Suchergebnisse

"Bringing space back" into comparative politics is a difficult task, perhaps inevitably accompanied by various substantive and methodological problems. This paper introduces the concepts of "territorial homogeneity" (of D. Caramani) and "party nationalization" (of M. Jones and S. Mainwaring), both of them dealing with political parties as actors and territorial space as an environment in which they operate. Our aim is to identify some of the typical issues/ matters (selection of cases, elaboration of relationships among variables) any researcher who would try to conceptualize the relationships between political parties and territorial units has to cope with. In respect of issues in question the solutions offered by Caramani and Jones&Mainwaring often seem neither intercompatible nor fully satisfactory. This may raise the question about inevitably ethnocentristic nature of the "homogeneity concepts". We further extend our methodological note, limiting -rather than delineating- the areas of possible use of the homogeneity concept for the post-communist countries, arguing that sensible comparisons would require much better control for intervening institutional variables- a task which is almost impossible to achieve with such a heterogeneous sample. ; "Bringing space back" into comparative politics is a difficult task, perhaps inevitably accompanied by various substantive and methodological problems. This paper introduces the concepts of "territorial homogeneity" (of D. Caramani) and "party nationalization" (of M. Jones and S. Mainwaring), both of them dealing with political parties as actors and territorial space as an environment in which they operate. Our aim is to identify some of the typical issues/ matters (selection of cases, elaboration of relationships among variables) any researcher who would try to conceptualize the relationships between political parties and territorial units has to cope with. In respect of issues in question the solutions offered by Caramani and Jones&Mainwaring often seem ...

This article explores the spatial influences that shape the contemporary Czech party system & their consequences for the institutionalization of the party system. First, the regionalization of the party system is measured to identify the specific regional clusters of votes for individual parties. Second, after controlling for the impact of social cleavages, the independent effect of two macro- regions on the differences in voting decisions is analyzed. In the case of Moravia, no such independent effect is evident. Conversely, in the formerly German- inhabited Sudetenland there is an effect on the vote in the case of two parties (KSCM & ODS). The historical reasons for this spatial regime are briefly discussed. Finally, the relative insignificance of spatial regimes in the Czech party system is explained with reference to its high degree of nationalization (the level of spatial heterogeneity in regional voting results). The author employs spatial analytical techniques in the article, such as measures of spatial autocorrelation, the spatial regression model, & the Gini Index. The findings suggest that there is a high degree of spatial institutionalization of the Czech party system & relatively insignificant contextual effects at the macro- regional level.