Parliamentary Elections and Party Landscape in the Visegrád Group Countries - Vít Hloušek, Roman Chytilek

The countries of the so-called Visegrád Group (V4) were already a relatively common topic in comparative political science in the 1990s. Its purpose is not only to address issues relating to elections to the (lower chambers) of parliament in the countries of the Visegrád Group. Not only are they close both geographically and in terms of their historical and political developments; a shared heritage of 40 years of communist rule meant that they (and other Central andEastern European states) were experiencing a complicated and often painful threefold transition affecting their politics, economics, social structures and processes.An attempt to address not only the consolidation of democracy in V4 countries but also the metadiscourse of research about them, this book presents an up-to-date and detailed map of the V4 party landscape in the years 2005-2006.

This line-up of contributors brings together experts from all the countries studied as well as from different disciplines: it includes comparative political scientists, experts on electoral studies and sociologists who study electoral behaviour and electoral alignments.The result is a compact overview and analysis of party politics and electoral behaviour in the countries of the Visegrád Group, which will be useful for further research on this topic and also for the comparative analysis of party systems and political systems in- and outside the post-communist group of countries. The last section of the present book addresses the question of how consolidated those countries and their party systems are and suggests what implications there are for future research in the post-communist area.In addition to Sarah Birch, the renowned expert on electoral systems and their impact on party systems, this book includes contributions by the following scholars: Roman Chytilek, JakubŠedo, Maxmilián Strmiska and Otto Eibl (Czech Republic), RóbertTardos and Zsolt Enyedi (Hungary), Artur Wolek and AndrzejAntoszewski (Poland) and Olga Gyarfášová, Vladimír Krivý and MarekRybář (Slovakia).