Understanding Cleavages in Party Systems: Issue Position and Issue Salience in 13 Post-Communist Democracies

There has been considerable debate about the characteristics of political cleavages underlying post-Communist Central and East European party competition, with views ranging from ‘no structure’, to ‘one dimensionality’, to ‘structured diversity’ to entirely sui generis country-specific approaches. Much of the disagreement, we argue, results from the failure to take seriously the distinction between issue position and issue salience. Taking this into account, we present a model of party cleavages that synthesizes the various arguments into one comprehensive model. We provide empirical evidence for our argument derived from an expert survey of 87 parties in 13 post-communist democracies. Theoretically, our study provides a much more positive picture of the character of party cleavages and of democratic responsiveness in post-Communist states than is generally accepted