Political parties and party systems in Czechoslovakia – Towards the continuity and discontinuity within “transitology” research

The article examines the question of continuity and discontinuity in the development of parties and party systems that have existed in Czechoslovakia in the course of the 20th century, furthermore, it focuses on the related issues of their transformation. Its author presents and designs analyses differences among the character and functions of political and party systems that ware formed as a consequence of the “break” points of the Czech political history in 1918, 1938/39, 1945, 1948 and 1989. It turns out the question of transformation, continuity or discontinuity of the political partisanship cannot be answered so easily. Nevertheless, it is possible to establish dominance of the elements of discontinuity, while in some aspects we can find a formal continuity and some phenomena tend to reproduce themselves in certain periods of history.