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INTRODUCTION
The events of 1989 represented the starting point for a new type of politics in
all former communist countries from the Central and Eastern Europe. From closed
political systems, characterized by the total monopoly of power by the communist
elite, the new democracies from the region suddenly shifted to competitive political
systems, meant as the abandon of Marxist-Leninist ideological monopoly, the
organization of free and competitive elections in which autonomous and rival political
parties competed for the public offices and for the pursuit of particular goals. Since
1989, the political parties have become, in whole Eastern Europe, the principal actors
involved in two separate but interconnected processes, that is the representation of the
electorate and the competition for political power, although the second one seems to
be true only for the former satellite countries rather than for former Soviet republics,
where the political parties remain feeble political actors, engaged merely in
representation process and less in competition for executive power.
Soon after the end of the non-democratic regimes in Eastern and Central
Europe, a fairly number of studies have emphasized the importance of the nature
of party competition in the new emerging democracies for the democratic future of
those countries. They have realized that the emergence of new political parties and
free elections are not effective guarantees for democratic survival of the new
democracies and the type(s) of party competition should represent an important issue
for the quality of democracy (for such argumentation, see Kitschelt et al, 1999).
Specifically, it is important to determine whether parties are involved into
programmatic competition for votes, i.e. they are emphasizing a set of collective
goods (policy preferences), or they tend to tempt voter through other routes
(clientelistic linkages or charismatic appeals).
In spite of different ways political parties appeal to voters in order to obtain
votes, the party competition in any political system involves a certain degree of
convergence or divergence upon the policy preferences of the political parties. Even
parties which are involved in clientelistic linkages with voters or those who rely on
charismatic leaders, propose, to a certain limit, policy programs, although their
programmatic positions on important dimensions are blurred for the political
competitors and for the electorate. Simplifying the complex nature of politics, it is
usually said that party competition involves two important dimensions: the electoral
competition and, the second dimension, the parliamentary competition among parties.
Convention