The Adaptation Strategies of Post-Communist Political Parties: An Introduction

Starting with the third decade of post-communism, the political landscape of the world that once belonged to the Soviet bloc or its satellites has been marked by important transformations at institutional and individual levels. So far, relatively little is known about how political parties respond to recent challenges and developments in politics and societies. This Focus seeks to address this gap in the literature and pursues theoretical, empirical and methodological objectives. The collection of articles seeks to outline a few theoretical models of adaptation to the political realities, to identify and explain various ways in which political parties respond to challenges and continue to perform their function of representation, and to measure variables and concepts that were previously approached only from a normative or descriptive perspective.