IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/ceasxx/v77y2025i3p415-438.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Death of the Dinosaurs? Organisational Resilience and the Survival of Older Mainstream Parties in Czechia

Author

Listed:
  • Seán Hanley
  • Lubomír Kopeček

Abstract

This article examines how organisational strength, leadership change and strategy enable traditional parties in postcommunist Central Europe to survive political and electoral crisis and new party challengers and unexpectedly re-emerge as nationally competitive actors. Case studies of two Czech parties, the Civic Democratic Party (Občanská demokratická strana—ODS) and the People’s Party (Křesťanská a demokratická unie–Československá strana lidová—KDU-ČSL), suggest that partial recovery can be achieved by a ‘crisis leader’ who manages risks through strategies of limited reform, focused on mobilising core members and voters in local politics and other second-order venues. The final part discusses how the two parties’ participation in the anti-populist SPOLU alliance superseded their earlier anti-crisis strategies.

Suggested Citation

  • Seán Hanley & Lubomír Kopeček, 2025. "Death of the Dinosaurs? Organisational Resilience and the Survival of Older Mainstream Parties in Czechia," Europe-Asia Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 77(3), pages 415-438, March.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:ceasxx:v:77:y:2025:i:3:p:415-438
    DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2025.2455163
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09668136.2025.2455163
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/09668136.2025.2455163?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:ceasxx:v:77:y:2025:i:3:p:415-438. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/ceas .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.