| Abstract [eng] |
The article provides a diachronic quantitative comparison of the political regimes of the First (interwar, LR I) and Second (contemporary, LR II) Republics of Lithuania, which is supplemented by synchronic comparisons with the neighbour countries. For this comparison, the data set and Index of Democracy by the Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen (known in the literature as the Vanhanen Index, VI) is used, whose values are calculated by multiplying those of the indicators of public contestation and of participation at the elections. The data of Vanhanen are corrected, extended, and some of his assumptions are criticised. (1) Calculating the VI values for interwar Lithuania, Vanhanen uses imprecise demographic and electoral statistical data for 1920–1923. (2) The III Seimas (Lithuanian parliament) election in 1926 and that of IV Seimas in 1936 are missing in his data. Therefore, the VI values for Lithuania in 1920–1939 are underestimated. In his calculations for the LR II, Vanhanen (3) used incorrect contestation data on the elections to the Restoration Seimas in 1990 and (4) misclassified the LR II after adoption of the 1992 constitution as a political system with parliamentary dominance. In fact, contemporary Lithuania is semi-presidential republic and should be classified as a system of concurrent powers. Vanhanen’s data-set is extended with the data for 2001–2009. According to the author’s recalculations with corrected data, the VI values in 1920–1925 were no less than in 1990–1995, and its value in 1926 is on a par with the highest VI values for the LR II. Importantly, participation in all four free Lithuanian Seimas elections in 1920–1926 was constantly high, while participation in the parliamentary elections in the LR II is steadily decreasing. In 1926, the value of the VI index for Lithuania caught up with those in the other Baltic States, which are reputed as more advanced in terms of social and political modernization. With 86.4% of all voters included into the lists going to the polls, the election to the III Seimas in 1926 set an absolute all-time participation record for all free elections in Lithuania (there is no reliable data on its most close competitor – elections to the Constituent Assembly in 1920). These and other comparisons reveal the Vanhanen’s index to be a measure just of electoral democracy and not of the full-scale liberal democracy. In interwar Lithuania, liberal democracy existed only for 5 months in 1926, when the state of emergency (justified by the conflict with Poland) was recalled. In the LR II, the consolidation of liberal democracy made a rapid advance after 1992. The high participation in all Seimas elections (including unfree and unfair election in 1936) in the interwar Lithuania contradicts the established opinion that interwar Lithuanian society was not ready for democracy. Even if one indeed may doubt their maturity for liberal democracy, Lithuanians accepted and appreciated electoral democracy. As a matter of fact, Lithuania in 1920–1926 is quite on a par with or even surpasses the LR II in terms of the level of electoral democracy. The LR II surpasses the LR I in terms of liberal democracy. Vanhanen’s index is not a valid tool for measuring liberal democracy. However, the application of Vanhanen’s index to the time of the 1926 coup helps to highlight in the decorative parliamentarism of the IV Seimas in 1936–1940 some non-fictive elements of a genuine electoral regime, which have survived because of the obstacles for the complete entrenchment of authoritarianism set by the autonomy of the Klaipėda region under defense of international treaties. |
