Publication details
Party Government Evolution: The Case of the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The paper explores the evolution of parties’ legislative behaviour and the trends in government-opposition relations in a young, post-communist parliamentary democracy. The main criteria of analysis are the type of governance (compromise versus dominance) and prevailing dimensions of conflict in legislative voting. The study uses an extensive descriptive analysis of complete legislative data over the period of 20 years (1993-2013) to identify both regular legislative cycles and long-term trends. This is done by a framework based on time-series of all votes, taking into account party and bloc unity (measured by Rice and Unity indices), government and opposition success rate, and the composition of legislative coalitions used in particular legislative periods. The main outcome of the analysis is that the Czech case underwent a transformation of party behaviour towards a more conflictual type of governance. This evolutionary change comprises the change in legislative practice (from compromise voting to government-opposition conflict), the transformation of opposition strategy (towards concentration and active blocking), and increasing predictability of parliamentary outputs (with ad-hoc coalitions slowly disappearing). The paper briefly discusses several most-important implications of this shift and presents the results in a comparative context of other parliamentary democracies (Germany and possibly others). |