Electoral legislation reforms, state funding and political parties in the Czech Republic: a sign of cartelization of party politics?
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The cartel party thesis presented by Richard Katz and Peter Mair years ago has proved to be one of the most valuable concepts in recent research of party politics. Although the concept has been based critized several times (e.g. Koole 1996, Kitschelt 2000), many changes of party competition and party organization pointed out by Katz and Mair proved to be valid. In this context, particular attention has been paid to the problem of public financial resources received by political parties whose expansion can be considered as one of the most important signs of cartelization of party politics. In other words, the parties have become increasingly dependent on state for their resources. Case studies of Slovenia (see Haughton, Krašovec 2011) or Estonia (see Sikk 2003) have shown that the extension of state subsidies unified parliamentary parties no matter their ideological profile was. Unfortunately, only little attention has been paid to the public financing of political parties as a sign of cartelization of party politics in the Czech Republic (as an exception see Císar, Tomáš 2007). By conducting an analysis of the content and the process of enactment of legislative measures defining the financing of political parties, and of results of this measures (i.e. the amount of public finances given to the political parties and the structure of their budgets) the paper tries to assess the level of cartelization of parties` funding policy and to fill the gap in this area of research. |
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