1
Incumbents in Central and Eastern European (CEE) democracies have always
faced fierce competition from newly emerging political parties. In the years
immediately following these countries’ transition to democracy, this phenomenon could be seen as a logical consequence of the ideologically heterogeneous electoral blocs of the anti-communist opposition splitting into new
parties along ideological divides. From the Solidarność movement in Poland
to the Czech Civic Forum and the Latvian Popular Front, conservative, liberal,
and agrarian parties emerged and started competing with each other and with
post-communist or social democratic parties on the other side of the original
regime divide (Rose and Munro 2009: 50). Given these dynamics, the question of whether party systems in Central and Eastern Europe would eventually
evolve into stable and structured party systems similar to those we observe
in many Western European countries has long attracted significant scholarly
debate (e.g. Evans and Whitefield 1993; Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2009).
However, this has not been the case. Disappointment and the demand for
new political actors remained high as neither right-wing nor left-wing governments fulfilled citizens’ expectations during the 1990s, and voters kept a sharp
lookout for other options after the turn of the new millennium (Pop-Eleches
2010).
In this context, the most successful new parties that have appeared since
the 2000s did not follow the rules of existing ideological divides. Rather, their
campaigns minimized the weight placed on ideology and focused on attacking what they were not: the existing political elite. One of the early successes
of this type of new party was the party founded by the former Bulgarian King
Simeon II, who had long lived in exile in Spain. After Bulgaria experienced a
harsh economic crisis marked by hyperinflation in the mid-1990s, he returned
with the promise of saving Bulgaria, tackling corruption, and making the country better than the previous elites had left it. Ideology was secondary. After his
newly founded party National Movement Simeon II (NDSV )¹ won a landslide
victory with more than 42 percent of the popular vote, it formed a coalition
¹ The party later changed its name to the National Movement for Stability and Progress (NDSV ).
Centrist Anti-Establishment Parties and Their Struggle for Survival. Sarah Engler, Oxford University Press.
© Sarah Engler (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192873132.003.0001
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Introduction
2
CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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with the Turkish minority party Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS)
and governed the country for the next four years. However, the following
elections saw the NDSV suffer a heavy loss, and it dropped out of parliament in 2009. A new political challenger, Boyko Borisov, Simeon II’s former
bodyguard, won the national parliamentary elections with his newly formed
Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) and, like Simeon II
had done several years earlier, Borisov promised to make Bulgaria a better
place to live.
These new parties, which I label centrist anti-establishment parties (CAPs),
are the main protagonists of this book. Contrary to radical right and radical
left parties that dominate the camp of anti-establishment parties in Western
Europe, CAPs attack the political elite without attacking their main ideological stances. Rather, an anti-establishment rhetoric combined with a critique
of opaque and corrupt political procedures is the most important ingredient
in the political campaigns of these successful newcomers. This protest appeal
clearly distinguishes them from the existing mainstream parties and other new
center-left or center-right parties that appear from time to time.
As of 2020, new CAPs had emerged in all Central and Eastern European
member states of the European Union. They had been able to join government in all but one country (Hungary). Very recently, they have even begun
to spread over to Southern and Western Europe with Peppe Grillo’s Five Star
Movement (FSM) in Italy, Citizens (CS) in Spain, and Macron’s En Marche!
(LREM) in France. Nonetheless, their success does not usually last long. As in
the Bulgarian example above, the story of a successful new party promising
to do better than the political establishment only to be replaced by a newer
party using the same strategy a few years later unfolds throughout the region
(Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2015). The consistently high electoral volatility in Central and Eastern Europe can thus be attributed not only to successful
new CAPs but also to their failure to maintain support over a sustained period
of time (Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2020). It is therefore important not
only to study the phenomenon of these parties’ appearance (Pop-Eleches 2010;
Havlı́k and Pinková 2012; Hanley and Sikk 2016) but also to understand what
happens after their initial breakthrough.
In this book, I explore the vulnerability of CAPs’ nature and analyze how
some CAPs have managed to overcome the difficulties created by their original
protest strategy. I argue that once CAPs lose their newness, they can no longer
exclusively rely on their initial strategy of pure protest. The risk of losing some
protest voters to even newer anti-establishment parties is too high. Indeed, as
we will see throughout the book, many CAPs are not able to survive several
INTRODUCTION
3
1.1 The Fragile Nature of Centrist Anti-Establishment Parties
The emergence of successful CAPs started in the late 1990s and the early 2000s
and was first systematically examined by Učeň (2004a; 2007) and Pop-Eleches
(2010). Both described these formations as a new type of party that challenges the mainstream and verbally attacks the political establishment but,
unlike existing categories of unorthodox parties, does not base its critiques
on a radical ideological foundation such as anti-capitalism or nationalism.
Rather, these political actors were perceived to downplay ideological divides
and focus on personalities instead (Pop-Eleches 2010: 226). In a similar vein,
Sikk (2012) ascribed the success of these new parties in the Baltic countries to
their newness and not to their ideological traits as only the former was the main
characteristic that distinguished them from established parties. As a result, all
these authors emphasize the need for a concept that grasps this new type of
party.
This book relies on Hanley and Sikk’s (2016: 523) classification, which
clearly outlines the ideological difference between radical and centrist antiestablishment parties. According to this definition, CAPs differ from other
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consecutive elections and soon drop out of parliament. However, some CAPs,
such as the aforementioned GERB, have survived. How can we explain these
patterns? My book explores the determinants of CAPs’ survival and, more
specifically, addresses the question which strategic responses are available to
CAPs for responding to their new situation after their initial breakthrough.
My main argument is twofold: first, I argue that CAPs can only survive if they
change their electoral strategy to one of three potential strategies of survival—
a reorientation to the mainstream, a stronger focus on the issues of corruption
and clean political procedures (issue strategy), or a reframed protest strategy.
Second, however, the choice of one of these strategies is constrained by the
voters who supported them in their first elections. An electorate that is ideologically too heterogeneous can prevent the successful adoption of a new strategy
of survival.
Before I introduce the main argument, I offer some clarification about the
nature of centrist anti-establishment parties and the terms I use when I talk
about them. I start with a clear distinction between anti-establishment parties,
populism, and radicalism, which makes it possible to both have a thorough picture of the phenomenon of CAPs in the region and to understand the sources
of their vulnerability.
4
CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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anti-establishment parties in the way that they are “committed to mainstream
models of liberal democracy and the market economy” and therewith display
neither elements of the ethnocentrism and authoritarianism of the populist
radical right (Mudde 2007) nor traces of the anti-capitalism of the radical
left (March and Mudde 2005). Unlike Pop-Eleches (2010) and, to a certain
extent, also Učeň (2007), Hanley and Sikk (2016) do not define CAPs as nonideological protest parties but simply perceive that ideology is not central in
the CAPs’ critique of the political elite. Instead, they define CAPs as parties
that focus on the need for political reform or renewal to make political processes more efficient and less corrupt. Stanley (2017: 143) even argues that
anti-corruption claims replace the need for a thick ideology, such as nativism
or anti-capitalism, that complements and justifies an anti-establishment discourse. Furthermore, several studies show that high levels of corruption and
the frequency of corruption scandals have been beneficial to the CAPs’ political success (Bågenholm and Charron 2014; Engler 2016; Hanley and Sikk
2016). Indeed, Chapter 2 shows that the large majority of CAPs relies on
anti-corruption claims to emphasize contempt of the political elite.
Scholars have used different labels to refer to what I call “centrist antiestablishment parties” in this book, although they refer to the same parties.
The term centrist populists (Učeň 2007; Pop-Eleches 2010; Havlı́k and Pinková
2012; Kriesi 2014; Stanley 2017) is most widely used. Hanley and Sikk (2016)
talk about anti-establishment reform parties, while Bågenholm (2013a) mainly
focuses on their anti-corruption discourse and calls them anti-corruption parties. I follow the most widespread label and keep the term “centrist” to contrast
this type of new party to the anti-establishment parties on the radical right and
the radical left (unlike Hanley and Sikk (2016), who avoid ideological labels).
It is important to clarify that the term “centrist” does not relate to centrism
as an ideology of the center (e.g. Christian democracy in Western Europe)
or to the most centrist position on the ideological spectrum. Rather, all parties that do not belong to the radical right or the radical left but that still
use anti-establishment rhetoric are considered “centrist” anti-establishment
parties.
I do, however, avoid the term “populism” and use “anti-establishment”
instead. This is because the latter describes one of CAPs’ most distinctive characteristics in a simpler and more unambiguous way and does not conflate their
anti-establishment rhetoric with other crucial elements of populism such as
people-centrism and the reference to a “general will.” At first glance, one could
certainly argue that the discourse of the parties comes close to the dichotomy
INTRODUCTION
5
between the “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” at the heart of the widely
used definition of populism by Mudde (2004: 543):
However, Mudde (2004) also clearly states that a populist party divides society
into two homogeneous groups (“the corrupt elite” versus “the people”). Therefore, he defines populism as the opposite of pluralism, which sees citizens not
simply as “the people” but as individuals with different desires and political
attitudes (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). Empirical studies on populism
thus usually measure populist rhetoric against two, or even three, attributes
(Jagers and Walgrave 2007; Rooduijn and Pauwels 2011; March 2017). In addition to anti-establishment rhetoric, they also assess whether a party’s claims
are people-centric and whether they refer to a “general will” that follows the
idea of the “good people.” Parties that only adopt anti-establishment rhetoric
could just as well belong to the group of technocrats critical of the political
class (Caramani 2017) or simply be parties that wish to replace the current
political elite but believe in a pluralist society. Among the group of centrist
anti-establishment parties, there are many parties that represent a pluralist
view of society, such as the Slovak Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) or the former Polish party Palikot’s Movement (TR), or that promote technocratic ideals
of democracy such as the Croat The Bridge (Most). While CAPs use antiestablishment rhetoric per definition, we often find no evidence of the other
elements of populism in their rhetoric (Engler et al. 2019). In light of this,
calling them “populist” would only contribute to a further “blurring” of the
concept of populism. The label “CAPs” puts the focus on the essence of these
parties—centrist anti-establishment parties—and distinguishes them from the
radical right and the radical left that the literature on anti-establishment politics covers more prominently.² The term also distinguishes them from all
² More recently, scholars have introduced the term “technocratic populism” or “techno-populism”
to describe anti-establishment parties that promise political renewal by a new form of doing politics
that relies on competence and expertise instead of ideology (Bickerton and Accetti 2018; Guasti and
Buštíková 2020). The debate that this new literature has brought along is important to understand the
commonalities technocrats have with populists—namely, that technocrats also assume that there is one
optimal output, similar to populists’ “general will” (Bickerton and Accetti 2018). Nonetheless, applying
the label to all anti-establishment parties that are neither radical right nor radical left would once again
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an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,”
and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté generale
(general will) of the people.
6
CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
(1) A vast body of literature strives to explain party persistence or failure from the perspective of party system stability and thus focuses
on the question of how established parties are able to defend against
disregard the fact that anti-establishment rhetoric and a pluralist view of society are not necessarily
mutually exclusive. The term “techno-populism” is thus not suitable to analyze the large number of
centrist anti-establishment parties with pluralist views and that therefore are neither populists nor
technocrats (see also Engler et al. 2019).
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parties that can be classified as centrist but that refrain from criticizing the
political establishment—which is the case of most centrist parties that had
already emerged in the 1990s but also of several mainly liberal parties that were
formed in the 2000s, such as Civic Platform (PO) or Modern (.N) in Poland and
the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE) in Romania.
CAPs’ core characteristics also already hint at aspects of their vulnerability. In the absence of a strong ideological foundation, their strong focus on
anti-establishment claims is difficult to uphold once they reach political office
either in parliament or in government (van Kessel 2015: 22; Deegan-Krause
and Haughton 2018). Because CAPs usually enter government very early on
in their careers, generally immediately after their first elections, they have
to transform from outsiders to integrants of the ruling class at a very early
stage of their existence. Research has shown that governing already poses
more risks for new political parties than for established parties (Deschouwer
2008; Bakke and Sitter 2013: 214; Bolleyer 2008: 30ff.), but CAPs have to deal
with an additional problem. In contrast to radical right or radical left parties
that criticize both the established elite and its ideology, CAPs’ major difference vis-à-vis the political mainstream and, therewith, the main foundation
of their anti-establishment rhetoric—their newness—fades quickly regardless
of whether they are in government or simply in parliament. This challenge
affects their electoral performance after their initial breakthrough. Many CAPs
fail to deal with the contradiction between their initial strategy of pure protest
and their new role as office holders and consequently fail to get re-elected into
parliament a second time (Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2015).
Some CAPs, however, survive. I argue that existing theories fail to explain
their survival. First, the literature on party system stability focuses on the persistence of established parties and cannot explain the survival of the more
vulnerable parties that have only emerged more recently. Second, while studies
on party survival appear to be more helpful at first sight, they would predict that no CAP would survive in the long run and thus cannot explain the
variation among CAPs.
INTRODUCTION
7
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new competitors rather than explaining the latter’s persistence. These
accounts highlight the importance of institutional factors, such as
a country’s electoral or political system (Tavits 2008; Andrews and
Bairett 2014), processes of de- and realignment along new cleavages
(Kriesi et al. 2008; Bornschier 2010; Hooghe and Marks 2018), and
exogenous credibility shocks such as corruption scandals or economic
crises (Kriesi and Pappas 2015; Hutter and Kriesi 2019; de Vries and
Hobolt 2020). In the very volatile party systems of Central and Eastern
Europe, the theories of de- and realignment are less suitable to explain
party system transformations. Political conflicts are usually more stable
than the parties that represent them and, hence, many changes in these
countries’ party systems happen without profound societal transformations (Deegan-Krause 2013; Borbáth 2021). In contrast, institutional
factors and credibility shocks do help us understand the success of new
competitors, and CAPs, in particular, have strongly benefited from rising corruption or a proportional electoral system (Engler 2016; Hanley
and Sikk 2016). However, theories of party system stability are not able
to explain why so many CAPs fail while others survive. Unlike established parties with stronger party-voter ties and a core of loyal voters,
new parties first need to establish stable support before we can discuss
why they lost it.
(2) The literature on the survival of new and small parties in Western European party systems (Meguid 2005; Bolleyer 2013; Spoon 2014; Beyens
et al. 2016; Bolleyer and Bytzek 2017) and on party survival more generally in Central and Eastern Europe (Tavits 2012, 2013; Bakke and
Sitter 2013; Gherghina 2015; Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2020) and
Latin America, where party system volatility is also high (Cyr 2017;
Rosenblatt 2018), might thus be more helpful. This literature puts more
emphasis on party agency than on contextual factors and particularly
highlights the importance of organizational strength for party survival
as it helps parties to establish stronger ties to supporters, provides a tool
for personnel recruitment, and helps them to recover after experiencing heavy electoral losses (Bolleyer 2013; Cyr 2017; Rosenblatt 2018).
According to Bolleyer (2008), the former is particularly important for
new parties to deal with the risks of government participation. Tavits
(2013) confirms that this is also the case in Central and Eastern Europe
and shows that the stronger the party organization, the higher the likelihood that the party persists. Another strain of arguments found in this
literature is the need for providing a clear political alternative in the
8
CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
Nevertheless, none of these factors beneficial to survival are present in the case
of CAPs. CAPs are usually built around a single person, with no strong relation
to societal or local organizations (Pop-Eleches 2010: 231). As a result, their
organizational resources are much lower than those of their competitors in
the same country, and often, their party memberships remain low even after
several years (see also Chapter 3). Furthermore, their initial strategy of protest
relies not on an ideological vision that distinguishes them from established
parties but solely on their political inexperience. As a result, existing theories
would predict that all CAPs would be unlikely cases of survival, and they could
not explain the variation among them. As I illustrate and discuss in detail in
Chapter 3, party organization also fails to explain convincingly and sufficiently
why some CAPs survive if we take into account that some of them may invest
in party structures in the future.
This book thus looks at another, often overlooked, factor of party survival:
a party’s electoral strategy. I argue that CAPs only have a chance of survival if
they are able to overcome the vulnerability that stems from their initial strategy
of protest, which is exclusively reliant on their newness. The book introduces
three electoral strategies that CAPs can adopt to reduce this vulnerability
without fully abandoning their initial appeals and stresses the importance of
changing either the discursive or the ideological elements of the CAPs’ initial
strategy. It also discusses the factors that constrain their choice of a strategy—
most importantly, the ideological divisions of their electorates. In a nutshell, it
shows what CAPs become if they are more than just a brief uproar.
1.2 Map of the Argument
In CAPs’ first elections, their newness, combined with anti-establishment
rhetoric, is sufficient to attract voters who are dissatisfied with the existing parties (Sikk 2012). Once CAPs have gained access to the political institutions,
however, they can no longer claim to be outsiders to the political establishment. As they lose their main advantage over mainstream parties, CAPs
need to adapt their electoral strategy to continue attracting voters. Strategic
change is costly and bears the risk of alienating former voters (Somer-Topcu
2009). Between keeping their original strategy of pure protest and adopting a
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form of issue entrepreneurship or a political vision that sets them apart
from the established parties (Meguid 2005; Spirova 2007; Rosenblatt
2018; de Vries and Hobolt 2020).
INTRODUCTION
9
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completely new electoral strategy, CAPs have the option to only change some
aspects of their electoral appeals, while keeping others intact, and thus to stay
closer to their original profile. If a CAP maintains a part of its original identity
by staying true to at least one of the three characteristics of its initial strategy
(anti-corruption claims, anti-establishment discourse, and ideological moderateness), it can choose among three different strategies. Each strategy relies on
a different theoretical foundation of electoral support—protest voting, issue
voting, and ideological voting—and thus enables CAPs to continue attracting
voters beyond their initial success.
The first strategy is to continue using a reframed anti-establishment discourse or reframed protest strategy. Since the party has lost the advantage
of being an outsider to the establishment, it has to redefine the establishment in a new way that includes all mainstream parties but excludes the CAP
itself. Right-wing populism and left-wing populism have successfully deployed
this strategy (Mudde 2007; Gomez et al. 2015). Both frameworks include all
actors in the category of the “corrupt establishment” that represent positions
of the political mainstream either economically (antagonists in left-wing populism) or culturally (antagonists in right-wing populism). A second strategy
a CAP may adopt is to focus on the issue ownership of fighting corruption
or issue strategy. Since corruption is a major source of low levels of political trust (Anderson and Tverdova 2003; Kostadinova 2012), a CAP might
be able to hold on to voters who are tired of the corruption scandals of the
former mainstream parties by abandoning its anti-establishment discourse
but still continuing to politicize corruption. The third strategy consists of a
CAP abandoning both its anti-establishment discourse and its anti-corruption
claims, that is, adopting the rhetoric of a mainstream party or mainstream
strategy. The choice of this strategy entails that the party can no longer rely on
protest voting or issue voting. By transforming into a party from the political
mainstream and only discussing issues that already form part of the ideological space of political competition, ideological proximity becomes the main
criterion for party choice.
This book departs from the assumption that all CAPs have the same chance
to successfully adopt a strategy of survival. In the second part of the book, however, I loosen this assumption. The reason for this is ideology. Ideology plays
an important role in the adoption of all survival strategies but not the CAPs’
original protest strategy. The adoption of a reframed protest strategy requires
that a party radicalizes on at least one salient issue in order to clearly distinguish itself from all remaining parties. Meanwhile, the mainstream strategy
only works if voters feel represented by the ideological position of the former
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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CAP (and newly minted mainstream party). If the chosen strategy of survival
increases the importance of ideology, the party’s ideological starting point is
likely to matter as well. A political platform that attracted protest voters from
both the left and the right in the CAP’s first elections makes subsequent ideological adaptations more difficult because the party risks losing some of its
voters. When the party attracted a more homogeneous group of voters from
either the right or the left, embracing a more pronounced political program
in subsequent campaigns is less likely to cause harm. Furthermore, the literature on partisanship has shown that even though a diluted party brand makes
the party attractive to a heterogenous electorate, it might prevent voters from
feeling attached to, or even from identifying with, a party and thus makes its
long-term survival less likely (Lupu 2014; Rosenblatt 2018).
The existing literature on CAPs has mainly focused on their electoral breakthrough (Učeň 2007; Pop-Eleches 2010;Hanley and Sikk 2016); ideology has
so far played a subordinate role in their analyses. Scholars have focused more
on the commonalities in the CAPs’ discourse (anti-establishment rhetoric and
no radical ideologies) than on the more nuanced differences in their ideological positions. Although such a focus is reasonable when parties are first
classified into a new category, I argue that it is misleading when one wants
to capture the parties’ ideological foundations for the purposes of tracing
their future developments. Even though all CAPs’ positions fall in the mainstream, as we will see in Chapter 2, their ideological platforms still differ and
affect which voters are attracted to them. In this book, I bring ideology back
in by analyzing how ideology affects the composition of CAPs’ electorates
in the first elections and how this in turn influences the parties’ capacity to
survive.
The book thus builds a two-stage argument. First, in order to survive
subsequent elections, CAPs have to overcome the contradiction of an antiestablishment party whose newness and outsider status fade quickly. To do
so, they can rely on three strategies of survival: a reframed protest strategy,
keeping the issue ownership of fighting corruption (issue strategy), and a
mainstream strategy. Second, the ideological composition of a CAP’s electorate
determines the likelihood and success of adopting a new strategy. The more
ideologically divided an electorate is, the harder a CAP finds it to move towards
a new strategy of survival that requires adopting more distinct political positions. Although all CAPs position themselves in the ideological mainstream,
they differ in the extent to which they have attracted an ideologically heterogeneous electorate. These differences are crucial to understand the parties’ future
trajectories and, particularly, their survival.
INTRODUCTION
11
1.3 Case Selection, Measurement, and Data
Research design
The book adopts a mixed-method approach by combining quantitative data
from an original expert survey, existing survey data, and extensive qualitative data derived from interviews conducted with party officials and MPs. The
analysis of CAPs’ survival is divided into three parts.
The first part analyzes the survival of the entire population of CAPs between
2000 and 2016. I measure CAPs’ electoral strategies using a new expert survey and analyze how strategic decisions influence their survival. Expert survey
data have been proven to measure party positions to a similar degree of
accuracy as manifesto data (Marks et al. 2007), and they are widely used in
the measurement of political parties’ ideological positions (Jolly et al. 2022).
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This book analyzes the survival of CAPs in all European Union (EU) member states of Central and Eastern Europe over the period between 2000 and
2016: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland,
Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The phenomenon of CAPs is less widespread
in established democracies, where the main anti-establishment actors are
located in the nationalist or the anti-capitalist camps (Bernhard and Kriesi
2019). More recently, parties that come close to the adopted definition of
CAPs, such as Citizens in Spain or the Five Star Movement in Italy, have also
gained support in Southern Europe. Similarities in the low levels of political
trust and high levels of corruption across the two regions might explain why
CAPs can also be found outside the post-communist countries. Nevertheless,
I constrain my main analysis to the post-communist region in order to keep
the cases’ comparability high. In the conclusion, I provide a discussion of the
prospects of these more recent examples of CAPs in Western Europe. The
exclusion of CEE countries that are not EU members has to do with these
states’ democratic quality. More particularly, the degree of clientelism that
is prevalent in many of these countries creates an uneven playing field that
privileges existing parties over new formations and thus generates an environment less favorable to CAPs (Engler 2016). In the more competitive countries
that eventually joined the EU, CAPs started gaining visibility in the late 1990s
and the early 2000s after the major political camps of the left and the right
had alternated in power and citizens had started looking for new alternatives
(Pop-Eleches 2010).
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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I argue that expert evaluations are even more useful than manifesto data when
it comes to measuring the salience of anti-establishment rhetoric and references to corruption. Party manifestos are usually structured along policy areas
and thus leave little leeway for anti-establishment rhetoric compared to other
types of party communication such as political speeches, social media communication, or billboards. In contrast, experts rely on a variety of sources
when they produce their party assessments (Marks et al. 2007). Nonetheless,
expert survey data have also shown some weaknesses. Experts’ judgments can
be biased by their political preferences or by the sources they base their assessments on; they may be less sensitive to changes in parties’ positions over time,
and retrospective assessments can be affected by succeeding events (Marks
et al. 2007; Steenbergen and Marks 2007). However, as I discuss in more detail
below, the validity and reliability of the original expert survey conducted for
this project is high. Detailed analyses that test for different types of biases are
shown in Appendix A.
The second part of the book is comprised of qualitative case studies, which
present the transformation of CAPs’ electoral strategies in more detail and
illustrate the process of adopting a new strategy between two elections. While
the expert survey is a good tool to assess the strategies of all CAPs and make
them comparable to one another, the information it provides is still limited,
to some extent, because it reduces the information about parties’ ideological positions and the salience of their anti-establishment and anti-corruption
rhetoric to a numerical scale. A triangulation of the quantitative measurement
of party strategies with qualitative evidence first allows us to cross-check the
quantitative data and to find potential biases that result from expert evaluations and, second, provides more information about the nature and context of
anti-establishment and anti-corruption rhetoric. In turn, this additional information allows us to gain a better understanding of what the different strategies
look like and how political parties employ them in the real world. Furthermore,
the case studies also allow us to assess how the strategies unfold in between
elections, and reveal party-internal conflicts and other struggles that the party
leadership might face when aiming for a change in party strategy. I rely on
qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews that I conducted with
MPs and party officials from CAPs in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2016. I combine these insights with information from
the secondary literature to produce case studies that identify critical junctures
in the parties’ strategic decisions, explore the rationales put forward by party
officials, and examine the difficulties the parties faced when they switched
electoral strategies.
INTRODUCTION
13
New expert survey
Measuring a party’s initial electoral strategy and the subsequent transformations after its initial breakthrough requires information about the party’s use of
anti-establishment rhetoric, references to corruption, and ideological stances.
While the Chapel Hill Expert survey (CHES) provides data about the latter
for the entire time period under investigation, no existing data allow for a
comparison of parties’ use of anti-corruption and anti-establishment claims
over time.³ This book introduces a new expert survey on party claims on corruption and anti-establishment rhetoric that covers all major parties’ electoral
campaigns in the new EU member states between 2000 and 2016 (Engler et al.
2021).
The following question was asked for each party:
We would like you to consider the salience (i.e. importance) of the following issues for [party] in the electoral campaign of the national parliamentary
elections between [year] and [year]:
Salience of reducing corruption (0 not important at all; 10 extremely
important)
Salience of anti-establishment and anti-elite rhetoric (0 not important at all;
10 extremely important).
Each party received a score between 0 and 10 on the salience of its anticorruption claims and on the salience of its anti-establishment rhetoric
³ The CHES data set only started including an item for anti-corruption and anti-establishment
rhetoric in 2014. The Party Manifesto Project (Volkens et al. 2017) measures the salience of anticorruption claims in party manifestos and, unlike the CHES, provides data for several elections per
country. However, as I illustrate in Appendix A, the use of anti-corruption claims in party manifestos often does not correspond to the overall use of the anti-corruption issue in the parties’ electoral
campaigns.
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Finally, the third part of the book proceeds to take a closer look at the CAPs’
support base. The latter eventually decides whether CAPs survive or not, and
thus an analysis of the success of different strategies of survival cannot be conducted without taking into account to what extent the strategies match voters’
preferences. Using survey data, I explore the ideological composition of CAPs’
electorates and show how ideological divisions in the latter can reduce a party’s
chances of survival. This part is, again, complemented by data derived from
semi-structured interviews with politicians.
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
⁴ The 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey asked a similar question (Bakker et al. 2015b). Unlike CHES,
which only asks about political corruption, we decided not to restrict parties’ corruption discourse to
political corruption. This is because a genuine anti-corruption discourse might advocate for reforms at
the lower administrative level (“petty corruption”) or at the judicial level, both of which do not involve
political actors. A restriction to political corruption would therefore have prevented the identification
of a broader anti-corruption discourse and therewith the identification of one of the three strategies of
survival (issue strategy). Nevertheless, the data from the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey and from the
ESCAE are strongly correlated (r = 0.81; see Table A.5 in Appendix A).
⁵ For this question, we used the same wording as the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which also additionally includes the terms “anti-elite rhetoric” and “anti-establishment rhetoric.” According to our
understanding, anti-elite and anti-establishment rhetoric are not substantially different from one
another, and both can include the political establishment/elite and other types of dominant groups
in society. We are aware of the possibility that not everyone might consider these two terms synonymous. The reasons to include both terms in the questions are twofold: first, doing so allows for a direct
comparison with the data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (r = 0.89; see Table A.5 in Appendix A);
second, it minimizes the risk of experts not reporting claims against one (the elite) or the other (the
establishment) due to their different understandings of these two terms.
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for each of its national electoral campaigns. The questionnaire provided
definitions of corruption and anti-establishment rhetoric to ensure that
experts had a common understanding of these terms. Corruption was defined
as “misuse of public power for private gain” (Rose-Ackerman 1999: 91).⁴
We provided the following definition of anti-establishment rhetoric: “Those
engaging in anti-establishment rhetoric explicitly identify with ‘ordinary people’ and contrast themselves against a separate and coherent ‘political class’
that is composed of all political opponents undifferentiated by party affiliation and may also (but need not) include economic, intellectual and/or
international elites.”⁵
We asked the same question about the most important parties (CAPs and
all non-CAPs) in the last two to five national parliamentary elections for each
country in the sample. The sample included all parties that had ever figured
among the top five most voted parties in any parliamentary election covered by
the survey. If a party belonged among the five strongest parties in an election,
but received less than 5 percent of all votes, it was excluded from the survey. In
order to reduce the number of questions and years between today and the earliest election, the survey starts with the election in which the first CAP emerged
on its country’s electoral scene. These have been identified by the literature
(Učeň 2007; Pop-Eleches 2010; Hanley and Sikk 2016; see also Bågenholm
and Charron 2014: appendix). The earliest survey starts in 2000. A maximum
of five elections are included in each country questionnaire (see Table A.1 in
Appendix A).
We contacted an average of 14.7 experts per country. The main criterion of
selection was whether the scholar had published about a country’s party system and elections or about party patronage and corruption. The main focus
was on English-language publications, but publications in other languages,
INTRODUCTION
15
Now, we would like you to self-assess your judgement in the last two questions.
How confident are you of your responses on [party] for each election (1 very
uncertain; 4 very confident)?
This approach allows us to exclude answers that are clouded in too much
uncertainty from our analysis. The correlation between election year and
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in particular the countries’ national language(s), were also considered. The
majority of surveyed scholars hold PhDs in political science. From the 162
surveys that were sent out, 122 surveys were completed. The overall response
rate was 75.3 percent, though rates varied across countries ranging from 53.3
percent in Estonia to 94.7 percent in Czechia. The average number of participating experts is 11.1 experts per country, ranging from 5 in Latvia to 18
in Czechia (see Table A.1 in Appendix A). The expert survey was conducted
between January and April 2016; the last elections to be included were the
Slovak national parliamentary elections in 2016. Because this questionnaire
was sent out before the actual election day, two new parties—We Are Family
(SR) and People’s Party Our Slovakia (ĽSNS)—were not included; the electoral polls had not predicted that they could pass the electoral threshold. We
sent out a follow-up survey for the national parliamentary elections in Croatia,
Lithuania, and Romania in March 2017 in order to include all elections that
took place in 2016.
The external and internal validity, as well as the reliability of the data, have
been tested. Appendix A presents and discusses the results of different tests and
shows that the quality of our expert survey is comparable to that of other expert
surveys (Tables A.2 and A.3). It also shows that while there is a strong correlation between the values of our two variables and the two variables in the 2014
CHES data set, our measurement differs from the corruption variable of the
Party Manifesto Project (Table A.5). A closer examination of the data reveals
that the latter often fails to measure the salience of anti-corruption claims in
the manifestos of parties that, according to both our survey and the CHES
data set, use anti-corruption claims in their campaigns. This finding indicates
that a more general assessment of a party’s electoral campaign (speeches, billboards, debates, etc.) can detect characteristics of the party’s platform that are
not necessarily represented in its manifesto.
Since the survey asks retrospective questions, Appendix A also compares the
reliability and validity of the data over time (Tables A.6 and A.7 in Appendix A)
and shows that time affects neither. Moreover, we asked all experts to answer
the following question for each party in each election:
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
Case studies
Several case studies complement my quantitative assessment of party strategies. The focus here is on the three parties that are prototypical examples of
the three strategies of survival and that also survived in the long-term: Unity
(former New Era), Direction (Smer), and Law and Justice (PiS). The case studies illustrate the different paths the three CAPs embarked on in the aftermath
of their initial breakthroughs and serve as a check of the quantitative measurement of their electoral strategies. Additionally, the case studies shed light
on each party’s internal debates about its strategic decisions and illustrate the
costs that these decisions bear such as internal disputes, splits into different
fractions, and founding members leaving the party. They therefore also serve
as a test of how the theoretical expectations, which envisioned parties as unitary actors, unfolded in a reality where parties are simply the sum of different
actors and interests (Panebianco 1988). I also elaborate on the trajectories of
several other CAPs which did or did not survive in the long term and discuss
to what an extent their strategic adaptations and their paths followed my theoretical expectations. The case studies rely on interviews that I conducted with
current and former MPs, party officials, country experts (political scientists),
and anti-corruption experts. In total, I conducted 44 interviews in Bulgaria,
Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia between June and October
2016.⁶ The case studies are mainly based on these interviews (in combination
with secondary literature), and the rest of the book also references them to
facilitate the interpretation of the quantitative results.
⁶ Table B.1 in Appendix B lists all conducted interviews and includes a reference number to each
interview.
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level of confidence varies from country to country. In Latvia (elections:
2002–2014), experts were slightly more certain about their judgment of past
elections than they were about current elections (r = −0.04), while we can find
a slightly lower confidence in the judgment of elections in the early 2000 in
Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Estonia (between r = 0.13 and r = 0.2). More
striking than the differences across time are the differences in confidence levels between larger and minor parties and parties that ran as junior partners in
electoral alliances. The latter received the lowest levels of confidence. I have
excluded all responses with a confidence level below three from my classification and main analyses. This ensures that this study only considers answers
that experts themselves are certain about.
INTRODUCTION
17
Survey data
1.4 Contribution of the Book
The phenomenon of CAPs has been observed for nearly two decades and a
rising number of studies has addressed it over this period (Kriesi and Pappas
2015; Stanley 2017). Učeň (2004a; 2007) shaped the term “centrist populists”
and took a first step toward a comprehensive conceptualization. Subsequent
studies have refined the concept and analyzed the CAPs’ electoral breakthroughs within a broader theoretical framework of political dissatisfaction
(Pop-Eleches 2010; Sikk 2012; Hanley and Sikk 2016; Voda and Havlı́k 2021).
Finally, some country-specific studies have taken a closer look at the electorate
of new CAPs (Havlı́k and Voda 2016; Stanley and Czesnik 2016). What is striking about all of these studies is that they always focus on the CAPs’ electoral
breakthroughs and never look beyond their first elections.
This book contributes to the literature by exploring what happens to these
parties after their first electoral campaigns. This is important for several
reasons. First, my book shows that all CAPs that have survived abandoned
at least one of their core characteristics, either by shifting from a moderate to
a radical ideological profile or by dropping their anti-establishment appeals.
The changing nature of CAPs illustrates why static categorizations based on
parties’ characteristics in their early years can be problematic. The book further supplies a comprehensive and systematic classification of this new type of
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The final part of the book uses survey data to examine the CAPs’ electorates
in an effort to see how the ideological composition of each party’s support
base affected its survival. Individual-level data on voters’ ideological attitudes
for the period between 2002 and 2016 come from the European Social Survey
(ESS, rounds 1 to 8). These surveys allow me to identify CAPs’ voters through
the question “Which party did you vote for in the last national election?” The
electorate’s ideological composition on the main axis of competition—the left–
right axis—can be measured using the variable lrscale, which measures each
voter’s self-placement on the left-right scale. Other variables that measure the
respondents’ attitudes toward redistribution or their stances on cultural questions allow me to assess the CAPs’ electorates in the two-dimensional space of
party competition. I assign all voters to a party, or identify them as non-voters,
and statistically compare the ideological composition of different parties’ electorates, which allows me to test the relationship between ideological coherence
and party survival.
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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party which, on the one hand, provides a common ground for the analysis of
the phenomenon of their initial success and, on the other hand, makes it possible to analyze their subsequent divergent trajectories. Second, understanding
which trajectories of CAPs are more likely to succeed helps us understand
party politics in Central and Eastern Europe more generally as CAPs have
been in power in almost all of these countries and make up for a large share
of voters. CAPs can serve as a gateway to bringing radical ideologies into the
center of power when they decide to reframe their original protest strategy and
adopt more radical stances once in government. CAPs, however, also have the
potential to temporarily reduce the demand for political change, when they
manage to survive, by providing a genuine anti-corruption strategy or filling
in an ideological gap.
Understanding the transformation of parties that start out as outsiders and
proceed to join the political establishment is important not only to the study
of party systems in Central and Eastern Europe but also becomes vital to the
study of many other European democracies. Challenger parties are on the rise
all around Europe, and while their ideological positions range from the radical
left to the radical right, they share their extensive use of anti-establishment
claims (Bernhard and Kriesi 2019; de Vries and Hobolt 2020). The number
of parties that present themselves as outsiders but then manage to come to
power has increased as well. At the time of writing, challenger parties, such as
Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), We Can (Podemos, P), the Five Star
Movement (FSM) and En Marche! (LREM) and several populist radical right
parties, have already formed part of governments in Western Europe.
Several studies have discussed the problems that radical anti-establishment
parties might face in power, that is, the challenge of retaining antiestablishment appeals or the constraints their radical demands might face
(Heinisch 2003; Luther 2011; van Spanje 2011; Albertazzi and McDonell
2015). The need for changing rhetoric and ideological transformations have
already been discussed in the literature (Albertazzi and McDonell 2015), but
so far, the actual transformations have not been systematically assessed. The
only attempt to explain the variation in radical right post-government support found that internal coordination and party coherence have been crucial to
some parties’ continuing success (Akkerman and de Lange 2012). The analysis
of CAPs in government contributes to the discussion by focusing on the problems caused by the parties’ anti-establishment discourse and disentangling
them from problems that arise from radical demands that do not really affect
CAPs. The number of CAPs that reach government coalitions is higher than
the number of their anti-establishment counterparts in Western Europe. My
INTRODUCTION
19
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book therefore presents a first assessment of the general assumptions that
parties in power become more moderate rhetorically as well as ideologically.
Most importantly, this book shows that “mainstreaming” is only one of the
options CAPs can choose from, and it is, by far, not the most successful one.
Rather, adopting more radical claims and reframing their original protest discourse has proven to pay off in some cases. This finding therefore strengthens
the doubts that an inclusion of radical parties in government can lead to a
moderation of their political positions.
The book also contributes to the literature on party survival. The vast
majority of comparative studies analyzing the survival of (new) political parties stresses the importance of organizational strength (Tavits 2012, 2013;
Bakke and Sitter 2013; Bolleyer 2013; Gherghina 2015; Beyens et al. 2016;
Bolleyer and Bytzek 2017; Cyr 2017; Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2020).
Most new CAPs, however, have no strong relation to societal organizations,
are often built around a single person (Pop-Eleches 2010: 231), and greatly
resemble entrepreneurial parties (Kopeček 2016; Krašovec 2017) with weak
organizational structures. As I show in Chapter 3, this is also the reason why
organizational strength only plays a limited role in explaining patterns of survival among CAPs. Moreover, organizational strength itself does not solve
the problem of CAPs losing their political appeals once they lose their newness, which is the main “selling point” of the original protest strategy. What is
needed is an explanation beyond organizational strength, which this book can
offer.
Understanding party survival in Central and Eastern Europe is particularly important. A large part of the ongoing high electoral volatility in the
region results from the entrance of new political parties and the exit of other
parties (Powell and Tucker 2014; Laroze 2019). CAPs comprise the largest
group of successful new parties, but they are also often quickly replaced by
even newer parties (Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2015). Their entrance
and their exit are therefore important parameters in understanding electoral volatility (Haughton and Deegan-Krause 2020). Yet, studies on electoral
volatility and the success of new political parties have so far mainly focused
on contextual factors, such as the countries’ economic situation, electoral
and political systems, or corruption levels (Tavits 2008; Andrews and Bairett
2014; Casal Bértoa 2014; Powell and Tucker 2014; Engler 2016). Rarely are
the characteristics of new parties analyzed in order to understand their electoral breakthroughs (Bågenholm and Charron 2014; van Kessel 2015) and
never—with the exception of Tavits’ (2012) and Gherghina’s (2015) studies on party organization—have they been used to understand parties’ exit.
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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Only more recently have Haughton and Deegan-Krause (2020) provided a
more comprehensive theoretical framework that integrates party leadership,
political appeals, and party organization to explain the rapid rise and fall of
new parties in the region. The findings of this book stress the role of party
agency even more and show that the adjustments in the CAPs’ electoral strategies during the course of their life determines much of their political fate
and, thus, also the fate of potential new parties that would follow in their
footsteps.
The second part of the book sheds more light on the role ideology plays
in the electoral fate of CAPs that strongly rely on protest voters in their first
elections. Expectations about the impact of ideology on party choice in the
protest voting literature range from the approach of “pure protest voting,”
which denies the impact of ideology (van der Brug et al. 2000; 2005; PopEleches 2010), to a more moderate approach of coexistence of protest and
ideological considerations (Bélanger and Aarts 2006; Pytlas 2016; see Birch
and Dennison 2019). As far as CAPs are concerned, however, scholars have
usually advocated for the former approach but never actually tested it at the
individual level. Pop-Eleches (2010: 223), who developed a framework of
protest voting in Central and Eastern Europe, defines protest voting as the pure
punishment of the political establishment which is independent from any programmatic considerations by voters. This view of protest voting clearly derives
from his perception of CAPs as empty vehicles of protest (Pop-Eleches 2010:
226). In a similar vein, Učeň (2007: 51) ascribes them a “relative lack of ideology.” He does, however, acknowledge that there are differences among CAPs’
ideological platforms, although their ideological positions are not the main
message of their campaigns. This book’s finding that CAPs’ electorates do not
tend to be more heterogeneous than mainstream parties’ electorates clearly
speaks against the prevailing view that all CAPs attract protest voters regardless of voters’ ideological preferences. Rather, there is evidence that protest
voting can coexist with ideological considerations. A closer look reveals that
a non-negligible number of CAPs already mainly attracted voters from either
the political left or the right in their first elections. Voters’ ideological positions
also correlate strongly with the parties’ political platforms. The book therefore demonstrates that, although the success of CAPs seems to mainly come
from unsatisfied voters, ideological considerations are nevertheless already
important in CAPs’ first elections. Considering CAPs as empty vehicles of
protest is misleading and, as Chapter 6 shows, underestimates the role of ideology in the parties’ decision-making, future transformations, and, ultimately,
their survival.
INTRODUCTION
21
1.5 A Roadmap
This introductory chapter has introduced the phenomenon of CAPs, their
definition, and the major puzzle surrounding their existence: how can a party
that has won its first elections by doing little more than criticizing the ruling
elite survive? After a brief summary of the argument, my research strategy,
and the data, Chapter 2 explores the CAPs’ nature in more detail. It first
identifies and lists all CAPs in Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on
the CAPs’ two core characteristics: their anti-establishment rhetoric and ideological positions within the mainstream. It then follows a more detailed
debate about the roles that the topic of corruption and ideology play in the
CAPs’ electoral campaigns. This is important because it allows us to first grasp
the fragility of the CAPs’ nature and, second, formulate expectations about
possible strategies of survival. Chapter 3 then introduces the theoretical framework of CAP survival. It first discusses the impact of party organization and
government participation—both of which are known to contribute to party
survival—and shows that neither is capable of explaining the patterns of survival among CAPs. It then discusses the main argument—namely, that CAPs
are only able to survive if they adopt one of the three aforementioned strategies
of survival: the reframed protest strategy, the issue (anti-corruption) strategy,
or the mainstream strategy.
Chapters 4 and 5 empirically assess the argument that, in order to survive,
CAPs need to abandon their initial strategy of pure protest. Chapter 4 uses the
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Finally, the book illustrates the limitations of party scholarship that, most of
the time, analyzes political parties as unitary actors (Panebianco 1988; Budge
et al. 2010). Although the theoretical framework of this book rests on the
assumption that CAPs are unitary actors and does not discuss how partyinternal factors might play in, focusing instead on the parties’ supporters, the
case studies provide insights into the inner workings of political parties that
might be important for future scholarship on party strategies. The interviews
with party leaders, MPs, and party officials shed light on challenges frequently
faced by new parties once they are in office for the first time as they show
how different political camps prevent strategic reorientation or put the party
at risk of splintering or losing prominent party members. As the second part of
the book then discusses in more detail, these challenges are most pronounced
among those parties that attract very diverse electorates and, hence, are also
comprised of different ideological camps within the party.
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CENTRIST ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT PARTIES AND THEIR STRUGGLE
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new expert survey data to look at the changes in CAPs’ electoral strategies since
their first electoral campaigns. The analysis confirms that no CAP that did not
adopt a new strategy of survival has managed to survive in the long term. It
also provides evidence of the success of all three strategies of survival. The case
studies in Chapter 5 illustrate the evolution from the original protest strategy to
the adoption of a new strategy of survival for three CAPs that have survived in
the long term: PiS, Smer, and Unity. Qualitative evidence derived from interviews with party officials and MPs sheds light on the critical junctures in these
parties’ trajectories and on the challenges they have faced throughout their
journeys. All three parties made a clean cut from their original protest strategy and adopted a new strategy of survival. The chapter concludes with a case
study of a party that failed to survive—Gregor Virant’s List (DL) in Slovenia—
and with a discussion of the strategic adaptations of several other CAPs, some
of which survived and others that did not. It addresses the challenges these parties faced in adopting a new survival strategy and presents the consequences
their strategic decisions had for their electoral fate.
The second part of the book then relaxes the assumption that all CAPs have
the same opportunity to adopt a new strategy of survival. Although all CAPs
have a moderate ideological platform, Chapter 2 has already demonstrated that
CAPs display nuanced differences in their ideological appeals. These ideological appeals might not be important for the parties’ initial breakthroughs, but,
as Chapter 6 shows, they bear implications for the parties’ support base. Some
CAPs attract protest voters from across the ideological spectrum, while others
have a more homogeneous support base mostly concentrated on the left or on
the right side of the continuum. Chapter 6 discusses the theoretical implications of this finding and uses survey data and qualitative case studies to show
that a less coherent support base constrains CAPs in their choice of a new electoral strategy and increases the likelihood of party death. Finally, Chapter 7
concludes by looking beyond Central and Eastern Europe. It discusses the
extent to which the phenomenon travels to other European countries and
asks whether new parties, such as the Five Star Movement or En Marche!,
will follow trajectories similar those of CAPs in Central and Eastern Europe.
Furthermore, it discusses how the book facilitates a better understanding of
party change in Europe and concludes that despite rising levels of volatility
and political distrust, it is very unlikely that politics will one day be reduced
to protest politics and personalistic claims, if even the fate of CAPs eventually
depends on ideology.