The quality of a democracy hinges not only upon citizens' sense of being represented, but also their perception that the political elites govern effectively. In this chapter, we will not analyze the actual record of governments in post-communist democracies, but employ our elite surveys to explore the probabilities that parties in our four East Central European countries form durable legislative and executive majorities. We presuppose that durable majorities are able to deliver more consistent policies and in this vein make governments calculable for market participants. Stability of the political environment, in turn, encourages private investments and thus indirectly economic growth and rising standards of living.

Our analysis is also premised on the assumption that parties' attitudes and dispositions toward mutual collaboration reveal a polity's capacity for governance, particularly in institutional settings that tend to require legislative and executive coalitions among parties to enact binding policies. Toward the end of this chapter, we will briefly confront our survey findings with the actual experience of governing in the four countries and the governments' political-economic record on which we have already supplied some basic figures in the final section of chapter 3.

All four East Central European polities incorporate strong institutional elements of a type of democratic rule Lijphart (1977; 1984) has labeled “consensual” democracy. They involve electoral laws of proportional representation that facilitate multiple-party caucuses in parliament. Moreover, they stipulate cabinet responsibility to parliament, as opposed to a powerful independent executive presidency.