Kevin Deegan-Krause

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at Wayne State University

Three decades after the fall of socialist regimes in Central Europe, the successes of democratic transition face threats from broader trends toward skepticism, disengagement and distrust across Europe, though perhaps more intensively in the East. This backdrop, especially evident in Slovakia, underscores the need for comprehensive data on voter and...

Despite spells outside parliament, with its blend of nationalist and populist appeals the Slovak National Party (SNS) has been a prominent fixture on Slovakia's political scene for three decades. Unlike some of the newer parties in Slovakia and across the region, partly as a product of the point of its (re-)creation, SNS has a comparable organizati...

Party politics across Central and Eastern Europe has become less structured. Many of the divides that anchored political competition have waned in recent years, weakening the attachment of voters to the existing palette of parties and making them more likely to be attracted to new and non-traditional electoral vehicles. But for such parties to succ...

Most accounts of the emergence of new parties are episodic, but to understand the rise and breakthrough of new parties in Central Europe requires an understanding of the links between party death and party birth, between one cohort of new parties and the next. Parties proclaiming their novelty, anti-corruption appeals, and the celebrity of their le...

Scholars have disagreed over how to assess and measure what constitutes a ‘new’ political party. The different understandings of newness matter because they are used in attempts to measure the overall instability of party systems, often producing widely varying results for volatility calculations. There are multiple approaches to assessing novelty....

New parties are different from the more established parties in terms of their organization, appeals, and leadership. Not only do they often take the cosmetic step of avoiding the word ‘party’ in their names, but they also usually choose very different organizational structures, with far fewer members and party branches. Furthermore, in contrast to...

New party emergence poses major questions for the quality of democracy. New parties can help remove incompetent and corrupt politicians from power, re-engage citizens, represent neglected interests and issues, respond to changes in society, and provoke established parties to perform better. But new party emergence can also bring into public office...

In order to better understand the dynamics of party politics in Central Europe, it is necessary to map and measure the party systems and the rise of new parties. The chapter maps in graphic form the development of the party systems in eleven states (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovaki...

Scholars seeking to explain the patterns of party politics in Central Europe since 1989 have drawn on accounts that stress the role of cleavages, economic performance, legacies, populism, and European Union accession and membership. Although they offer insights, these accounts in themselves do not provide a compelling explanation. More attention ne...

Many of the patterns of party politics we have witnessed in Central Europe are also in evidence in other regions of the world. From Iceland to Israel, from Greece, and Guatemala, and in countries as diverse as Peru and Japan, new parties and politicians have broken through, and some old, seemingly well-established, parties have lost significant lev...

Why are there so many new parties? Why do so few of them survive? And why are they appearing and disappearing in so many more countries these days? Based on hundreds of interviews with party leaders, activists and voters and three decades of election results across Europe, The New Party Challenge introduces new tools for mapping and measuring party...

Although the party systems of Central Europe have witnessed significant turbulence, some parties have survived. Endurance is more common among parties that built well-developed organizational structures, took a clear ideological stance as a standard-bearer on a major enduring issue divide of politics, and developed internal institutional structures...

The more populism enters public debates, the more it needs close scrutiny. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context for exploring the diversity of parties identified as populist; anti-establishment rhetoric provides a suitable conceptual starting point because of its pervasive role in the region's political discourse. Using a new expert s...

This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS Political parties in Central and Eastern Europe come and go quite rapidly, giving the region a reputation for electoral chaos, but amid the change, some p...

The seemingly random triumph and demise of new political parties in Central and Eastern Europe actually represents a durable subsystem with relevance for party systems around the world. This article supplements existing research on volatility with new measures of party age distribution that reveal clear patterns of disruption, turnover and restabil...

This article, a detailed analysis of the content of the legislation on political parties in postcommunist Slovakia, constitutes one part of a broad-based attempt to discover the extent to which changes in the patterns of party regulation have affected party system formation and development. In Slovakia the answer is “not much”, but the process by w...

We theorize and examine the channels by which corruption may affect voting behavior. First, motivated by low empirical correlation between exposure to corruption and perceptions thereof, we postulate two distinct mechanisms: pocketbook corruption voting, defined as the effect of personal experiences with corruption on voting behavior; and sociotrop...

This third edition of The Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe provides an authoritative and thorough analysis of the political changes, which have occurred in Central and Eastern Europe since the demise of communism. It offers an historical, comparative perspective of the region and focuses on the social consequences of the democratisati...

Introduction Can populism and democracy co-exist? At first glance the case of Slovakia answers ‘no!’ Slovakia’s democratic institutions suffered during governments commonly regarded as populist and recovered during the governments regarded as anti-populist. This conventional wisdom is not wrong, but it is too simple. A closer look at the case of Sl...

This article relies on cases from new EU member states in postcommunist Europe to integrate two overlapping debates about majority–minority relations. Since the Second World War, political theorists and international institutions have tended to discourage group-rights approaches in favour of individual rights; meanwhile, policy-makers who achieved...

The study of cleavages focuses primarily on constraints imposed by socio-demographic factors. While scholars have not ignored the agency of political elites, such scholarship remains fragmented among sub-fields and lacks a coherent conceptual framework. This article explores both temporal stability and positional alignments linking vote choice with...

Shifting our understanding of populism from a question of core identity to a description of party appeals allows for a neutralization of the term's negative connotations by allowing that all parties may use populist appeals to some extent. It is then possible to address a party's use of populist appeals by measuring its distinctly nonpopulist appea...

This article presents a survey of political cleavage. The survey presented in the article asks what scholars mean when they talk about cleavages; the revelations of recent studies about the contours of new cleavages, their origins, and their consequences are included. The model of difference, divide, and cleavage is illustrated in the article. The...

The contrast between Slovakia’s primary Communist successor party—the Party of the Democratic Left—and its own successor—Smer—offers considerable insight into the interaction between party ideology, organization and electoral success in post-Communist Europe. The Party of the Democratic Left and Smer offered relatively similar programmatic position...

Although aggregate popular support for particular nationalisms in Slovakia showed little change during the 1990s, relationships between nationalisms changed significantly. This article uses categories of nationalism derived from the relational typologies of Brubaker and Hechter to analyze surveys of postcommunist Slovak public opinion and demonstra...

The results of Slovakia's 2002 elections can be said to mark the completion of a "second transition" to democracy. With the election of 2002, it became clear that Slovakia's nationalist-authoritarian experiment is effectively over. What remains to be seen is the extent and duration of its impact on Slovak political life. Today's leaders must conten...

How do voters' political opinions shape the way they think about political parties? In the left–right socio-economic competition of advanced democracies the answer to this question is often taken for granted. For this reason many approaches to the study of parties are not easily applicable to countries where different issues dominate political deba...

Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the United States Information Agency, and the US Department of State, which administers the Russia, Eurasian, and East European Research Program (Title VIII), a grant from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, and grants from the Kellogg Institut...

We examine the relationship between corruption and voting behavior. Theoretically, we build on the existing economic voting literature to provide a framework for thinking about how corruption aects voting behavior: pocketbook corruption voting is dened as the eect of personal experiences with corruption on voting behavior; sociotropic corruption vo...

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Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 448-474). "April 2000." Thesis directed by A. James McAdams for the Department of Government.