Two decades after the collapse of communism, Central and East European countries have come a long way towards liberal democracy and stable party systems, confounding pessimistic predictions about unstable competition, weak parties, and limited institutionalization. To be sure, party system stabilization has entailed fissure and fusion, producing winners and losers along the way; and some party systems have gone through several restructuring processes, but overall there is surprisingly strong continuity between the parties that are represented in the respective parliaments today and the parties and movements that emerged in the early 1990s. Moreover, not only have ten countries fulfilled the dream of “returning to Europe” by joining the EU – many of the major parties in these countries have also joined European parties such as the Party of European Socialists (PES), the Liberal Democrats in Europe (ELDR), and the European People's Party (EPP), signaling convergence across the old Iron Curtain. And although the left–right dimension initially played a secondary role in many countries, it has gradually come to the fore, as have other, older cleavages. The tabula rasa thesis has been thoroughly refuted: communism did not erase all social cleavages – on the contrary, there was “evidence of [a] social basis to party support across the region” already in the early 1990s.

The conditions under which party systems in Central and Eastern Europe developed were nevertheless quite different.