Black garden aflame: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the Soviet and Russian Press

Abstract

make decisions and lead electoral campaigns, largely irrespective of party organizational constraints. In Slovenia, early on strong politicians were central to the processes of transition to democracy and the foundation and development of parties. The authors of the chapter on Slovenia (Danica Fink-Hafner and Alenka Krašovec) make a useful distinction between the presidentialisation of older parties and the personalization of leadership in new parties, which sounds like a completely unbound form of presidentialisation. In Serbia’s constitutional design, checks and balances are not solid. The authors (Dušan Spasojević and Zoran Stojiljković) found that there is a lot of room for strong party leaders to claim personal political legitimacy (e.g., through a direct election to the Presidency) and to treat political institutions, including their own parties, as malleable structures. The parliamentary regimes of Albania and Kosovo also create conditions conducive for the presidentialisation of parties. As the chapter on Albania shows, there is a gap between what formal regulations stipulate and what practical circumstances facilitate. Afrim Krasniqi argues that Albania’s parliamentary regime has quasi-presidentialist features and party leaders wield much more power than the legal framework provides. In Kosovo, Albert Krasniqi explores how the presidentialisation of parties has been facilitated by legacies of war (during which party leaders were military leaders), the mode of party financing, which is controlled by party leaders, and the empowerment of party leaders by the international community in order to promote political stability in a war-torn society. One wonders whether other explanatory variables have played a role in making West Balkan parties as presidential as the volume’s contributors argue. For example, research in Europe and the USA has shown how recent electoral campaigns are run not so much by political party organizations, but by professional media experts, relying on attractive, personal traits of party leaders. Another independent variable is the size of the parties under study. Even the largest West Balkan parties are essentially small organizations. The structure and daily functioning of parties, in which often everyone knows everyone else in person, is bound to be personalistic. Such criticisms notwithstanding, the book’s readers obtain an informed analysis and opinion about major domestic political developments in West Balkan democracies. Passarelli and his research associates integrate the cases of West Balkan party systems and parties into the international literature of European comparative politics, helping to make the latter richer in terms of case variation. Finally, the volume is so well-informed and wellwritten that it could also serve as a textbook on domestic Western Balkan politics.