Party systems at the European union’s doorstep: Party system structuration and dimensionality in the Western Balkans

Abstract

Although consisting of EU (potential) candidate countries, the Western Balkan Six (WB6: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia) remain largely absent from the study of party politics. Mapping the dominant lines of party contestation in the region and comparing them cross-nationally is vital to understanding what types of ideological conflicts divide the parties of this region, how programmatic the party systems are, and whether they resemble other party systems. We are the first to use and validate the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey to investigate which issues structure Western Balkan party systems and to quantitatively map these systems. Generally, these party systems are weakly programmatic, unidimensional, and structured along cultural issues with a background consensus on the EU. This article contributes to the scholarly understanding of party competition in a geopolitically important region and facilitates future research on party systems in young democracies.

Keywords

political parties party systems western Balkans european union expert surveys

Introduction

How are party systems in the Western Balkans Structured? The Western Balkan Six (WB6), Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), North Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia, are in the EU accession pipeline. If they join, they will send representatives to the European Parliament, incorporating their conflicts into the broader European political space. This, alongside the region’s geostrategic and security relevance (Halili 2025), makes understanding their party systems important for scholars of European party systems and the EU.

However, we know little about the divisions and conflicts structuring these party systems. We ask which ideological conflicts differentiate parties, whether these divisions reflect broader trends in other party systems, and if these patterns are consistent with programmatic party competition? Answering these questions helps us to understand these countries as potential EU members and to evaluate the competitive quality of Western Balkan democracy.

Notably, the study of party conflicts and issue dimensions in Europe has focused on Western and (increasingly) Eastern Europe (Rovny and Edwards 2012). However, research on party conflict and reliable data on party systems in the WB6 is limited.

We provide two contributions to the party politics literature. We establish the quality of the 2019 Chapel Hill Candidate Study (Bakker et al., 2020). We find that experts in WB6 evaluate parties like experts in other regions but with more disagreement on economic issues. Analysis of anchoring vignettes establishes that experts place hypothetical parties very similarly across regions, indicating disagreement on economic positions in these countries reflects unclear or conflicting economic positions (Rovny 2012).

Second, this is the first systematic study to empirically map the region’s party systems. We follow state-of-the-art approaches in identifying the structuration and dimensionality of these party systems using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (Martínez-Gallardo et al., 2022; Zur and Bakker 2025), supplemented by inductive approaches to get inside the CFA results.

Our findings suggest WB6 party systems are unidimensional, dominated by cultural competition, and weakly programmatic. These deviate from both the economy-dominated, unidimensional party systems of Latin American (Martínez-Gallardo et al., 2022) and from the higher dimensionality of party systems in Western and Eastern Europe (Bakker et al., 2012).

Coupled with the evaluation of the data quality, these results are first steps towards a more nuanced quantitative understanding of Western Balkan party competition and the divisions they may bring to the European Union. This is a foundation for further research in the region to consider broader party competition theories (Green-Pedersen 2007), alternative issues, and the indirect role of the European Union more systematically (Vachudova and Hooghe 2009).

Dimensional structure of party competition and the Western Balkans

Party politics can be modeled spatially (Adams et al., 2005; Downs 1957). Although parties compete on a number of different political issues, “[i]deology constrains political space” (Rovny and Edwards 2012, 58). When parties have coherent ideologies and engage in programmatic competition, issues develop consistent relations with each other, resulting in low dimensionality (Converse 1964). In the post WWII period, this generally resulted in unidimensional left-right competition dominated by economic issues.

While the economic left-right dimension was dominant, scholarship in the European context has identified the need for at least a second (if not a third) dimension anchored in cultural issues and the European Union (Bakker et al., 2014; Hix, 1999; Hooghe et al., 2002; Koedam et al., 2025). These changes primarily result from the increased salience of cultural conflicts (Adams et al., 2006; De Vries and Hobolt 2020; Green-Pedersen 2019; Meguid 2008; Van de Wardt et al., 2014), which have become increasingly integrated into left-right competition (Lindqvist 2025).

Looking beyond Europe, the unidimensional to multidimensional trend does not generalize. For example, Latin American party systems remain largely unidimensional (Martínez-Gallardo et al., 2022). One reason for this may be that valence issues, like corruption where parties generally share a goal and compete on competence (Stokes 1963), may crowd out ideological issues (Green 2007; Lindqvist 2022, 132). Regardless, economic issues remain primary.

However, it is much less clear that economic issues should predominate in WB6. Contemporary political parties in the Western Balkans were founded in the late 1980s. After the fall of communism in Albania and the breakup of Yugoslavia, which included Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina, party formation was shaped by wars, non-democratic regimes, and a prolonged process of state-building (StojarováEmerson, 2013).

Rather than economic conflict, questions of identity, nationality, and ethnicity were essential in this period. For example, the ruling League of Communists of Serbia (1945–1990) merged with the Serbian branch of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People to form the nationalist-leaning Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), led by Slobodan Milošević, whose populist agenda and extreme ethno-nationalism contributed to the outbreak of the Yugoslav Wars (Sell 2002). In Bosnia and Herzegovina, party politics remains also deeply ethnicized following the 1992–1995 war, with parties pursuing divergent goals: Serbs support Republika Srpska’s autonomy or unification with Serbia, Bosnians seek a unitary state, while Croats remain divided, with some supporting the creation of their own entity within BiH (StojarováEmerson, 2013). While not subject to consociational institutions like those in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Merdzanovic 2015), ethnic minority parties remain important to understanding party differences in Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia.

This geopolitical context suggests that economic issues are unlikely to anchor party competition in the WB6. Additionally, the six countries under consideration here are EU candidate countries or, in the case of Kosovo, a potential candidate. As a result, the requirements of EU membership include clear restrictions on economic policies that weaken opposition to the market economy, limiting the plausible range of economic positions (Vachudova and Hooghe 2009).

In sum, party system dimensionality is a vital factor in understanding how parties compete. We expect Western Balkan party systems to display low dimensionality, weak programmaticism, and patterns of competition dominated by socio-cultural issues.

Data & quality

A primary hurdle to studying parties in the Western Balkans is a lack of data. In this paper, we use the previously underutilized 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) Candidate Survey (Bakker et al., 2020), the most comprehensive dataset covering party positions across all six Western Balkan countries. Administered from July 2020 to September 2020, this survey includes all six Western Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia) and includes parties that either received three percent of the vote in the most recent prior national election or have at least one representative in the national parliament.¹

Table 1 below shows the number of parties, experts, and expert-party combinations present in the data. The key observation here is that all cases presented here are multiparty systems evaluated by a robust number of country experts.

Table 1.

Countries included in 2019 CHES Candidate Survey.

Country	# Parties	# Experts	# Expert-party observations
Albania	8	15	120
Bosnia and Herzegovina	13	13	169
Kosovo	9	15	135
Montenegro	13	16	208
North Macedonia	7	20	140
Serbia	9	23	207

Alternative data sources are ill-suited for our analysis as they lack full regional coverage, offer limited issue content, or rely on few experts. For example, the MARPOR project includes most cases (Lehmann et al., 2022), but manifestos are only produced before elections, and not all have been coded. VPARTY includes all countries but has a median of 2 experts per party-year answering the left-right question for the countries in our sample (Düpont et al., 2022). The Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project (DALP) excludes Kosovo and Montenegro (Kitschelt 2013), and the Global Party Survey includes relatively few individual policy issues (notably only a single clear economic issue: spending vs tax) (Norris 2020).²

Confirming data quality

First, we establish that this data can be trusted. This paper focuses on party positions, so it is critical that experts largely agree. We follow prior work by comparing this data set to the rest of the 2019 CHES survey and to the 2020 CHES Latin America survey (Jolly et al., 2022; Martínez-Gallardo et al., 2022). These sources have already gone through extensive validation, so they function as trusted baselines (Bakker et al., 2014; Jolly et al., 2022; Martínez-Gallardo et al., 2022). Additionally, the 2020 CHES Latin America Survey focuses on party systems that went through economic and political transitions at roughly the same time as the Western Balkans. Latin America is also a region, like the Western Balkans, which is often regarded as weekly programmatic, competition revolves around personalistic leaders, and their charisma and corruption is a key concern in party politics (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007), so it offers a useful comparison. Western and Eastern Europe are included as well-known, validated benchmarks for programmatic party competition.

As a first check, we calculate the standard deviation of expert placements for each party on four dimensions: economic left-right, GALTAN (a cultural dimension), EU integration, and the general left-right dimension. We then plot the distribution of these standard deviations as density plots in Figure 1. Narrower, left-shifted distributions indicate greater expert agreement.

Figure 1.

Density plots of the standard deviation of expert placements on the economic left-right, GALTAN, EU Integration, and the general left-right. Colors indicate regions with Latin America omitted from the figure on EU positions given that the question is not asked in that survey.

Expert agreement in the Western Balkans is very similar to other regions, though Western European experts have the most agreement on every dimension. Notably, the distributions for EU position are functionally identical, and the Western Balkan density curve for left-right general and GALTAN is very similar to the curves for Latin America and Eastern Europe. The main deviation is the economic dimension. Here, expert disagreement in the Western Balkans is slightly higher.

Because we do not know whether economics structures party competition in the Western Balkans, this discrepancy warrants further investigation.

There are multiple reasons expert disagreement might be higher. One is that experts misunderstand the question or interpret it differently, an issue of expert data quality. A second reason could be that the parties are more difficult to place on economic issues—either as intentional party strategy or result of intraparty disagreement (Rovny, 2012, 2013; Rovny and Polk, 2020). High expert disagreement could, therefore, be a characteristic of parties in the region, not expert error.

The 2020 CHES Latin America Survey, 2019 CHES Survey, and the 2019 CHES Candidate Survey include identical anchoring vignettes (descriptions of hypothetical parties) on economic issues, allowing us to check how the experts from different countries place the same information. This is beneficial in diagnosing whether respondents from different countries understand the political space in the same way (Bakker, Edwards, et al., 2014; Bakker, Jolly, et al., 2014; Lin and Lee, 2024; de la Cerda et al., forthcoming).

If the disagreement is expert error, they should place the vignettes differently as well. If the disagreement is due to the parties themselves, then WB6 experts should place the vignettes similarly to experts from other contexts.

Figure 2 plots the average perceived position of each vignette by country with error bars indicating one standard deviation to the left and right of the average value.³ A dashed vertical line indicates the average perceived position from Western European experts. We use Western European experts as the benchmark because they have the least disagreement in Figure 1.

Figure 2.

Average placement of anchoring vignettes by country with bars and whiskers indicating one standard deviation. The dotted vertical line in each panel indicates the average position by West European experts as a benchmark.

We find that experts in the WB6 place the vignettes very similarly to experts in Latin America and Europe. The standard deviations of expert perceptions in the WB6 can be slightly larger, particularly for vignettes A and B, but the deviation from the benchmark is usually less than one standard deviation and close to the East European and Latin American averages. The larger standard errors may be partly due to the positions of the anchoring vignettes being beyond the common range of cases in the region, which lacks many parties with economic positions less than 3 or greater than 9 (see Figure 3). It may also suggest less cohesion within economic issues, which we consider later in the analysis.

Figure 3.

Plot of party positions on economic left-right and GALTAN by country with dashed lines indicating the center points of each dimension.

We conclude that Western Balkan experts have similar levels of disagreement as experts in other regions. Therefore, the 2019 CHES Candidate study is a valid data source for this analysis.

Mapping Western Balkan party systems

Party system dimensionality

With validated data, we proceed with the analysis of party system structure. The discussion above leads us to expect that these party systems will be weakly structured, resulting in a unidimensional structure.

Figure 3 plots party positions on the economic left-right and GALTAN dimension. Most countries have limited differentiation on economic issues, with few parties holding extreme economic left or right positions. In comparison, positional differentiation is higher on GALTAN, most notably in Montenegro, Serbia and to some extent in BiH. Albania and Kosovo show little ideological distinction on either dimension. Most parties cluster near the midpoint on both dimensions.

Table 2 formalizes this with the standard deviation of parties’ positions on the economic, GALTAN, and EU dimensions. GALTAN predominates as the highest standard deviation dimension in five of six countries. Kosovo is the exception with the highest (though relatively small) standard deviation on economics, closely followed by the EU dimension. In no country does the EU have the highest standard deviation, suggesting it is generally an area of background consensus rather than partisan conflict. To more deeply get at these tendencies, we go below the level of broad dimensions to individual issues.

Table 2.

Standard deviations of party positions by issue.

Country	Econ. Left-right	GALTAN	EU
Albania	1.03	1.12	0.25
Bosnia and Herzegovina	0.63	1.75	0.75
Kosovo	0.82	0.57	0.8
Montenegro	0.92	2.33	1.03
North Macedonia	1.78	1.84	0.98
Serbia	0.6	2.58	1.98
Total	0.96	1.7	0.97

We continue by following Martínez-Gallardo et al. (2022) and Zur and Bakker (2025) in using a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to assess the benefit of modeling party competition as multidimensional rather than unidimensional. This analysis focuses on the issues of redistribution, spending versus taxation, deregulation, immigration, the environment, social lifestyle, role of religion in society, law and order, and rights of ethnic minorities.⁴ First, we use CFA on these variables with a unidimensional fit, i.e., all variables load on a single dimension. Then, we separate the economic and cultural variables. Finally, we compare the specifications in terms of fit quality, error, and residuals, to see whether a two-dimensional fit improves the quality of the CFA.

We present the results of these CFAs in Table 3. For each region, there are two columns, one with the summary statistics for the one-factor model and one for the two-factor model. Figure 4 visualizes these results by bootstrapping the included experts to empirically obtain distributions for each region.

Table 3.

Confirmatory factor analysis fit indices.

	CHES-Europe		CHES-Latin America		CHES-West Balkans
	One factor	Two factor	One factor	Two factor	One factor	Two factor
Comparative fit index (CFI)	0.708	0.943	0.891	0.936	0.690	0.786
Root mean squared error of approximation (RMSEA)	0.267	0.120	0.171	0.134	0.165	0.139
Standardized root mean square residual (SRMR)	0.130	0.054	0.46	0.039	0.107	0.089

The WB6 does not follow the European trend. Although they both start off with relatively low comparative fit index (CFI) in the unidimensional models, the two-factor model only substantially improves the CFI and other fit measures in W. and E. Europe. The Latin American party systems are well-modeled by the unidimensional approach, gaining little from a second dimension (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Density plots of the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), Root Mean Squared Error of the Approximation (RMSEA), and Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (RMSR). Each row shows the results by region with each column showing a different result. The darker shaded distribution shows values for the one-factor model while the lighter shaded distribution shows values for the two-factor model.

Therefore, the Western Balkans appear to be primarily unidimensional party systems, but it has poor fit values under all specifications and falls well below the standard benchmark of 0.90 in the CFI (Kline 2023). This is indicative of a weakly programmatic party system.⁵

Figure 5 shifts to the country level. The x-axis is the degree of party system ‘structuration’, which we define as how well the CFA fit matches the underlying data (CFI of the model (one-vs two-dimensional) with the best fit). Scores near one indicate that the CFA accurately reflects the underlying positions. Low scores suggest the model struggles to match reality. On the y-axis, we plot the party systems’ dimensional complexity, which we measure as the difference between the two- and one-factor CFIs. Higher values indicate that the second dimension improves fit quality compared to the unidimensional model.

Figure 5.

Comparison of the degree of party system structuration—measured as the higher of the two comparative fit indices of the one or two dimensional CFAs higher values indicating the model does a good job of fitting the underlying data—and dimensional complexity—the difference in the CFA between the two and one-factor CFAs with higher values indicating a greater improvement by allowing a second dimension—based on the CFAs in Table 2. Regions are color coded with Europe in light blue, Latin America in black, and the Western Balkans in red.

In the Western Balkans, low dimensionality is the rule. No cases meaningfully benefit from the inclusion of a second dimension. This low dimensionality is quite similar to the Latin American cases where the second dimension generally delivers marginal (if any) improvements to model fit. However, the Western Balkan cases have lower levels of structuration than most Latin American or European cases. Albania, North Macedonia, and Montenegro have among the lowest levels. Moreover, there is significant intra-regional variation within the Western Balkans themselves. Serbia has the highest degree of structuration in the region—followed by Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina—with scores between 0.8 and 0.9. Even this is below most other countries and below the standard 0.9 threshold for ‘good’ fit.

Getting inside the dimensions

We go further in interrogating these results by questioning whether the weak structuration is due to A) imposing economic and GALTAN dimensions that do not fit in the W. Balkans or B) weak inter-issue correlations within each dimension, indicative of weak programmaticism.

First, we consider whether poor fit is the result of coercing the underlying variables to follow the common economic and GALTAN patterns of Western and Eastern Europe. If that division does not match reality, this choice could explain the weak structuration and unidimensionality from the CFA. We assess this using principal component analysis (PCA). PCA is like CFA, but it differs in that the contribution of variables to the components is determined inductively, not by researcher discretion.

Table 4 shows the loadings of the nine variables used in the CFA on the first two principal components from the PCA.⁶ Together, they explain sixty-nine percent of the variation in the data with the first component explaining forty-seven percent and the second explaining twenty-two percent. The PCA inductively sorts the issues along cultural and economic lines. The cultural variables load more strongly on the first component, with the partial exception of the ethnic minorities loading nearly equally on both dimensions. The economic variables load on the second component.

Table 4.

Factor loadings from PCA in W. Balkans.

Variable	PC1	PC2
Redistribution	−0.27	0.449
Spend vs. Tax	−0.105	0.352
Deregulation	−0.028	0.668
Immigration	−0.43	−0.158
Environment	−0.376	0.201
Social lifestyle	−0.438	−0.071
Religious principles	−0.393	0.078
Law and order	−0.396	−0.232
Ethnic minorities	−0.293	−0.314
Standard deviation	2.051	1.415
Variation explained	0.468	0.223
Cumulative variation explained	0.468	0.69

Therefore, the researcher-imposed two-dimensional structure of the CFA reflects the PCA structure. This choice is likely not driving the poor quality of the CFA fit. Additionally, cultural issues are predominant in W. Balkan party systems (echoing Table 2). The cultural principal component alone explains almost half the observed variation and twice as much as the economic component.

With confirmation from the PCA that cultural and economic variables should be separated, we turn to the correlations within these categories. Figure 6 contains six panels. The top row (panels A and B) shows correlations for the W. Balkans, the middle row (panels C and D) does the same for Western and Eastern Europe, and the bottom row (panels E and F) shows the correlations for Latin America. Correlations among the economic issues in the W. Balkans are systematically and substantially lower than in the rest of Europe and Latin America. The average correlation in the W. Balkans (excluding the diagonal) is 0.393, substantially lower than the average of 0.94 in the other European cases and the average of 0.9 in Latin America. The correlation among cultural variables is also lower in the W. Balkans, but the correlations are lower in all regions, 0.576, 0.88, and 0.78 respectively.

Figure 6.

Correlation tables of economic variables and cultural variables separated by region. Darker colors indicate stronger correlations.

These correlations indicate that structuration is lower in the W. Balkans than in the other regions due to notably weak relationships within both dimensions, particularly the economic dimension. Although economic and cultural variables separate in the PCA, the within-dimension correlations are weak, indicating weak structuration and programmaticism.

Conclusion

Despite consisting of EU candidates and potential candidates, the study of party systems and political parties has largely ignored the Western Balkans. This paper remedies this oversight by validating from the Chapel Hill Expert Study and determining these party systems’ dominant lines of conflict.

We show that Balkan experts understand and place parties with similar accuracy as in other regions. We then find that these party systems have generally low dimensionality and are grounded in social and cultural differences, a contrast to both the unidimensional but economy-dominated party systems of Latin America and to the multidimensional politics of Western Europe. The level of programmatic structuration seems relatively low due to weak inter-item correlations among economic issues. As the first quantitative study in this area, these findings should be taken as a first step, with future work revisiting these findings with different issues, party system features, and measurement approaches.

In addition to providing some of the first quantitative research on WB6 party systems, the validation of the underlying CHES data opens future avenues of research. The 2019 CHES Candidate Survey also includes questions on corruption salience, intraparty dissent, and other features relevant to party competition and its implications for citizens and democracy. Further exploring how these features contribute to party competition in the Western Balkans could help to contextualize the results of this article and identify potential alternative organizing features of these party systems. Although beyond the scope of this note, the data could also be linked with CHES 2014 Candidate Survey to investigate longitudinal trends. Future studies can incorporate open-ended survey questions and qualitative interviews with party experts to identify the most salient issues structuring party competition in the Western Balkans.

Our results also contribute to a more nuanced scholarly understanding of politics in the Western Balkans. We also find evidence that the EU is generally a background consensus, which nonetheless can influence party systems indirectly (Vachudova and Hooghe 2009). Furthermore, these party systems continue to change. In recent years we have witnessed increasing contestation of the economy and EU among actors in the Western Balkans (Caiani et al., 2024), including new, pro-EU parties like Europe Now! in Montenegro with a focus on the economy and opposing corruption in 2022. There is also growing influence from other geopolitical actors in the region, including China and Russia (Gafuri 2024). These developments are not reflected in our analysis, but they constitute profitable avenues of future research.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material - Party systems at the European union’s doorstep: Party system structuration and dimensionality in the Western Balkans

Supplemental material for Party systems at the European union’s doorstep: Party system structuration and dimensionality in the Western Balkans by Adea Gafuri, Jacob R Gunderson, Jesper Lindqvist in Party Politics

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions on the paper. We would also like to recognize the following colleagues for their comments on the paper: Ann-Kristin Kölln, Nico de la Cerda, Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Seth Jolly, Luis Sattelmayer, Felix Lehmann, Linda Berg, Tapio Raunio, Nicholas Aylott, participants in the 2025 Swedish Network of European Studies Conference, members of the CERGU network, and particpants in the Contemporary Politics in the Western Balkans 2025 workshop.

ORCID iD

Jacob R. Gunderson

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author biographies

Adea Gafuri is s a Researcher affiliated with the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, based in Stockholm. Her work has previously been published in Democratization, The Journal of Development Studies, and Studies in Comparative International Development, among others. Her research expertise lies in the interaction between domestic and international politics in the context of democratization processes, foreign aid, quantitative methods, and international organizations, with an additional regional specialty in the Western Balkans.

Jacob R. Gunderson is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg. His research focuses on interparty and intraparty competition, party brands, and inequality. His research has been published in, among others, the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of European Public Policy, Political Parties, and the European Journal of Political Research.

Jesper Lindqvist is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Lund University. His research focuses on developing a comparative understanding of the basis of left-right politics. He also researches the causes of unequal policy representation, as well as cleavages and party politics. His research has been published in the European Journal of Political Research, Political Behavior, Electoral Studies, Acta Politica, and International Political Science Review.

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