The New Democracies in Eastern Europe: Party Systems and Political Cleavages (Studies of Communism in Transition series)

This major book - the first of its kind - provides a unique up-to-date account of the party systems that have evolved in Eastern Europe since the revolutions at the end of the 1980s. The new political systems of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria are analysed and compared. It also includes an analysis of the most recent developments in Eastern Germany.

The New Democracies in Eastern Europe presents a genuinely comparative perspective on the old and the new party systems. The breakdown of the old authoritarian system is shown to be a by-product of the built-in crisis in legitimacy which became progressively worse as the mistakes and failures of the communist regimes accumulated. A comparison between the political systems of the inter-war period with those of the present day shows that many of the difficulties encountered during the early periods of democracy are still present. As a result, the future of the new democratic structures in Eastern Europe is still uncertain.

Edited by Sten Berglund, Professor of Political Science, University of Örebro, Sweden, Germany and the late Jan Åke Dellenbrant, formerly Reader in Political Science, University of Umeå, Sweden