Origin, Ideology and Transformation of Political Parties

Vít Hloušek is Associate Professor of European Studies at the Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Lubomír Kopecek is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Masaryk University, Czech Republic

'Despite the wealth of research, the question of why party system development has been so turbulent and uneven in the region is still unsettled. With their new book, Vít Hloušek and Lubomír Kopecek offer a welcome addition to the debate, providing a font of information on political parties in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia. ... With this highly descriptive approach, the authors eschew the conventional political science model of explicitly setting out an empirical "puzzle" and then adjudicating between a limited set of clearly outlined rival causal hypotheses... this book is in its own understated way advancing a quite radical claim. Certainly it is not the picture that one finds in much of the rest of the literature on the region's party systems... there is much to laud in this needed empirical update on the contours of east central Europe's party systems.' Slavic Review 'The dominant strength of this work is its argument for compatibility of parties across the European continent which helps to diminish the over-focus that persists in political science between Western and 'post-communist' Europe. The cases of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia are carefully chosen, and the authors take care not to include former Soviet Union republics or the majority of the Balkans where convergence with Western European party models has yet to occur... Ultimately this research encourages more studies similar to this one. This book is an essential read for political party scholars and useful to all scholars of Central European studies.' Political Studies Review

• Preface; List of Abbreviations; Chapter 1 Types of Political Parties and Party Families; Chapter 2 Social Democrats and Socialists; Chapter 3 The Far Left; Chapter 4 The Greens; Chapter 5 The Agrarian Parties; Chapter 6 The Liberals; Or, the Curse of the Political Center; Chapter 7 The Christian Democrats; Chapter 8 The Conservatives; Chapter 9 The Far Right; Chapter 10 Ethnic and Regional Parties; Chapter 11 Party Families in East-Central and Western Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century;