Party agency and the religious-secular cleavage in post-Communist countries: The case of Romania

Research focusing on several post-communist countries has found evidence of social cleavage effects on political behaviour similar to those found in Western Europe. In some post-communist countries, however, social cleavage effects appear far weaker (if at all). To understand why this is the case, I perform a case study of Romania, focusing on the religious–secular cleavage. Drawing upon research that emphasises the role of parties in forming cleavages, I argue that the reason for the absence of social cleavage effects is due to party competition for the same group of voters by parties from opposing ends of the ideological spectrum. By shifting their positions, some parties have prevented the appearance of cleavages by shaping individuals' perceptions of the parties and, in doing so, have even altered individuals' own left–right self-placements.

Measuring party organization: The vertical dimension of the multilevel organization of statewide parties in Spain and the UK

Over the past few years, attention to the role of state-wide political parties in multi-level polities has increased in recognition of their linkage function between levels of government, as these parties compete in both state-wide and regional elections across their countries. This article presents a coding scheme designed to describe the relationship between central and regional levels of state-wide parties. It evaluates the involvement of the regional branches in central decision-making and their degree of autonomy in the management of regional party affairs. This coding scheme is applied to state-wide parties in Spain (the socialist PSOE and the conservative Partido Popular) and in the UK (Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats). It is an additional tool with which to analyse party organization and it facilitates the comparison of parties across regions and in different countries.

Devolution and party organizational change: The British and Spanish and state-wide parties compared

This article investigates the link between regionalization of the structure of government, regional elections and regionalism on the one hand, and the organization of state-wide political parties in Spain and the UK on the other. It particularly looks at two aspects of the relations between the central and regional levels of party organization: integration of the regional branches in central decision making and autonomy of the regional branches. It argues that the party factors are the most crucial elements explaining party change and that party leaders mediate between environmental changes and party organization. The parties' history and beliefs and the strength of the central leadership condition their ability or willingness to facilitate the emergence of meso-level elites. The institutional and electoral factors are facilitating factors that constitute additional motives for or against internal party decentralization

Religious Political Parties and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Political parties have only recently become a subject of investigation in political theory. In this paper I analyse religious political parties in the context of John Rawls’s political liberalism. Rawlsian political liberalism, I argue, overly constrains the scope of democratic political contestation and especially for the kind of contestation channelled by parties. This restriction imposed upon political contestation risks undermining democracy and the development of the kind of democratic ethos that political liberalism cherishes. In this paper I therefore aim to provide a broader and more inclusive understanding of ‘reasonable’ political contestation, able to accommodate those parties (including religious ones) that political liberalism, as customarily understood, would exclude from the democratic realm. More specifically, I first embrace Muirhead and Rosenblum’s (Perspectives on Politics 4: 99–108 2006) idea that parties are ‘bilingual’ links between state and civil society and I draw its normative implications for party politics. Subsequently, I assess whether Rawls’s political liberalism is sufficiently inclusive to allow the presence of parties conveying religious and other comprehensive values. Due to Rawls’s thick conceptions of reasonableness and public reason, I argue, political liberalism risks seriously limiting the number and kinds of comprehensive values which may be channelled by political parties into the public political realm, and this may render it particularly inhospitable to religious political parties. Nevertheless, I claim, Rawls’s theory does offer some scope for reinterpreting the concepts of reasonableness and public reason in a thinner and less restrictive sense and this may render it more inclusive towards religious partisanship.

An analysis of the talent management challenges in a post-communist country: the case of Poland

There is a dearth of empirical studies on talent management (TM) in the emerging markets, and in particular a lack of research on TM in the countries of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region. Our empirical study in 58 organisations in Poland, a major economy in the CEE region, is one of the first studies to examine TM in this context. Our study highlights the particular nature of the TM challenges facing organisations in Poland and shows that there is little evidence to suggest that Polish practice is converging with Western models. Our paper suggests that TM is likely to challenge many traditional management practices and attitudes which continue to dominate Polish culture in the period of transition to a market economy.