Social Science Department Lecture Series: New Parties and Illiberalism in Central Europe and Beyond

Why do some parties live fast and die young, but others endure? Why are some party systems more stable than others? And what does this mean for the health and quality of democracy? Drawing on the experiences of political parties in eleven countries from Central and Eastern Europe in the three decades since the 1989 revolutions, this talk will outline new tools for mapping and measuring party systems, and provide conceptual frameworks to analyse the dynamics of party politics, particularly the birth and death of parties. In addition to highlighting the importance of agency and choice in explaining the fate of parties, the talk will underline the salience of the clean versus corrupt dimension of politics, the flow of voters in the new party subsystem, and emphasize the dimension of time and its role in shaping developments. Moreover, the talk will consider whether the emergence of so many new parties is helping or hindering the illiberal slide in Central Europe.