International Actors and Democratization: US Assistance to New Political Parties in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

What happens to revolutionary movements when they assume power? While the literature in political science and sociology has traditionally argued that new parties will reflect societal cleavages within nation states, recent analyses have challenged the assumption that new political parties will reproduce the patterns of earlier parliamentary democracies and observed the increasing influence of international and transnational actors. In this paper, I argue that new political parties may emerge around political rather than economic cleavages in conditions of rapid change, while assistance to political parties may create a dual relationship whereby international organizational forms and issue areas lackig historical precendent are adopted, but adapted to mobilize public support.