Preliminary research, as well as personal observations, seem to indicate that the new democracies lack several conditions which are assumed in the light of the experience of earlier democracies to be necessary for the stability of democratic institutions based on universal suffrage. When one puts together piecemeal observations, one arrives at a list of such “absences” that is almost comprehensive: no effective parties (Di Telia 1991), no encompassing unions and other representative institutions, no national bourgeoisies capable of offering a hegemonic project (“capitalism without capitalists,” Rychard 1991, also Domański et al. 1993), no stable political class (Weffort 1991), no clearly identifiable political forces (Bruszt 1989, Rychard 1991), even no crystallized structure of interests to be represented (Bruszt and Simon 1991, Kolarska-Bobińska 1991). Not only the state but also the civil society is weak in most new democracies.

In the historical development of Western Europe, political parties, along with labor unions, were the main mechanism of incorporation of the masses into the political system. Indeed, recent research shows (Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992) that working-class parties were the main force in bringing democracy. By organizing class and other interests, they became instruments by which those groups that suffered from poverty and oppression by virtue of their place in the economic system could struggle for the improvement of their material and cultural conditions. At the same time, by channeling the pursuit of interests and values into the institutional framework of competitive politics, political parties regularized intergroup conflicts.