were restricted right up through the Second World War. It emerged from the war to win the general elections of November 1945, only to be suppressed once again as the communists tightened their grip on power in the late 1940s. It briefly emerged again during the abortive uprising of 1956, and once again in late 1988, as state-socialist control finally began to disintegrate. Although the resilience of this party is surely indicative of a great number of devoted activists, circumstances were hardly conducive to providing the education and services necessary for solidifying mass allegiance. The Hungarian Social Democratic Party has an even longer pedigree and an equally discontinuous organizational history. Founded in 1891, it struggled for years during the Austro-Hungarian empire to mobilize working-class interests. Under the regime of Admiral Horthy in the interwar period, its activities were curtailed to the largest cities in the country. It was given full freedom to organize briefly after the Second World War, only to be absorbed into the Hungarian Communist Party in 1948. Other revived parties, such as the Independent Hungarian Democratic Party, the Hungarian Independence Party, and the Hungarian Radical Party, contested only one pre-communist election. This is also true for the Democratic People's Party, the forebear of the contemporary Christian Democratic People's Party, even though there had been a decades-long tradition of political Catholicism in Hungary.
Second, even if some parties had managed to capture particular constituencies during the pre-communist period, the organizational discontinuity these parties suffered (with the important exception of the communist parties) during state-socialism, and the sheer length of the disruption, meant that two generations never had any contact with these parties. If loyalty is at all related to the amount and intensity of contact that a person has with a party, then the nearly fifty-year absence of these parties renders rather slim the chance of a mass resurgence of loyalty to them. 19 Even where parties exist and operate freely, there is no guarantee that electors will form an enduring attachment. 20 In Hungary, the period in which parties could freely mobilize potential electors was too short for them to have sunk very deep roots into society. 21
A Reconceptualization
Notwithstanding these criticisms, a case for political continuity can be made, since continuity can also be conceived of in terms of loyalty to political blocs or traditions. Such a distinction between parties and blocs has been crucial to our understanding of political continuity in Western European party systems. Since Lipset and Rokkan put forth their famous "freezing hypothesis," claiming that "the party systems of the 1960s reflect, with few but significant exceptions, the cleavage structures of the 1920s, there has been debate concerning the degree to which Western European party systems have exhibited long-term stability. 22 At the center of the discussion has been the question of whether electoral volatility is best judged with respect to the changing fortunes of individual parties or the aggregate losses suffered by distinctive blocs of parties. The details of this debate need not concern us. What is important is that an analytic distinction is elaborated between individual party organizations and the underlying system of conflicts around which blocs of parties compete. Evidence of electoral volatility or stability at either level of analysis is informative, but for different hypotheses. Thus, while volatility at the level of individual parties may be evidence of a party's inability to maintain the loyalties of its voters, it is not necessarily evidence of deeper underlying changes in mass attachments. Evidence for such a claim would, however, be found in volatility at the level of blocs. 23
An emphasis on party blocs rather than on individual parties has several advantages for the study of political continuity in East Central Europe. First, as noted above, it refocuses attention from the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual parties to the underlying conflicts and ideological distinctions that both unite and divide all parties. It thus removes the theoretical salience of the distinction between new and historic parties, since both of these types of parties may articulate views that put them in the same political tradition. The support (or lack thereof) for historic parties would thus no longer be sufficient evidence for the presence or absence of political continuity. Second, when viewed in dynamic terms, the distinction permits the identification of continuity and discontinuity in countries where individual party organizations rise and fall with regularity but the underlying structure of oppositions remains relatively stable. In metaphoric terms, it permits us to distinguish between a continuation of the game with different players and a change of the game itself. Third, an emphasis on blocs explicitly recognizes a distinction commonly made in discussions of partisanship between party identification and loyalty to a more underlying tendance such as the left, the right, Christian democracy, or social democracy. 24 This latter type of partisanship has been best articulated in the case of France, where long-term partisan stability has been understood in terms of deeply rooted attachments to either the left or the right.
The Argument for General Partisan Orientations
There are a number of reasons to expect post-socialist East Central European societies to exhibit general partisan orientations. First, there is evidence that even during state-socialism these societies were never completely stripped of political articulation. In Poland, for example, the Catholic Church is thought to have served as a focus of attachment and a locus of conservatism throughout the period. 25 In Czechoslovakia, there was evidence of lingering social-democratic values, particularly in the Czech regions. 26 Regarding Hungary, one analyst noticed a persistence of petit-bourgeois values, while another identified progressives, radical traditional leftists, radical new leftists, and agrarian-oriented populists, as well as a number of other tendencies. 27 I recognize that attempts to identify political values within socialist society are fraught with methodological difficulties. We do not know, for example, how widespread these beliefs were, or why individuals may have held them, but at least there is evidence that the views existed. 28 Some of these orientations were bound to carry over into the post-communist period.
Second, at a very minimum, the experience of state-socialism itself should have generated a divide between those who are "for" the communists and those who are "against" them, or between those who would or might support socialist parties and those who under no circumstances would ever vote for them again. It should be pointed out that state-socialism was not simply one-party rule, akin to the post-war dominance of the liberal-democratic party in Japan. It was a system that generated powerful sympathies and antipathies. For many, socialism meant access to an education, escape from penury, and a measure of human dignity. Many others were imprisoned, killed, exiled, pauperized, or otherwise had their lives and careers ruined because of their real or perceived opposition to these regimes. For countless others, state-socialism meant the denigration of religious beliefs or the denial of basic human freedoms. Those facts make for powerful attachments, whatever their direction.
Empirical evidence of general partisan orientation is more difficult to obtain. We do know that low party identification and volatile party preferences characterize the region. As of August 1993, for example, upwards of 60 percent of those surveyed in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland expressed no party identification, compared with 81 percent in Great Britain. 29 Electoral volatility, symbolized by the resurgence of former communist parties, provides further proof that if partisan orientations are at all widespread, they are not to be found in attachments to parties. In Hungary, for example, the Hungarian Socialist Party roughly tripled its share of the popular vote between 1990 and 1994. In Poland, the SLD, successor to the old Communist Party, received more than twice the number of votes in 1993 as it did in 1991. Throughout the region, mobility among parties is even greater than that experienced in the initial post-war democratic elections in Western Europe. 30
These low levels of attachment do not, however, necessarily preclude more stable underlying partisan orientations. First, voters could be switching between similar types of parties rather than between ideologically dissimilar parties. The precise meaning of "ideologically similar" is clearly open to interpretation, but nonetheless, as in Western Europe a switch from one conservative party to another is less momentous a shift than a move from a conservative to a social democratic party. The former may represent the importance of a specific issue, a preference for a particular leadership style, or any of a host of pragmatic concerns. The latter is much more likely to entail a change in world-view or value orientation. I am not arguing that in East Central Europe there has been no volatility at this fundamental level: the sheer magnitudes of the electoral shifts suggest otherwise. However, the number of voters with stable general orientations will be greater than that indicated by levels of party loyalty. 31 Another way in which volatile electoral preferences may mask underlying stability is if public perception of the parties has changed over time. In late 1989 and early 1990 the post-communist citizenry was faced with a barrage of political information, only some small portion of which they could possibly have digested. Views concerning what these parties represented were bound to change as voters obtained new information. Thus, a switch in party support might represent a revelation that a voter has found a party that better represents his or her views rather than the adoption of a new belief. In Hungary, for example, the public image of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, winner of the first post-communist election, shifted from being more or less centrist to decidedly right-wing between 1990 and 1993. 32 As in the case of voter mobility within blocs, this will not account for all volatility. Opinions on the economy, for example, are clearly changing over time. In Hungary the fraction of people who believe the country is progressing in a good direction dropped from 32 percent to 20 percent between October 1991 and October 1993. 33 However, many other political beliefs held by an individual, regarding, for example, the role of the Church in society or the need to defend Hungarian culture from "pollution" by Western values, almost certainly display greater stability.
Continuity Restated
I now introduce a more abstract model of how bloc identity over time might be understood. We already saw in the discussion of historic parties that divergence between the pre- and post-communist policies of a given party was not sufficient to establish them as "different" parties. I now generalize that notion by loosening the link between the identity of a political tradition and the specific practices of parties that purport to manifest that tradition. In this view the identity of a tradition lies less in the specific content of the world-view it articulates than in the relationship between this world-view and that of its rival political traditions. This does not mean that at a given time one could not distinguish a set of parties based on some cluster of beliefs that they share about how best to improve people's lives in the prevailing social circumstances. Such a bloc would not, however, be intelligible as "conservative," "liberal" or anything else in the absence of rival political ideologies against which these beliefs can be evaluated. This is because there is no baseline outside of politics against which one can judge the prudence, reasonableness, or even radicalness of a given prescription. Any evaluation requires a conception of what belongs in the domain of the political, which itself is the object of intense political struggle. Over time, an ideology is identified not by its adherence to a more or less fixed set of prescriptions for the economy and society, but by its location in the political space with respect to competing ideologies. 34
To illustrate this let us begin with a simplified example. Consider a political conflict common to many European states, that between Church and state over control of education. At any given time, suppose a bloc may be identified by the fact that its members advocate policies providing for a greater role for religious values in education than does another bloc. For labeling purposes let us call the proponents of religion CD and their rivals SD. This relative position with respect to the education issue is preserved over time even though the actual policies articulated by each side may change dramatically during that period. Thus, whereas a half century ago the CD bloc may have been willing to cede substantial control of education to religious authorities, and the SD bloc may have fought for the complete abolition of religious influence in the schools, today each advocates a more moderate stance but in spatial terms they remain on the same "side" of the issue. The contemporary SD bloc, however much it has come to accept the importance of religious values, nonetheless remain less in favor of religious instruction than its CD rival. This argument may be represented graphically as in Figure 1, below.
A Spatial Representation of the Temporal Evolution of Bloc
Views on the Issue of Religious Influence in the Schools.
An outline of this anti/pro-Church dimension is made in order to illustrate the relative movement of each camp over time, rather than a camp's exact placement on the dimension at a given point in time. The SD camp may be identified by the fact that it remains to the left of the CD camp in both periods. Of course the labels on the axis could have been reversed, in which case SD would have been to the right of CD. This would not mean that SD is more "right-wing" than CD -- although this figure appears to accord with our intuitions about the political meaning of "left" and "right," here left and right have only directional meaning. What is important is that one camp remains to one side of the other over time.
The labels "CD" and "SD" have been used in conspicuous reference to social democratic and Christian democratic parties, since these parties have often battled over control of the educational system. The above discussion illustrates why old social democratic parties and new social democratic parties can be considered in one social democratic category despite the fact that the contemporary versions are palpably more bourgeois, tolerant of religion, and accepting of capitalism than were their pre-communist counterparts. They bear an affinity for one another as a result of having occupied structurally similar political positions, i.e. similar relative to other units in the system.
Measurement Concerns
While the comparison of electoral support for blocs of parties over time may be interpreted as electoral continuity according to the above argument, it is not necessarily partisan continuity. This distinction, routine in the study of Western party systems, is necessary because there may be reasons why an individual votes for a given party other than identification with that party or the values that the party articulates. A detailed discussion of the role played by issue and candidate attributes in voters' choices is beyond the scope of this essay. 35 What is important for present purposes is that in studies of electoral persistence in Western party systems, continuities in partisanship, measured through the repeated use of mass surveys and especially panel studies, could remain empirically, as well as analytically, distinct from electoral stability. Partisan and electoral change could covary, as in France or Italy, or they could diverge, as in Canada. 36
The implications of this distinction are enormous for the study of partisan continuity in East Central Europe, because little data exists on partisanship for the pre-communist period. The only source of disaggregated data on political preferences available for both periods is electoral data, yet no automatic inference from this data to partisan identity can be made. However, electoral outcomes can be used as a proximate pointer to political orientations, rather than as a direct indicator. By "proximate pointer" I mean something similar to what has been called "inferred measurement," where a general phenomenon (partisanship) is inferred from a specific observation (voting) by the use of a general law about behavior. 37 Of course there are (as yet) no behavioral laws relating voting to partisanship. But there are a number of conditions where voting may be considered at least a provisional indicator. First, using votes for party lists rather than for single member constituencies may mitigate the influence that particularly popular (or unpopular) candidates may have on the direction of the vote. Second, where parties are distinctive more in terms of the values they articulate than in their specific economic policies, the role of economic self-interest in determining which bloc is voted for may be mitigated. Third, even where individual votes are decided based on bread-and-butter economic issues, such as privatization or subsidies, it is not clear whether some form of partisanship is not also implicated. Many people who oppose privatization or the unrestricted sale of land do so not because they will personally make or lose money, but because they are ideologically opposed to the creation of another capitalist class or to the ability of foreigners to buy up the means upon which their livelihoods rely. The degree to which these conditions hold in any particular country is of course an empirical question.
Indicators of Continuity
I have thus far argued why support for particular political blocs over time counts as continuity, but have not offered any indicators of continuity. There are at least three different measures, each making different presuppositions about the appropriate baseline against which contemporary outcomes should be compared. The first, continuity-as-stasis, has already been mentioned. In this view the baseline is the support received by pre-communist blocs. The greater the difference between the vote for contemporary blocs and their pre-communist counterparts, the less continuity exists between the two periods. The second method might be called continuity-as-adaptation. In this view the baseline is what outcomes would have been, had the quantitative model that best accounts for voting behavior in the pre-communist period still been applicable to contemporary electoral behavior. Such a model would be statistical, including such plausible explanatory variables as percentage of the workforce in agriculture and industry, religious affiliation, age, etc. Given a reasonably accurate statistical model of pre-communist voting behavior, how well would that model predict contemporary outcomes? The difference between what that model would predict and the actual results would be the deviation of contemporary outcomes from the expected continuity. The closer contemporary results come to the predicted results, the greater the continuity.
The third method can be called continuity-as-residue. Here the baseline is not the overall support received by a bloc in the pre-communist period, but the deviation between support for a bloc in a given region and the support that it received nationally. In other words, continuity can be regional and relative. Even if the nationwide support for a bloc has changed between the pre- and post-communist periods, there can be continuity if today that bloc remains popular in the same regions in which it had strongholds in the pre-communist era. Continuity-as-stasis is the strongest form of continuity. Its image of political preference is that of an identity so deeply rooted as to be virtually impervious to social and economic evolution. Although it has already been shown to be innaccurate with regard to support for historical parties at the national level, this does not mean that it might not hold for blocs at the national level, or for historic parties and even blocs in particular regions. Continuity-as-adaption is more speculative, posing a counterfactual: what would contemporary outcomes have been if the pre-communist party system had not been interrupted? Of course we will never really know the answer -- if there had been no interruption these countries may have developed quite differently than they actually did. The party system might or might not have stabilized. The counterfactual model proposed above can only give a possible answer, since it must be based on a view of politics which is not autonomous: parties are seen as emanations of the society for whose vote they compete, rather as independent actors seeking to channel and mold the interests of their potential constituents. Continuity-as-residue is weaker, since it allows for swings in the level of support for a given bloc. It requires the division of an outcome into two components: one that fluctuates from election to election as well as a component that is stable. The stable element signifies continuity.
Conclusion
The framework offered here for identifying political continuities and discontinuities between pre- and post-communist East Central Europe will permit a detailed determination of the ways in which state-socialism succeeded or failed in recasting partisanship in these societies. Continuities between the two periods would imply that even in 1989 and 1990 there were limits on the ability of parties to remake the electorate as they saw fit, since parties would have had to operate within the constraints defined by the already-existing political preferences in a given area. To the extent that these continuities are geographically localized, they would illuminate potential mechanisms by which partisanship was passed on even under state-socialism. Discontinuities, on the other hand, would provide a trace of the way in which state-socialism actually succeeded in penetrating a particular area, revealing both resistance and vulnerability.
East Central Europe should provide many surprises as a venue for studying political continuity and discontinuity. The reigning explanations of political continuity, such as parental socialization or organizational encapsulation, were developed for the conditions of open, stable democratic governance enjoyed in Western Europe and North America. Whether these mechanisms are at all helpful in understanding continuity under the more restrictive conditions of state-socialism remains an open question.
Footnotes
Note 1: For comments on earlier drafts I would like to thank Phineas Baxandall, Suzanne Berger, Grzegorz Ekiert, George Graham, Jeff Kopstein, Gwynne Oosterbaan, Vello Pettai, Gábor Tóka, and participants in the Seminar on Post-Soviet Institutions, Russian Research Center, Harvard University, Fall 1995. Back.
Note 2: A representative but by no means exhaustive bibliography would include André Siegfried, Tableau politique de la France de L'Ouest sous la IIIe République. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1964, 2nd edition, originally published in 1913; V.O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1949); Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967); Samuel Barnes, Representation in Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977); Hans Daalder and Peter Mair, eds., Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983); Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan and Paul Allen Beck, eds., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Joseph J. Houska, Influencing Mass Political Behavior: Elites and Subcultures in the Netherlands and Austria (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1985); Steven B. Wolinetz, Parties and Party Systems in Liberal Democracies (London: Routledge, 1988); and Stefano Bartolini and Peter Mair, Identity, Competition, and Electoral Availability: The Stabilization of European Electorates 1885-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 3: Lányi Gusztáv, "Föltámadás és/vagy restauráció?,"Magyar Tudomány XXXVIII, no. 2 (February 1993), 170. Back.
Note 4: Joseph Rothschild, Return to Diversity, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 234. Back.
Note 5: Karel Bartosek, "A Történelem Visszatérése-Cseh Modra," Világosság XXXIV, no. 1 (January 1993), 12. Back.
Note 6: Zoltán Barany, "First Session of New Parliament," RFE/RL Research Report, May 25, 1990, 26. Back.
Note 7: Translated from the Hungarian, as it appeared in the electronic mail version of Hirmondó 4.002, January 4, 1993 (hun@cs.uchicago.edu). Back.
Note 8: See András Körösényi, "Revival of the past or new beginning?," in András Bozóki, András Körösényi, and George Schöpflin, eds., Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (London: Pinter, 1992), 115-16. Back.
Note 9: See, for example, Péter Kende, "Vissza -- de milyen hagyományhoz?," Világosság XXXIII (December 1992), 881-87; Maurizio Cotta, "Building party systems after the dictatorship: The East European Cases in a comparative perspective," in Geoffrey Pridham and Tatu Vanhanen, eds., Democratization in Eastern Europe: Domestic and International Perspectives (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 99-127; István Schlett, "Tradíciók, modellek és körülmények: A politikai tagoltság determinánsai Magyarországon," Világosság XXXI (June 1990), 401-09; and Michael Waller, "New Wine in Old Bottles: Party Inheritances and Party Identities in the East European Transition." Paper presented at the conference on "The Emergence of New Party Systems and Transitions to Democracy," University of Bristol, September 17-19, 1993. Back.
Note 10: Gábor Gyáni, "Political Uses of Tradition in Postcommunist East Central Europe," Social Research 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993), 902-903. A similar view can be found in Miklós Szabó, "Restauration oder Aufarbeiting? Geschichte und Politische Kultur in Ungarn," Transit, no. 2 (Summer 1991) 72-80. See also Waller, 14. Back.
Note 12: Miklos Sukosd, "Why History Doesn't Repeat Itself: The Saga of the Smallholders' Party," East European Reporter 5, no.4 (July-Aug. 1992), 53. Back.
Note 14: David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 70. Back.
Note 15: Petr Jehlicka, Tomas Kostelecky, Ludek Sykora, "Czechoslovak parliamentary elections 1990: old patterns, new trends and lots of surprises," in John O'Loughlin and Herman van der Wusten, eds., The New Political Geography of Eastern Europe (London and New York: Belhaven Press, 1993), 235-54. Back.
Note 16: For an overview of pre-communist elections in Hungary, see György Földes and László Hubai, eds., Parlamenti Képvisel_választások 1920-1990 (Budapest: Politkatörténeti Alapítvány, 1994). For 1990 election results and a discussion of the electoral system, see András Körösényi, "The Hungarian parliamentary elections, 1990," in Bozóki et al., 72-87. The results reported here from 1990 refer to the sum total of the votes each party received from the regional party lists. The vote for the Independent Smallholder's Party is not reported for 1945 because it was the only non-leftist party allowed by the Allied Control Commission to participate in that election (all "fascist" elements were excluded). A vote for this party in 1945 thus can not be considered a measure of party allegiance because it would have attracted the support of any center or right-wing political forces. The Smallholder's Party ended up winning 57 percent of the vote. Back.
Note 17: Jehlicka et al. Back.
Note 18: See Körösényi, "The Hungarian Parliamentary Elections, 1990," and György Wiener, "Társadalom, történelem, politika," Eszmélet 23 (June 1994), 45-64. Back.
Note 19: One of the clearest theoretical statements on this issue is Philip E. Converse, "Of Time and Partisan Stability," Comparative Political Studies 2, no. 2 (July 1969), 139-71. For East Europe the argument is made in Cotta. Back.
Note 20: See W. Phillips Shively, "Party Identification, Party Choice, and Voting Stability: The Weimar Case," American Political Science Review LXVI, no. 4 (December 1972), 1203-25. Back.
Note 21: See László Bruszt and David Stark, "Remaking the Political Field in Hungary: From the Politics of Confrontation to the Politics of Competition," Journal of International Affairs 45, no. 1 (Summer 1991). Back.
Note 22: See Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction," in Lipset and Rokkan, 50. Back.
Note 23: See Bartolini and Peter Mair, especially chapter 2. See also Peter Mair, "Continuity, Change and the Vulnerability of Party," in Peter Mair and Gordon Smith, eds., Understanding Party System Change in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 169-87. Back.
Note 24: The literature on partisanship is enormous. Lucid theoretical treatments can be found in Ian Budge and Dennis Fairlie, Voting and Party Competition: A Theoretical Critique and Synthesis Applied to Surveys From Ten Democracies (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1977), especially chapter 2; and Warren E. Miller, "The Cross-National Use of Party Identification as a Stimulus to Political Inquiry," in Ian Budge, Ivor Crewe and Dennis Fairlie, eds., Party Identification and Beyond: Representations of Voting and Party Competition (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1976). Back.
Note 25: George Kolankiewicz and Ray Taras, "Poland: Socialism for Everyman?," in Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds., Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1979), 101-30. Back.
Note 26: David Paul, The Cultural Limits of Revolutionary Politics: Change and Continuity in Socialist Czechoslovakia (Boulder: East European Quarterly, 1979); and David Paul, "Czechoslovakia's Political Culture Reconsidered," in Archie Brown, ed., Political Culture and Communist Studies (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1984), 134-48. Back.
Note 27: George Schöpflin, "Hungary: An Uneasy Stability" in Brown and Gray, 131-58; and Csaba Gombár, "Van-e, és ha van, milyen politikai tagoltság nálunk?," Politika és Társadalom 1983, 32-66. Back.
Note 28: For two penetrating assessments of the so-called "political culture approach" to studying communist societies, see Mary McAuley, "Political Culture and Communist Politics: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back," in Brown, 13-39; and Stephen Welch, The Concept of Political Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), especially chapter 3. Back.
Note 29: Richard Rose, "Mobilizing Demobilized Voters in Post Communist Societies." Working Paper 1995/76, Centro do Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales, Instituto Juan March de Estudios e Investigaciones. September 1995, 22. Back.
Note 31: Even in Hungary, where between 1990 and 1994 the Hungarian Socialist Party roughly tripled its vote, there is evidence of bloc stability. See László Brusz and János Simon, "Az Antall-korszak után, a választások el_tt," in Sándor Kurtán, Péter Sándor, and László Vass, eds., Magyarország politikai évkönyve (Budapest: Demokrácia Kutatások Magyar Központja Alapítvány, 1994), 795. Here the relevant blocs would be conservative: MDF, KDNP, FKgP; liberal: Fidesz, SZDSZ; and MSZD: socialist . Further analysis would need to be performed to determine whether electoral movement within a bloc is greater than what would result merely by chance. Back.
Note 33: Em_ke Lengyel, Zóltán Molnár, and Antal Tóth, "Magyar lakossági vélemények gazdaságról, politikáról és az európai együttm_ködésr_l 1991-1993," in Kurtán et al., 758. Back.
Note 34: The view presented here is essentially that presented in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace: 1936), 234-35; 240-41. Back.
Note 35: For a very readable introduction see Samuel Long, ed., Research in Micropolitics, Vol. 2 (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1987). Back.
Note 36: For France see Michael S. Lewis-Beck, "France: The Stalled Electorate," in Dalton et al. Back.
Note 37: See Adam Przeworski and Henry Teune, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (Malabar, Florida: Krieger Publishing, 1982, originally published in 1970), 94-106. Back.
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