ABSTRACT
Both legacy-based approaches and discussions of post-communist elites tend to take the formation of political parties in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe as unproblematic. The same is also true of broader institutional approaches stressing the importance of constitutional design or electoral systems. However, as the literature on party development makes clear, party formation is a complex and uncertain process which requires the carefully crafted mobilization of resources and the making of alliances, as well as powerful underlying social conflicts or favourable electoral incentives. Much writing on party development in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989, although acknowledging this in general terms, has overlooked issues of party formation, tending to assume that – other than communist successor parties or ‘historic’ parties with links to the pre-communist period – most parties in the region are simply elite creations which emerged ‘from scratch’ in the early 1990s. This implies that new centre-right parties such as the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) in the Czech Republic were formed ‘internally’ by parliamentary and governmental elites with few pre-existing organizational resources in place in a pattern reminiscent of the top-down emergence of conservative and liberal ‘cadre’ parties in nineteenth-century Western Europe.1
