On Parties and Party System in Albania : What Implications for Democracy

This article aims at contributing to the debate on party system and its implications on democratic consolidation in South-Eastern Europe by making a deep analysis of the Albanian case. In doing so, this article will lay out his arguments into five main parts. My starting point will be a short snapshot of the historical background of Albanian political parties so to sketch an idea of what may be argued as a continuity or path-dependency element on the today Albanian political system. The second part of my article will focus on the recent party development in Albania pointing at its major characteristics. As the next step, I will discuss the relations between political parties and their electorate. In the third section, the question of Albanian political reality will be examined both 1) from the perspective of political sociology, using Lipset-Rokkan model of cleavage alignments and 2) that of political institutionalism, more inclined to the primacy of institutions and political competition. As complement to such an agency-centred approach, the party-elite behaviour will be discussed to comprehensively explore the complex picture of Albanian political reality. Fourthly, on tackling the contradictions that are ever present in the debate of whether Albanian democracy is consolidated or not (always with reference to how parties and party system works), I argue that it is not much the (democratic) institutions who have framed political elites’ behaviour rather than the opposite. It has been the authoritarian political cultures of the Albanian political elites that have distort the democratic institutions. The main challenge in the Albanian case is not the adaptation of democratic institutions, formal rules and principles but how much they are put into practice by political actors. As last but not least, having discussed the handicaps of the Albanian party system I will put forward some suggestion that are to be considered as immediate for the well functioning of Albanian party system and as a consequence of Albanian democracy.