Abstrakt
The Czech party system was considered relatively stable in the region of Eastern and Central Europe. However, since the general election in 2010 it has been possible to observe the trend of rising genuinely new political parties and movements in the terms of their electoral gains and presence in governmental coalitions.
Party institutionalization is the multidimensional theoretical concept explaining different aspects of sustainability and persistence of political parties as organizations. Usually it is operationalized in two dimensions.
The first aims to explain how the organizations develop formal rules and structures to ensure their longevity and stable position in the party system. The second dimension, following assumptions of new institutionalism theory, is rather oriented towards questions of organization's interaction with its social surroundings.
In the specific case of political party, one of the most important interacting actor is party's electorate. Regarding the overall level of party institutionalization, it is necessary to understand to what extent political party is capable to gain and sustain electoral stability.
The paper discusses different concepts of electoral stabilization, namely aggregated and individual electoral volatility, party nationalisation score and patterns of electorate's socio-demographic characteristics. Performance of nine Czech political parties in general elections over time were chosen as cases to cover organizational variability among different party families and organizational forms.
The data for analysis were mainly collected from electoral statistics and registers. Individual-level data for the Czech Republic were then extracted from international sociological survey "Comparative Study of Electoral Systems" (CSES).