Economic Ideology and Political Success

Abstract

The communist-successor parties in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia have experienced divergent electoral fortunes since 1990. The Hungarian Socialist Party is in government, the Slovak Party of the Democratic Left has a stable vote of around 15 percent, while the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia is in decline. This report seeks to explain this difference in performance using data derived from surveys of the population of each country in the spring of 1994. Consideration is given to the merits of two explanatory factors: the ideological extremeness of the parties, particularly in relation to the question of economic transformation; or, alternatively, national differences in the experience of economic transition. It is shown that in respect of economic issues, the positions of successor-party supporters are similar across the three countries, but that perceptions of the ideological position of those supporters vary considerably, from being extremist in the case of the Czech party, to centrist in the case of the Hungarian party. These differing perceptions themselves reflect national variations in economic preferences between the three countries, which are in turn shown to result from differing economic experiences. Support is thus offered for an account which stresses variations in experience of the economic transition rather than differences in the strategies adopted by the successor parties.