The thesis researches particularity and nature of the pattern interrelations between the political opposition and the power and defines their impact on the democratization of the political systems of the Visegrad Group countries. The combination of theories of social capital conversion, synergetics, fluctuation, institutionalism, and neo-institutionalism was defined as the most relevant methodological approach. Due to the theory of social capital conversion, we have substantiated individual and group strategies of social capital conversion, clarified the dynamics of the objective structure of the political field, the commensurability of dispositions between the power and the opposition, and the change of their boundaries during repositioning in each of the studied countries. The interrelationship between the power and the opposition is studied as a process of accumulation, conversion, and exchange of capital in the struggle for the metacapital of the state. The synergetic approach was applied to analyze the role of power and opposition as determinants of fluctuation and bifurcation, qualitative change in the state of the system in the range between chaos and order, and the ability of nonlinear dynamic systems to self-organize. Synergetics has helped to establish the involvement of both the opposition and the power in the emergence of regular and strange attractors and their use as a resource for the accumulation of political capital.
The research has ascertained strategies for the accumulation and conversion of social capitals of the power and the opposition that help to understand the differences between democratization processes; revealed the specificity of their interrelations in each studied country, in consideration of the starting conditions, products of democratization, practices of democratic transition and their indicators; the research as well identified the defining points as bifurcation conditions for the democratization of political systems of the Visegrad Group countries, which separate the phases of growth and decline of mutual influence and have a decisive impact on democratization indicators.
Patterns in the interrelations between the power and the opposition as a determinant of a system's self-organization have been identified and their influence on the dynamics of democratization processes found. It has been proved that the patterns are products of strategies for the accumulation and conversion of public capital, the coordinated fixation of dispositions within the political field and habitus, implemented by political actors. They are commensurable with the force of the poles and the conditional distance between them. Therefore, the alteration of poles of the political field during the repositioning provoked insignificant changes in the interrelations between the power and the opposition. However, as for the democratization prospects, this factor plays a significant role.
Pattern interrelations have manifested themselves in the reproduction of political practices and models of political behavior in the actions of political agents, which was accompanied by the carry-over of such phenomena as political corruption, malpractice, clientelism, and others. Suchlike associated capital allowed the ruling elite to quickly compensate the costs of the election campaign and convert political capital into economic capital as the ultimate goal of the strategies of major social agents.
Based on the analysis of starting conditions, products and practices of democratic transition, institutions of constructive interaction between the power and the opposition, and indicators, the author has developed and conceptualized a dynamic model of democratization of Visegrad countries with phases of fluctuations and bifurcations, which is typical for post-communist countries. It has been established that the processes of democratization in the Visegrad Group countries have cycles of undirected non-periodic fluctuations conditioned by regular and strange attractors, which emergence is to some extent stimulated by the power and opposition and which, in turn, determines the struggle of equalization and stratification forces.
The dynamics of democratization have non-linear nature and are resulted by the implementation of a specific conversion strategy not only by the ruling but the opposition elite as well. To confirm this hypothesis, the study has determined the level of democracy in each of the studied countries in the temporal dimension, made a cross-regional comparison and highlighted the bifurcation points of the democratization process of the Visegrad political systems, establishing their dependence on the distribution of state metacapital between the power and the opposition. The study elaborated recommendations for Ukraine to improve national practices of democratization.
Key words: Visegrad Group, democratization, opposition, power, political institutions, political processes, political system.
