The Slovak American Society of Washington, D.C.
and
The Friends of Slovakia
present:
“The New Party Challenge in Slovakia: Understanding and Dealing with Constant Political Change”
Kevin Deegan-Krause
Associate Professor of Political Science
Wayne State University
&
Tim Haughton
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom
Saturday, May 15, 1:00 pm EST
To register for this event on the Zoom platform, please visit: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwqdOuurTIiH9O6Xh5oZ-xrgimnLRyWT0Gy.
If you have any questions about the event, please contact info@dcslovaks.org.
If you’ve spent 10 minutes lately looking at Slovakia’s political party system, you know that it changes with amazing rapidity, its political parties coming and going so quickly that it’s hard to keep track. (During that 10 minutes you might have even witnessed the birth or death of a party…or maybe even both).
Why is it that political parties in some countries endure, while in Slovakia they live fast and die young? And how unusual is Slovakia compared to other countries? In an engaging presentation based on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Prof. Deegan-Krause and Prof. Haughton will show how the findings in their new book – The New Party Challenge (Oxford University Press, 2020) – help to explain Slovakia’s rapid political change, and will then put it into broader context. By looking at Slovakia’s history, and that of other new (and old) democracies where rapid political change has become the norm, they look at the possible benefits of a shifting party system and what countries can do to escape the disadvantages.
Kevin Deegan-Krause is a political scientist who has spent more than two decades studying how political parties compete against one another, and how that competition shapes what happens in a democracy. His research on political parties has yielded many articles in political-science journals, as well as two books – Elected Affinities: Democracy and Party Competition in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Stanford University Press, 2006) and The New Party Challenge: Changing Cycles of Party Birth and Death in Central Europe and Beyond (co-written with Tim Haughton; Oxford University Press, 2020). His ongoing research focuses on the emergence of new political parties and the transformation of existing ones.
Tim Haughton is a political scientist with a particular interest in electoral and party politics, electoral campaigning, the relationship between politics and government, the interaction between domestic and European sources of change, the relationship between Britain and the EU, the role of the past in the politics of the present, and the domestic politics of Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. He is the author of several books including, most recently, The New Party Challenge (co-authored with Kevin Deegan-Krause; Oxford University Press, 2020). He served as Director of the Centre for Russian, European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) from 2012 to 2014, and Chair of the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham from 2016 to 2018.
