engleski

Stability and Permissiveness: Party Regulation and Party Competition in Croatia

The paper examines impacts of the party regulation on the development of the party system in Croatia from 1990 to 2016. The first part of the paper brings review of the state legislation concerning political parties and their organization and financing in Croatia as well as its major changes. Although political parties in Croatia are from the beginning recognized as the public entities and eventually put in the Croatian Constitution in 1990, the subsequent development of party regulation was rather slow and very liberal, resulting in an under-regulated system of party competition. Despite rather frequent changes of laws, it is clear that political elites used the legislative mechanisms to verify the existing organizational and financial practice and not to set any more ambitious policy towards pushing parties to function in the public interest. Only recently, under the pressure from the civil society and the EU, regulation of party funding and spending substantially restricted private funding of parties and improved transparency of party money flows. Despite this, some important effects of the party regulation on the party system can be recognized, though often through non-regulation or ill-regulation more than through direct positive impacts of discrete rules. In the second part of the paper three such impacts are examined. Firstly, a rather liberal rules concerned legal establishment of parties accompanied with certain forms of direct and indirect public party funding contributed to the fact that Croatian party system in the same time has a large number of parties and a low level of effective political representation. Secondly, even such tiny party funding rules secured from the beginning that the overwhelming part of party incomes is consisted of public money, making parties almost completely dependent on the state.

Croatia ; parties ; party law ; party finance regulations

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