The Socialist Party of Serbia 1990-2000: Political Impotence of the Organizational Omnipotence

Working Paper No. 3

Summary
This paper seeks to explain the role played by the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) in
functioning of the Serbian hybrid regime in the 1990s. It argues that, on the one
hand, owing to considerable financial assets, infrastructure and membership
inherited from the Serbian League of Communists (SKS), the SPS had a substantial
advantage over its rivals in political competition, critical for the regime’s
maintenance. At the same time, it contends that, as a result of the absolute
concentration of authority in the hands of its leader Slobodan Milošević, the capacity
of the SPS, as a political actor, to influence the processes of decision-making that
determined the regime’s dynamics was largely insignificant. In other words, because
of the way its organizational power was structured – which, despite being important
dimension of party strength, is analytically neglected in most of the related works -
the SPS, rather than a political value per se, turned out being a mere political tool of
its president.

About the author
Ivan Vuković is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science of the
Central European University in Budapest. In addition, he works as a teaching
assistant at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Montenegro. The
working title of his doctoral dissertation is ‘The Post-Communist Political Transition of
the Western Balkans: Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia between Yugoslav Past and
European Future’ (supervisor: Zsolt Enyedi). His main research interest relates to
general problems of political transition and democratization of the post-communist
European states and, in particular, the political dynamics of so-called hybrid regimes
in this region and beyond.