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Abstract
This review of the historical studies of cleavages and seeks to bridge the gap between the historical study of cleavages and frozen cleavage theory and the post-communist states of Europe which have transitioned to democracy. The study identifies the literature on frozen cleavages and new divides which have arisen transition, as well as the primary actors in their political representation and issue positioning. The key literature in the development of studies on cleavages was provided by Lipset and Rok-kan, but their work focused mostly on Western democracies and did not include any of the countries which were behind the iron curtain at the time. However, the transition of the post-communist nations of Europe are now several decades old. Since the demise of communist regimes in Europe, much literature has been produced on the newly democratic regimes developing there. This article provides a broad overview of general trends in cleavage literature and more specific developments for Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. The main findings were that there are frozen cleavages present in the post-communist countries of Europe, but that much of the developments since the fall of communism seem to be unpredictable and change-able — a fact reflected by the instability and constant change in the party systems.

To this day, no adequate solution has been found for measuring the strength of executives in political science. Despite the widespread use of several methods for measuring presidential powers, critical investigation of these methods still needs to be conducted. The author analyzes methods that have been established by Shugart and Carey, by Frye, McGregor, Hellman, Krouwel, Siaroff, Johannsen and Nørgaard among others. When discussing mistakes in the measurement of presidential powers (e.g., where authors fail to consider the informal powers of presidents, where measurements are based on a constitution and not on political practice, and where authors do not differentiate between significant and insignificant powers), the author tries to remove some of the problems of measurement. He modifies Krouwel's method based on measuring the presidential score and parliamentary score that allows us to "weigh" the presidential and parliamentary components of any form of government, whether presidential, parliamentary, or semi-presidential. He suggests a method of measuring based on the calculation of the index of the form of government (IFG), which is calculated by subtracting the parliamentary score from the presidential score. A positive IFG indicates the attraction of a system to presidentialism, and negative its shift to parliamentarism. This methodology is sensitive to post-communist realities and countries with informal politics. On calculating the IFG for the post-communist states, the author specifies clusters of such systems (presidentialized, balanced, parliamentarized) and shows the importance of measuring forms of government in contemporary political studies. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n1s1p443