Same or Different? Political Parties, Interest Groups and Social Movements in Central-East European Politics

This paper intends to broaden the concept of political conflict by incorporating both electoral and non-electoral (protest and interest groups) fields. In political science, studies of political conflict have primarily been focused on party competition supposedly expressing clashing interests of conflicting groups in a society. Although sociology has included social movements as well, they have mostly been studied in separation from the field of party politics. Parties have been seen either as one of possible targets of movement mobilization or part of an external political context. Interest groups have largely remained “stuck in between”. For political science they have been secondary to political parties, for sociology just one of the many possible constituent parts of broader social movements. This paper intends to disentangle the interactions of all types of political organizations in the public sphere. Although often overlooked, in addition to differences in the pattern of party competition, there is a large cross-national variation in issues expressed through extra-institutional collective action. For instance, while 52 percent of protest events in Poland in the last decades were related to economic issues, the Czech Republic displays only 5 percent of such protest together with a generally much more diversified portfolio of issues. Our working hypothesis is that the structure of party competition determines what issues are articulated in the non-electoral field. If the party field’s main conflict line is economic left-right, extra-institutional collective action driven by economic issues is crowded out. If socio-cultural dimension (social conservatism vs. liberalism) mostly defines the party field, economic issues are more represented in the non-electoral field. For our analysis we use four similar countries that differ in the structure of their party field: the Czech Republic and Slovakia (dominated by economic left-right) vs. Hungary and Poland (dominated by socio-cultural conflict line). To examine the issue composition of protest we use data on all protest events in the four countries between 1990 and 2010 reported by the national news agencies.