The International Factor in the Domestic Political Transformation in the Kosovo's* “Albanian World”

The Kosovo issue is predominantly researched in academic and expert literature from an international political perspective. However, in light of common socio-political processes taking place in Europe during the last fi ve-seven years, the study of its internal political component, namely the political party transformation under the infl uence of external factors and the international community, regional stabilization eff orts is no less important. Based on J. Sartori’s classifi cation of party systems and R. Harmel and K. Janda’s theory of party change, the article studies the role of international actors, in particular the European Union, played in the institutional transformation of the political party transformation in the Albanian Kosovo. It also studies what opportunities and barriers appeared as a result of the EU’s involvement. The paper explains why the complex confi guration of the international mission in Kosovo in practice did not increase its legitimacy and establish an institutional system of governance but instead resulted in a loss of the mission’s credibility. The paper analyses and describes the process of political party transformation in Kosovo’s “Albanian world” and highlights the signifi cant milestones in the development of a party system involving those that had been borne out of the Kosovo confl ict. The article explains their possible ways of transformation in the future. It also explains the success factors of the populist “Self-Determination” movement and how sustainable this success has been in the changing international balance.

Party (de)institutionalization in times of political uncertainty: The case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey

Recently many polities around the world as different as Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, Thailand suffer from autocratization. This has led to a growing scholarly interest in the process of autocratization. Yet, despite this emerging generation of studies on democratic setbacks, we still do not know much about the changing nature of party politics in the process of autocratization. We argue, in this article, that during autocratization, the incumbent party follows the path of internal and external party deinstitutionalization in response to the changing nature and intensity of political uncertainties. Using the case of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey, we address three questions: (1) How can the concept of party de-institutionalization be revised and used to understand party transformation during autocratization? (2) What explains party deinstitutionalization in transitional contexts? (3) What is the relationship between party de-institutionalization and autocratization? In doing so, this article increases our understanding of party transformation in transitional contexts and more specifically incumbent party change in the process of autocratization by providing a causal theory of party deinstitutionalization.

Platform for Integrating and Testing Tools which Transform Natural Language Queries into SPARQL Queries

In the paper we discuss how to support the process of creating tools which transform natural language (NL) queries into SPARQL queries (hereinafter referred to as a transformation tool). In the introduction, we describe the relevance of the task of understanding natural language queries by information systems, as well as the advantages of using ontologies as a means of representing knowledge for solving this problem. This ontology-based data access approach can be also used in systems which provide natural language interface to databases. Based on the analysis of problems related to the integration and testing of existing transformation tools, as well as to support the creation and testing own transformation modules, the concept of a software platform that simplifies these tasks is proposed. The platform architecture satisfies the requirements for ease of connecting third party transformation tools, reusing individual modules, as well as integrating the resulting transformation tools into other systems, including testing systems. The building blocks of the created transformation systems are the individual transformation modules packaged in Docker containers. Program access to each module is carried out using gRPC. Modules loaded into the platform can be built into the transformation pipeline automatically or manually using the built-in third party SciVi data flow diagram editor. Compatibility of individual modules is controlled by automatic analysis of application programming interfaces. The resulting pipeline is combined according to specified data flow into a single multi-container application that can be integrated into other systems, as well as tested on extendable test suites. The expected and actual results of the query transformation are available for viewing in graphical form in the visualization tool developed earlier.

The European People's Party and the East

Using the example of the European People’s Party’s (EPP) activities in the Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, this book demonstrates that European political parties may, under certain conditions, successfully influence political party transformation in the Eastern European Neighbourhood. In order to cover the highest possible variety of interactions between the EPP and its partner parties, the study examines three different mechanisms of norm promotion: conditionality, persuasion and social influence. While the EPP has influenced its partner parties to a certain extent both on an internal and an external level of party development, certain features of its partner parties have, however, strongly limited its influence, and its partner parties have often been resistant to change. Equally, their compliance with the EPP has frequently been merely rhetorical or formal. Finally, the author suggests a typology of which type of partner parties has been more likely to demonstrate such compliance.

Hoist on their own petards? The reinvention and collapse of authoritarian successor parties

What happens to authoritarian ruling parties when they accept democracy and reinvent their organizations, symbols, and programs to comply with the norms of free political competition? The consequences of such reinvention have been neglected empirically, yet they are critical for our understanding both of the costs and benefits of party transformation and for the health of democratic party competition. Using a novel data set comprising 81 countries over 1945–2015, and a structured comparison of two prominent cases of authoritarian reinvention, this article makes three contributions. First, it distinguishes among the different strategies available to authoritarian ruling parties after the collapse of their monopoly regimes, including exit, dissolution, and reinvention. Second, it finds that the cruel paradox is that the biggest boosters and builders of party democracy—the reinvented authoritarian successor parties—eventually suffer the most electorally. Third, this paradoxical fate follows from their initial decisions to reinvent and transform themselves.

What explains former rebel party name changes after a civil conflict ends? External and internal factors and the transition to political competition

The transformation of rebel groups into political parties has captured the attention of scholars of both conflict studies and of party transformation. In this paper we examine the question of rebel party image change by investigating the causes of name changes adopted by a rebel organization as it transforms into a political party after the end of a civil conflict. We develop an analytical framework based upon the extensive literature on party identity change in the West, and apply it to the name changes of rebel parties. Using an original data set of 54 former rebel organizations, we find that factors internal to the organization (such as the degree of inclusivity and the origins of the rebel organization) explain name change more than factors related to the post conflict environment.