Střed | Centre. Journal for Interdisciplinary Studies of Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Call for Papers
Střed | Centre, 2/2015 – Call for Papers
State Holidays and their Celebrations in Central Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Střed | Centre, 1/2015 – Call for Papers
Corruption, Clientelism and Informality in Economics, Politics and Society
Střed | Centre, 1/2014 – Call for Papers
The Political Party Systems in Central Europe 1848-2010
Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2014
Contact: stred@mua.cas.cz
Publication languages: Czech, English, German
Journal Website: http://www.mua.cas.cz/index.php/en/journals/centre
Full text of the journal: www.ceeol.com
Abstracts: http://cejsh.icm.edu.pl
Political parties are a key, and in many aspects a dominant, actor in the political process that is valid in Central Europe as well. Political parties became the institutional bearer of social and political conflicts, and developed an ideological-programmatic basis for the transfer of these conflicts into the protodemocratic conditions of Austria-Hungary. Political parties then – similarly to what happened in Western Europe and North America – became key actors in the efforts to establish democratic political systems in Europe between the wars; but they often also became the gravediggers of these attempts. The interwar period is also characterized by the increasing intertwining of the party structures with the state bureaucracy, and the 1930s in particular were a harbinger of the crisis of democracy and political parties, connected to the opposition to parliaments as arenas of partisan-political conflict and the rise of state-parties, often with totalitarian tendencies. In Central Europe, this trend did not weaken after the Second World War, but became stronger with the prohibition of right-wing parties and the transformation of popular or national fronts into totalitarian monoliths that were fully entwined with society. The continuation of pre 1989 Communist parties is still a significant research problem, especially with regard to the „flexibility“ of the ideology and the formation of „internal“ and „external“ oppositions in the shape of factions within state-parties or the activities of satelite subjects. Last but not least, the transition to democracy, with the renewal and reconstruction of the partisan political system during the basic transformation of lines of conflicts, and social groups supporting political parties, was a fundamental break. The journal Střed/Centre is therefore devoting the first issue of 2014 to the widely defined topic of political parties and their influence on the development in Central Europe in the last one hundred and fifty years.
Possible thematic areas:
- Political parties as the expression of conflict-based divisions and structuration of Central European societies
- Political parties in relationship to the state and its institutions (parties in parliament, etc.)
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Transformation of the organizational structures and financing of political parties
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Transnational institutional and program connections between political parties in Central Europe
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Political oposition against state-parties in non-democratic political systems in Central Europe
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Criticism of the political party system as a model of an organized political sphere
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Path dependency and the development of political parties after the year 1989