Parliamentary Opposition in Post-Communist Democracies: Power of the Powerless

This article charts the development of parliamentary opposition in post-communist Eastern Europe in the context of the changing nature of executive-legislative relations. We first review the existing literature on opposition in post-communist Europe. The second part of the article presents an analytical framework of different modes of executive-legislative interactions. Empirical analysis then demonstrates the practical relevance of these modes in post-communist political systems and their consequences for the position of the parliamentary opposition. We draw our empirical material from three countries of the region: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Hungary. We demonstrate that political parties have become the principal source of parliamentary opposition in these countries. However, we also highlight the crucial link between party stability and the ability of the opposition to influence the policy-making process.