Parties and electoral choices in East-Central Europe

In this chapter the performance of four East Central European party systems are compared with regard to the ''meaningfulness of electoral choice'' that they offer to voters. This is attempted by analysing several survey-based indicators of patterns in East Central European electoral behaviour. The aim is not so much the testing of well-established hypotheses on the circumstances facilitating the fast structuration and consolidation of the party space in newly established democracies - which do not abound - but the description and inductive speculation on possible explanations. In view of the number of indicators that are utilised and the number of parties operating in the four countries, most of the statistical evidence that will be referred to cannot be reproduced here: the interested readers can, however, find them in the original conference paper version of this chapter [see Toka 1993]. Since the compilation of that body of evidence, quite a number of the parties mentioned in this chapter have experienced mergers, splits, or major changes in their electoral strength. The reason why only occasional references will be made to these developments is that the patterns of electoral behaviour discussed here seem to prevail in more recent survey data too.