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First published March 1999

The Communist Successor Parties and Party Organizational Development in Post-Communist Politics

John T. IshiyamaView all authors and affiliations
Volume 52, Issue 1
https://doi.org/10.1177/106591299905200104

Abstract

The emergence of competitive party politics in the countries of postcommunist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has offered a unique opportunity to test some long-held propositions in party organization theory. What factors may promote certain types of organizations over others? To address this question, I develop a theoretical framework which identifies a set of party organizational types and the factors which might lead to the development of certain types over others. Second, I test these in light of the evidence from the communist successor parties from ten Eastem European and former Soviet countries. It was found that, among several independent variables, the previous communist regime type, the strength of the constitutional presidency, and the features of the electoral system were the best predictors of party organizational type among the communist successor parties.

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1 I consider these two dimensions in combination rather than separately for three reasons. First, in the classic works on political parties, most notably Duverger (1954) and Epstein (1967), mass or program parties were characterized by both a reliance on mass membership and the valuing of ideological coherence. On the other hand cadre (and for Epstein “electoral”) parties relied less on mass membership and placed less emphasis on ideological coherence and greater emphasis on ideological flexibility Thus for consistency with the literature on political parties these dimensions are considered in tandem. Second, to analyze these dimensions separately could potentially lead one to overlook various combinations of these two dimensions which characterize different kinds of parties, i.e., parties which rely on mass membership but are not ideologically coherent and/or parties which are ideologically coherent but do not rely on a mass membership for political support. Third, I generally agree with Kitschelt's (1992) observation that there is a linkage between ideological coherence and organization in party development in general and post-communist politics in particular.
2 In this article I do not consider Katz and Mair's (1995) Cartel party as a distinct organizational type because (by their own admission) the “cartel party phenomenon” “remains in its early stages.” Thus the organizational type defies an explicit definition. I tend to agree with Koole (1996) that before classifying the Cartel party as organizationally distinct from the “electoral-professional party” or the modern “cadre party,” a clearer conceptualization of its organizational characteristics is first warranted.
3 It is important to note that I do not use the term “cadre” party in the same sense as connoted by Leninist theory. In this article “cadre” refers to the well-known concept in party organizational theory developed by Maurice Duverger. Further I use the terms “mass-like” and -‘cadre-like“ for two reasons. First, because comparativists working on party organization in Eastern Europe have already begun to use these terms as beginning points in the analysis of post-communist parties (see especially Lewis 1996; Agh 1995) and it only makes sense (if scholars are to be serious about bringing the investigation of developments in post-Soviet Russia fully into the field of comparative politics) to extend the use of these concepts as a beginning point in the analysis of post-Soviet politics as well. Second, I use these terms ”Cadre and Mass” in order to maintain conceptual continuity with the general literature on party organization in application to the parties in post-communist politics. Despite the risk of confusion, I contend that if we are to further the study of political parties in post-communist politics and reduce conceptual confusion, then it is absolutely imperative that we make every effort to become familiar and conversant with the rich existing theoretical literature on political parties before we create our own area-specific terminology.
4 Granted this may still be an imperfect measure of ideological coherence. For instance, it might be the case that with an extremely “incoherent party” which takes both positions on extreme left and right, judges might conclude that these positions balance one another out and hence the party is scored at the midpoint of 4 with a standard deviation of zero. Although I recognize this as a shortcoming (a problem which plagues all measures which rely on “expert coding”) this measure represents a convenient substitute for a more rigorous measure of party coherence. One such measure is that developed by Remington and Smith (1995) which measures the degree of coherence in terms of party fraction votes in the Russian State Duma. Until such a measure is developed for all ten cases examined here then the Huber and Inglehart data measure is the most accessible measure at this point.
5 This is not to say that these parties do not rely on an activist membership for support in campaigning for election. All it means here is that these parties do not have high organizational density scores.
6 Another measure is McGregor's (1994) the Weighted Presidential Power Score. Unfortunately, this score by itself does not take into account whether the president is directly or indirectly elected, nor whether the system is a parliamentary or presidential one.
7 For Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Russia, the degree of distrust was measured by responses to the following question: “There are many different institutions in this country, for example, government, courts, police, civil servants. Please show me on this 7-point scale where 1 represents no trust and 7 great trust, how great is your personal trust in each of these institutions?” [1-3 are classified as distrust]. For the Baltic states this distrust was measured by the ‘none’ response to the question “How much do you trust the following institutions or groups? (Rose and Haerpfer 1994a; 1994b; Rose and Maley 1994; Rose 1995a, 1996, 1997).
8 The Spearman's procedure is the appropriate technique for both interval variables which do not fulfill the “normality assumption” and/or categorical variables.
9 Literaturnaya gazeta no. 1 1, 16 March 1994.
10 Again note that although the party relies on an activist membership in organizing the party's campaign efforts, the party does not rely exclusively on mass support for its electoral base (witness the low organizational density scores reported in Table 1).
11 The ideology score for CPRF was based on judgement of five Russian experts who were administered the scoring sheet by this researcher in 1996.

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Volume 52, Issue 1
Pages: 87 - 112
Article first published: March 1999
Issue published: March 1999

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John T. Ishiyama
Truman Statec University
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