The discrepancy between the normative functions of political parties in representative democracies, as spelled out in political philosophy and political theory textbooks (what parties should do), and their empirical working (what they actually do) under recent conditions, is stark. In addressing the discrepancy we find two, traditional, responses. The first is prominent amongst critical social scientists: they argue that the empirical working of political parties simply illustrates the end of representative government or the ‘end of democracy’, the rise of ‘post-democracy’, the ‘deep crisis of political parties’, their inevitable ‘decline’, and combinations thereof. The second is that the reality shows off: the transformation fo the political parties under the pressure of the new political and social realities, which means less economy concernings and more identity and cultural issues.
One way to conceptualize competition in a party system is to map the positions of parties on two fundamental dimensions: the economic left–right dimension of governing the economy, and the social-cultural dimension of identity and values. This second dimension puts universalistic and socially liberal values in competition with traditional and communitarian ones.
But both of those perspectives shows that we assist to the transformation of the political parties, as organisations, functionalities and representativeness. For sure this process is more obvious in Western democracies and still „in status nascendi” in other societies. Our article is more focused on the Central Eastern Europe political parties as parties „in the between”.
The great majority of the political parties of the Central Eastern Europe try to act on the policy level on the „lef-right wing” axis but to come on power (alone or in coalition) their rethoric is an identity one (mainly ethnopopulist, but also anti-progressism and in some cases very religious). These type of politics make very difficult to interpret the real status of the political parties in CEE: are they populist parties, mainstream parties or a mix between them.
Our methodology will be a comparative one between the main parties from CEE and their conterparts on their European Political Families of the European Parliament.