Stability or Chaos? An examination of political party systems in ten Eastern European democracies.

How stable are the party systems of Eastern European democracies, which are member-states of the European Union? In this paper, I apply the criteria and framework for identifying institutionalized party systems first employed by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully (1995) in Latin American democracies and later modified by Michelle Kuenzi and Gina Lambright (2001) to examine African democracies. I utilize two of the four components of the original framework that are applicable to the selected cases, party competition and party roots in society, with party competition (volatility) first divided similarly in the manner of Allan Sikk (2005) and Eleanor Powell and Joshua Tucker (2008) and then considered as a single value. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]