Externalist accounts of postcommunist party success rest on assumption rather than testable evidence

Evidence

It is important to note here that I do not suggest that this is a hard and fast distinction. Indeed, it is likely that internal factors interact with external factors to affect the performance of the successor parties (see Ishiyama, 1997). Many works on postcommunist party politics, however, have a priori assumed that parties primarily react to their environments, that is, that the externalist perspective is correct. This assumption has largely been accepted as true without comparative, empirical assessment. By conceptually separating the internal and external perspectives, we are able to test the proposition that external factors drive party electoral success and hence investigate the accuracy of the externalist perspective. — John T. Ishiyama, Party Organization and the Political…, 16

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s research thread: the claim that manufactured external threats (or environment-driven accounts) are asserted as true without comparative empirical test parallels how threat-based accounts of group solidarity are often ‘assumed’ rather than measured against internal factors.

Related

• Post-communist party success depended on internal organization, not nostalgia or economic decline (similarity 0.83)
• Party survival hinges on internal actions, not external transition pressures (similarity 0.83)
• Postcommunist successor parties are genuine organizations, not clubs. (similarity 0.82)
• Weak competitors alone sustain successor party success without genuine organizational transformation. (similarity 0.82)
• Party regeneration hinged on internal party action and opportunity, not external conditions (similarity 0.81)
• Communist successor parties won by mastering capitalism, not by rejecting it (similarity 0.81)
• Party survival in competitive postcommunist politics requires organizational adaptation, not weak rivals. (similarity 0.80)
• Communist successor parties post-1989 offer a natural experiment in how organization shapes political survival. (similarity 0.79)
• Pre-1989 party organization, not post-transition strategy, determined postcommunist electoral success (similarity 0.79)