At the Parliament or in the Streets? Issue Composition of Contentious Politics in the Visegrad Countries Work in progress; please contact us for the most recent version of the manuscript. Ondrej Cisar and Katerina Vrablikova
[email protected] [email protected] Paper prepared for the ECPR General Conference, Université de Montréal 26 - 29 August 2015 (Panel: Party-Movements Interactions and the Policy Process: Beyond the Movements vs. Parties Dichotomy) Introduction In the last decades protest has rapidly grown and “normalized” as a standard component of conventional politics (Norris et al. 2006, Norris 2002, Meyer and Tarrow 1998, Teorell et al. 2007). In addition to political parties contentious/movement politics is one of the most important political forces in contemporary democracies. Surprisingly, we have thus far learned rather little about the interaction between parties and protest politics as the two fields have been mostly studied separately (McAdam and Tarrow 2013). There is a complete lack of such research in post-communist countries. While researchers have focused on the 1989 big protest events that accompanied the initial phase of democratization and a short period after that (see Glenn 2001, 2003, Ekiert and Kubik 2001, della Porta 2014), the research on political conflict in this region has solely been party-centered and mostly disregarded the role played by contentious politics. The goal of this paper is to examine interaction dynamics between party and protest politics in four post-communist democracies – the Visegrad countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) – as they provide the study with a great variation in the issue configuration of their political space.