Croatia at the crossroads

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 1998, Pages

  Pusić, Vesna ^a,b,c  

^a University of Zagreb ^*

^b UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB   (Croatia)

^c Georgetown University s   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 1842685569     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1998.0016     Document Type: Article

References (9)

1. By 1995, there were 65 registered political parties in Croatia. The most comprehensive official source, however, gives data only for the 28 parties that bothered to return their official information questionnaires. See the Statistical Yearbook of Croatia, 1995 (Zagreb: Central Bureau of Statistics of the Republic of Croatia, 1996), 48.
2. In the 1997 elections for the House of Counties and the municipal assemblies, HSLS suffered significant losses, while the SDP gained votes and seats. The HSLS remains, however, the largest single opposition party in the House of Representatives.
3. In the second and much larger assault, codenamed Operation Storm, the numbers killed during the actual military operation (until 10 August 1995) were reported as 2,584 Serbian and 150 Croatian. See O. Zuneć, "Drzava i pobunjenici: Operacija Oluja i njene posljedice" (The state and the rebels: Operation Storm and its consequences), Erasmus 13 (October 1995): 4-10. The casualty figures, low by the standards of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, influenced the favorable view that most people in Croatia took of these military thrusts.
4. Nobody is quite certain about the actual numbers of that change, since there has not been a census since 1991. Some estimates say that during the whole war period (1991-95) Croatia's ethnic-Serb population had gone from 12 percent to 5 percent.
5. Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, and Richard Gunther, "Democratic Transition and Consolidation in Southern Europe, with Reflections on Latin America and Eastern Europe," in Richard Gunther, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, and Hans-Jürgen Puhle, eds., The Politics of Democratic Consolidation: Southern Europe in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 82.
6. Television is totally under the control of the party-state. There is one independent local radio station in Zagreb (Radio 101), and a few other independent local radio stations outside Zagreb (these latter have weak transmitters and cover only small areas). There is one independent daily newspaper (Novi list, published in Rijeka), and four or five independent national political weeklies.
7. In the World Values Survey that I conducted in Croatia in December 1995, 38.9 percent of respondents from a representative sample of Croatians said that they would vote for the HDZ. In the Croatian political weekly Tjednik of 15 March 1997, the highest reported estimate is 30 percent.
8. The October 1995 elections left the HDZ with a 75-seat majority of the 128-member House of Representatives. The remaining 53 seats were divided as follows: Social-Liberals (HSLS), 13; Peasants (HSS), 10; Social Democrats (SDP), 9; Party of Rights (HSP), 4; Istrian Democrats (IDS), 4; Croatian People's Party (HNS), 2; Serbian People's Party (SNS), 2; Christian Democrats (HKDU), 1; Party of Slavonia and Baranja (SBDS), 1; Social Democratic Action of Croatia (ASH), 1; miscellaneous independent members, 6. The five parties that formed the coalition Novi Sabor 95 (the HSS, HNS, IDS, SBDS, and HKDU) together got 18 seats.
9. I include here Zagreb, where the opposition won the polling but was denied the mayor because of the already-described HDZ maneuvering. The other three cities are Split, Rijeka, and Osijek.