Extreme democracy: electoral rules and the development of party systems in the former Soviet Union

ENPolitical parties play a fundamental role in the development of contemporary democracies. Because they connect civil and political society, the parties should be perceived as both responsive and responsible to citizen interests. If neither voters nor other parties can be sure that the political actors will comply with the outcomes, democracy becomes unstable. Thus, because it is under constant threat of revolution, a main priority for a transitional regime would necessarily be the creation of a political party system wherein the chances of ideological polarization are minimized; where the incentives are structured so that political competition takes place among a large number of diverse interests that are located all along the political spectrum, rather than simply on the fringes. Electoral competition in some of the fragile democracies of the former Soviet Union, namely Russia, takes place primarily between parries located closer to the two ends of the political spectrum than to the center. The largest and most electorally successful parties are those located on the poles of the ideological space; parties whose main programmatic goals seem to be the undermining of the competition and the securing of power. Given the similarity in political histories and political demographics of Russia, Ukraine, and Lithuania, the central objective of this research is to locate an explanation for the variation in trajectories of party system development in three countries of the former Soviet Union and to ascertain what the party systems themselves can tell us about the legitimacy and stability of these nascent democracies. As such, this is the first study to use both content analysis and expert surveys to analyze the relationship between electoral institutions and the distribution of political parties in the democracies of the former Soviet Union.