Sticking together: explaining comparative centre-right party success in post-communist central and eastern Europe

This article attempts to explain varying patterns of centre-right success in three post-communist states, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic. Success is understood as the ability to construct broad and durable parties. Both macro-institutional explanations, focusing on executive structures and electoral systems, and historical-structural explanations stressing communist regime legacies have limited power to explain the observed variance. The introduction of a more sophisticated framework of path dependence, stressing the role of choices and political crafting at critical junctures, adds some insight but the lack of strong ‘lock-in’ mechanisms required by such approaches makes such a model unconvincing when applied to CEE centre-right party development. Other explanations that stress the importance of elite characteristics and capacity are needed to supplement the shortcomings of these approaches, in particular: (a) the presence of cohesive elites able to act as the nucleus of new centre-right formations; and (b) the ability of such elites to craft broad integrative ideological narratives that can transcend diverse ideological positions and unite broad swathes of centre-right activists and voters.