In the Third Wave of democratization, political scientists first studied the conditions under which polities shifted from authoritarian rule to competitive democracy. Next, they investigated the processes and institutional commitments that turn a volatile, open situation of democratic regime choice into a routinized political process, configured around institutions most citizens and politicians treat as the “only game in town.” Most recently, analysts have begun to explore the quality of the democratic experience in the new polities, both with regard to the features that characterize the process of democratic competition as well as with regard to the policy outputs that shape people's life chances. Our study of four East Central European post-communist polities is a contribution to the emerging literature on the procedural quality of new democratic polities. It focuses on one central and indispensable aspect of any democracy, the dynamics of party competition, and accounts for cross-national divergence of the democratic experiences in terms of historical legacies and the emerging framework of new electoral, legislative, and executive institutions. Of course, we do not pretend to provide a complete and determinist explanation of the quality of democracy in each of our countries. Political science models do not reflect the full complexity of political life and thus never provide necessary and sufficient explanations. As a consequence, we do not anticipate major political changes, because our models lack sufficient specificity.

If at least one of the following three propositions proves empirically robust in future research, our study will ultimately have been successful.