EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Democratization and Constitutional Choices in Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary and Poland 1989-91

Arend Lijphart

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 1992, vol. 4, issue 2, 207-223

Abstract: Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary and Poland have made different constitutional choices with regard to their new electoral systems (ranging from extreme proportional representation to a moderately majoritarian system) and with regard to parliamentarism-presidentialism (ranging from a semi-presidential to a pure parliamentary system). Stein Rokkan's two explanations of the adoption of proportional representation in Continental Western Europe around 1900, which can be logically extended to the choice of parliamentarism or presidentialism, turn out to be the best explanations for the constitutional choices of the three East European countries around 1990 as well: (1) the logic of democratization which requires a bargain between the old-established parties and the new parties; and (2) the needs of ethnically diverse societies. These factors were reinforced, but not fundamentally determined, by the attachment to single-member district representation, the distrust of political parties, the influence of earlier and foreign democratic models, and inaccurate assessments of partisan strengths.

Keywords: democratization; ethnic pluralism; parliamentarism; presidentialism; proportional representation; Stein Rokkan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1992
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951692892004002005 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:4:y:1992:i:2:p:207-223

DOI: 10.1177/0951692892004002005

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:4:y:1992:i:2:p:207-223