Authors

Martin Molder¹; Fernando Casal Bertoa²; Zsolt Enyedi³;  ¹ University of Tartu, Estonia;  ² The University of Nottingham, UK;  ³ Central European University, Austria

Discussion

A stable party system is often regarded as a precondition for a well-functioning democracy. Recent recesses in democracy and, in particular, in the liberal aspect of democracy in relatively stable and established party systems, however, warrant a fresh look into how the stability between parties shapes the quality of democracy. We use a dataset that covers 58 European party systems over more than a century to assess how party system institutionalization in the governmental arena – closure – is related to the liberal aspect of democracy. Our results show that stable coalition combinations are conducive to higher quality liberal democracy, while infrequent government changes and the exclusion of new parties from the governmental arena have a detrimental role. In the second part of the paper we particular zoom in on new, post-Communist European countries, where the lack of institutionalization of the party systems is often considered to be both inherent and potentially dangerous (Casal Bértoa and Mair, 2012; Mair, 1996). This is particularly true for countries like Albania, Hungary, Georgia, Montenegro and, to a lesser extent, North Macedonia, where high levels of closure have hindered the proper functioning of liberal democracy.