Poles Together?
The Emergence and Development of Political Parties
in Post-Communist Poland
Aleks Szczerbiak,
Sussex European Institute, University of Sussex
This book fills a gap in the existing literature on
how parties and party systems are developing in the
new democracies of post-Communist Central and Eastern
Europe. It provides the first detailed, empirically
based examination from a structural and organizational
perspective of the new parties and political groupings
that have emerged in Poland since the collapse of Communism
in 1989.
The author develops his argument on the basis of an
analysis of five key structural and organizational variables:
the internal distribution of power and modes of representation
within the parties; the role of the party bureaucracy;
the relationship between parties and their electorates;
the development of parties as membership organizations;
and the relationship between parties and the state.
As the first in-depth, empirically grounded single-country
study of party structure and organization in post-Communist
Eastern Europe, the book provides an opportunity to
draw broader conclusions about the process of Central
and East European party development and will contribute
significantly towards the development of a post-Communist
political party model. Szczerbiak sheds light on an
important aspect of the more general process of post-communist
democratization in the region and provides a major contribution
to one of the least-explored areas of transition.
"Although Aleks Szczerbiak's book is a single country
study, its breadth and depth of coverage and scholarly
sophistication make it of a wider interest for anyone
concerned with the subject not only in Central and Eastern
Europe, but also in other (emerging) democratic political
systems." - Party Politics
"Szczerbiak's critical assessment of the usefulness
of mainstream party literature in the Polish context
places his work above and beyond the many books and
articles whose authors labour bending the post-communist
political reality to fit more or less elaborate foreign
constructs... He managed to get to quite extraordinary
sources." - Europe-Asia Studies
2001
300 pages
ISBN 978-963-9241-23-7 cloth $49.95 / €42.95 / £29.95
ISBN 978-963-9241-35-0 paperback $21.95 / €19.95 /
£17.99
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