Reformist elites kept the party alive for lack of administrative skills to replace it

Evidence

Yet for all the rapid changes, the Slovak party did not dissolve. Some leaders argued this would mean the reformists would not rejoin the party. More importantly, the party’s inexperienced reformist elites felt vulnerable without a sizeable organization behind them104 – they simply did not have the administrative skill to dissolve the party and go about founding its replacement. While they could gain power in the party, and knew what they had to do to assert it, these new elites were neither numerous nor skilled enough to dissolve the party and staff its structures with their own people. By the time the party could hold its first independent congress, in October 1990, party leader Weiss argued that it would be peculiar to dissolve the party then. The party had survived the June 1990 elections, and so the leadership felt more confident, even as the members grew complacent about party transformation. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 513

Categorization

• XREF: A non-ideological, capacity-based explanation for why a successor party survived its crisis — organizational inertia and elite skill constraints rather than a new ideological mission. — connects to: Elite skill and pragmatism, not ideology, drove successful party transformation.; Elite skill, not ideology, drove communist party organizational regeneration — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 390

Broader Connections

• Elite skill and pragmatism, not ideology, drove successful party transformation. #contradicts (0.75)
• Elite skill, not ideology, drove communist party organizational regeneration #contradicts (0.72) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 390