¹ To keep our analysis more focused, we only selected books that deal with political parties and party systems and excluded books that focus solely on voters, such as election studies. For a good review of this literature, see Tucker, Joshua A., “The First Decade of Post-Communist Elections and Voting: What Have We Studied, and How Have We Studied It?” Annual Review of Political Science 5 (June 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

² Other authors stressing the importance of history include Kopstein, Jeffrey, “Post-Communist Democracy: Legacies and Outcomes,” Comparative Politics 35, no. 2 (2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Way, Lucan A., “Understanding the Role of Historical Constraint in Post-Communist Development,” Studies in Comparative International Development 37, no. 2 (2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

³ Mahoney, James and Rueschmeyer, Dietrich, eds., Comparative HistoricalAnalysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁴ The importance of agency formation is stressed by Geddes, Barbara, “A Comparative Perspective on the Leninist Legacy in Eastern Europe,” Comparative Political Studies 28, no. 2 (1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar); McFaul, Michael, “Explaining Party Formation and Nonformation in Russia: Actors, Institutions, and Chance,” Comparative Political Studies 34, no. 10 (2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Stoner-Weiss, Kathryn, “The Limited Reach of Russia's Party System: Underinstitutionalization in Dual Transition,” Politics and Society 29, no. 3 (2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁵ Mainwaring, Scott, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil (Stanford, Calif.:Stanford University Press, 1999Google Scholar).

⁶ Carothers, Thomas, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13 (January 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

⁸ Paul Pierson, “Big, Slow-Moving, and Invisible: Macrosocial Processes in the Study of Comparative Politics,” in Mahoney and Rueschmeyer (fn. 3), 178-79.

⁹ For a stimulating intellectual history of different models of political development as well as a good assessment of how effectively they each deal with continuity and change, see Janos, Andrew, Politics and Paradigm: Changing Theories of Change in Social Science (Stanford, Calif:Stanford University 1986Google Scholar), esp. 44-64.

¹⁰ Pierson (fn. 8); Aminzade, Ronald, “Historical Sociology and Time,” Sociological Methods and Research 20, no. 4 (1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Knapp, Peter, “Can Social Science Escape from History: Views of History in Social Science,” History and Theory 23, no. 1 (1984CrossRefGoogle Scholar); McDonald, Terrence J., “What We Talk about When We Talk about History: The Conversations of History and Sociology,” in McDonald, , ed., The Historical Turn in the Social Sciences (Ann Arbor, Mich.:University of Michigan Press, 1996Google Scholar); Pierson, , “Not Just What, but When: Timing and Sequence in Political Processes,” Studies in American Political Development 14 (Spring 2000CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Sewell, William, “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology,”Google Scholar also in McDonald. See also the exchange with Sperber, Jonathan and Ledford, Kenneth in Kreuzer, Marcus, “Reply to Sperber and Ledford,” Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003Google Scholar); Ledford, , “Comparing Comparisons: Disciplines and the Sonderweg,” Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Sperber, , “Comments on Marcus Kreuzer's Article,” Central European History 36, no. 3 (2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

¹¹ Sewell (fn. 10), 262–65.

¹² Ibid., 259.

¹³ Kopstein (fn. 2), 233.

¹⁴ Mahoney and Rueschmeyer (fn. 3).

¹⁵ It seems as if in Elster, Offe, and Preuss's analysis the most recent stage of the triple past-the postcommunist transition-and the tabula rasa or macrochange are one and the same, and hence, overlap. This raises the question of whether or not to consider the transition's proximate impact as a historical legacy. Because of their chronological contemporaneity with the explained outcomes, we exclude transition effects as a historical factor.

¹⁶ Mainwaring (fn. 5), 3–14.

¹⁷ Ibid., 3–4.

¹⁸ Sartori, Giovanni, “From the Sociology of Politics to Political Sociology,” in Martin Lipset, Seymour, ed., Politics and the Social Sciences (New York:Oxford University Press, 1969), 69Google Scholar, 87–88.

¹⁹ Lipset, and Rokkan, Stein, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignment: An Introduction,” in Lipset, and Rokkan, , eds., Party Systems and VoterAlignments (New York:Free Press, 1967Google Scholar). Sartori praises Lipset and Rokkan for marking a big step away from sociologically reductionist arguments because they analyzed nonclass cleavages and paid attention to historical sequences; see Sartori (fn. 18), 87–91. By the standards of the time, these were indeed marked improvements, but they do not alter the fact that the Lipset-Rokkan model is still actorless and structural.

²⁰ Kalyvas, Stathis, The Rise of Christian Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1996Google Scholar); Katz, Richard, A Theory of Parties and Electoral Systems (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980Google Scholar); Kreuzer, , Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation mocracy-France and Germany, 1870–1939 (Ann Arbor, Mich.:University of Michigan Press, 2001CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and Scarrow, Susan, Parties and their Members: Organizingfor Victory in Britain and Germany (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1995Google Scholar).

²¹ March, James and Olsen, Johan, “The New Institutionalism: Organizational Factors of Political Life,” American Political Science Review 78, no. 3 (1984), 740Google Scholar.

²² Aldrich, John, Why Parties? The Origins and Transformation of Party Politics in America (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Cox, Gary and McCubbins, Mathew, Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993Google Scholar).

²³ Sartori (fn. 18); Kalyvas (fn. 20).

²⁴ This issue is taken up by McFaul (fn. 4).

²⁵ This criticism also applies to their explanation of voters' and parties' programmatic orientations. Here too the theoretical sections emphasize the importance of actors and their choices, yet in their actual empirical analysis, structural factors and historical legacies-rather than historical efficiency-dominate to such an extent that actors' choices in effect are predetermined.

²⁶ They briefly discuss the internal organizational characteristics of programmatic and clientelistic parties. According to the authors (45), these organizational characteristics are so closely tied to these parties' programmatic orientations that they do not constitute a distinct dimension and thus never become an important focus of their analysis.

²⁷ Kreuzer, and Pettai, Velio, “Patterns of Political Instability: Affiliation Patterns of Politicians and Voters in Postcommunist Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,” Studies in Comparative International Development 38, no. 2 (2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Shabad, Goldie and Slomczynski, Kazimierz, “Interparty Mobility among Political Elites in Post-Communist East Central Europe,” Party Politics 10, no. 2 (2004CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

²⁸ Mainwaring (fn. 5), 4.

²⁹ It should be pointed out that underinstitutionalization is not the only problem associated with party development, since many scholars going back to Robert Michels have argued that parties also can restrict political representation by virtue of their overinstitutionalization. Thus, there seems to be a curvilinear relationship between levels of party institutionalization and political representation. Parties have to cross a minimal level of institutionalization before they can become channels of representation; beyond this threshold, however, party institutionalization can reach levels at which parties no longer are agents of popular expression but instead become agents of social control. On this, see Bermeo, Nancy, Ordinary Citizens in Extraordinary Times: The Citizenry and the Breakdown of Democracy (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2002), 14–19Google Scholar; Huntington, Samuel, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1969), 397–448Google Scholar; and Schedler, Andreas, “Under- and Overinstitutionalization: Some Ideal Typical Propositions Concerning New and Old Party Systems,” Working Paper, no. 213 (Notre Dame, Ind.:Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame, 1995Google Scholar).

³⁰ Mainwaring (fn. 5), 3.

³¹ Zielinski, Jakub, “Translating Social Cleavages into Party Systems: The Significance of New Democracies,” World Politics 54 (January 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

³² Such organizational reaffiliation strategies are so rare in established democracies that they have received almost no attention. See Mair, Peter, “The Electoral Payoffs of Fission and Fusion,” British Journal of Political Science 20, no. 1 (1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

³³ For a more detailed definition and discussion of these six affiliation strategies, see Kreuzer and Pettai (fn. 27), 75–76.

³⁴ For some first efforts in this direction, see Kreuzer and Pettai (fn. 27); Shabad and Slomczynski (fn. 27); Scott Desposato, “Party Switching in Brazil's 49th Chamber of Deputies” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 16, 1997); and Carol Mershon and William B. Heller, “Party Fluidity and Legislators' Vote Choices: The Italian Chamber of Deputies, 1996–2000” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, August 30-September 2,2001).

³⁵ See Kreuzer and Pettai (fn. 27).

³⁶ Kreuzer, and Pettai, , “Party Switching: How Disloyal Politicians Structure Party Organization, Popular Representation and Political Change” (Manuscript, Villanova University, 2004Google Scholar).

³⁷ Carothers (fn. 6).

³⁸ Pierson (fn. 8).

³⁹ Peter Hall, “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Politics,” in Mahoney and Rueschmeyer (fn. 3).

⁴⁰ On this point, see also Kitschelt, , Mansfeldova, , Markowski, , and Toka, , 1–3. The distinction between splitters and lumpers is owed to Jack Hexter, “On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Makers of Modern History (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1979), 241Google Scholar–42.