Early popular support for a party can erode completely over decades

Evidence

Third, the Czech party’s domestic roots, its postwar popular support, and the secularism of the populace favored the Czechoslovak communist party immediately after World War II. Some scholars thus predicted that this initial popular support meant that the party would succeed in the post- 1989 polity. However, the initial support in Czechoslovakia for the communists rapidly subsided after the party’s brutal coup in 1948 and even more so after the 1968–70 crackdown, so that very little remained by 1989. Without taking into account the ebbing strength of this legacy over time, we may be led to the wrong conclusion. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 142

Categorization

• XREF: Shows a legacy’s causal force decays with time — relevant to whether a constitutive external threat has durable or time-limited effects on solidarity. — connects to: Establishment center-left parties can collapse from dominance to irrelevance in years. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 169; Centrist social democratic parties can collapse suddenly into irrelevance. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 170