Postimperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Post-Soviet Russia, the early Third Republic in France, and the Weimar Republic in Germany can be understood as cases of “postimperial democracy”—a situation in which a new democratic regime emerges in the core of a former empire that has suddenly collapsed and where democratic elections continue for at least a decade. However, the regimes consolidated in these cases—republican democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state authoritarianism in Russia—vary dramatically. These divergent results reflect the impact of new ideologies, which generated collective action among converts by artificially elongating their time horizons in an environment of extremely high uncertainty. In France, ideological clarity allowed radical republicans to outflank more pragmatic parties; in Germany, ideological clarity allowed the Nazis to mobilize more successfully than centrist parties; and in post-Soviet Russia, the absence of any compelling new political ideology—democratic or antidemocratic—has rendered political parties too weak to challenge even a very weak state.

Beyond Patronage: Violent Struggle, Ruling Party Cohesion, and Authoritarian Durability

“…24 Quoted in Ihonvbere 1996, 70. 25 On non-material sources of party cohesion, see Schurmann 1966;Hanson 2010;. 26 Huntington 1970, 13-14.…”

Challenges and promises of comparative research into post-Soviet fascism: Methodological and conceptual issues in the study of the contemporary East European extreme right

“…Against the background of recent innovation in the definition and conceptualization of generic fascism, it appears, moreover, possible to apply it not only in synchronic cross-cultural analysis. Within diachronic comparison, one can now also contrast classically fascist with neo-fascist groupings when analyzing, for instance, the fate of young democracies, as has been attempted in first juxtapositions of the decline of the Weimar Republic to the development of post-Soviet Russia (Shenfield, 2001;Luks, 2008;Hanson, 2010;Kailitz and Umland, 2010). Such comparison should eventually lead to a disambiguation of the current theoretical models that explain the rise of fascism in rather general terms.…”

Elite Investments in Party Institutionalization in New Democracies: A Two-Dimensional Approach

“…Under such conditions, parties face higher pressure to try to cultivate distinctive party labels able to underpin stable commitments of clearly defined groups of followers (Hanson 2010;LeBas 2011;Lupu 2015), which, in turn, supports value infusion. More importantly, as presenting distinct policy packages or identities becomes, ceteris paribus, more difficult in increasingly fragmented party systems, investments in an infrastructure stabilizing ties to followers (Kitschelt and Kselman 2010, 13-14), that is, routinization, becomes increasingly valuable.…”