ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the content of the legislation on political parties in post-communist Slovakia. It attempts to discover the extent to which changes in the patterns of party regulation have affected party system formation and development. The chapter examines the weakly specified position of parties in Slovakia's constitutional laws. It summarizes the most important aspects of the two Slovak party laws and highlights their differences and innovations. The chapter identifies the presence – and more often the absence – of regulatory impact on the Slovak party system and focuses both on party creation, proliferation and turnover and on electoral and governmental stability. It analyzes the 1993, 2005 and 2014 laws on the basis of L. Karvonen's insight that the architecture of modern party laws involves a layered narrative referring to three different moments in the life of a political party: creation, development and extinction.
