ABSTRACT
Introduction Parties and elections form popular themes of research in political science and in particular in comparative political science. However, the lion’s share of contemporary party system research focusses on Western European party systems, while there is considerably less research into Central and Eastern Europe.1 In fact, considering the richness of empirical data from elections in all of Europe, there is surprisingly little comparative work between the different regions of Europe. Instead, comparative research including East Central and Eastern Europe, including those post-communist countries that entered the European Union in May 2004, is usually conducted in the perspective of the democratization process in that region (cf. Pridham 2003). In this book we focus on those post-communist countries that became new EU member states in 2004, namely the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Here, I occasionally use ‘new EU member states’ and ‘East Central and Eastern Europe’ parallel to the notion of post-communist EU member states. However, it must be noted that new EUmember states in 2004 also include Cyprus and Malta, though these have been disregarded because of their lack of a communist heritage, and their somewhat longer democratic and market-economy orientation. Moreover, in the literature it is not uncommon that East Central and Eastern Europe refer to a broader set of countries, including not only those former communist countries that we refer to here, but also to South East Europe with Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and – in addition to Slovenia – all countries formerly included in Yugoslavia. In addition, Eastern Europe usually includes those other European countries that received
1 Lewis (2000), Pridham and Ágh (2001) and White, Batt and Lewis (2003) are notable
exceptions dealing with parties and the political developments of East and East Central European countries.
