Grigore Pop-Eleches

Princeton University | PU · Department of Politics

A growing literature focuses on the role of political partisanship in shaping attitudes and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We provide a different perspective, by developing a theory of how partisanship interacts with another important factor that shapes how people think and behave in the context of the pandemic—local n...

We study the effects of transitional justice (TJ) programs that punish large numbers of human rights violators through the lenses of social psychology theories on how individuals respond to punishment in allocative situations, including how defendants in court trials evaluate their verdicts. We analyze subnational variation in procedures and outcom...

Significance We advance our understanding of changes in polarization over time and across space by highlighting how the nature and structure of social interactions shape changes in attitudinal polarization. We show how including geographical information in adaptive voter models improves their predictive accuracy for both individual-level attitude c...

What is the impact of repression on opposition to authoritarian rule? Studies of repression and dissent have yielded contradictory results. Some research suggests that repression reduces popular resistance while others show that it creates backlash and more dissent. In this article, we present an informational theory of repression to account for su...

Covert forms of authoritarian control remain an understudied strategy of authoritarian survival. This article uses the infiltration of the Catholic Church with secret collaborators in communist Poland to study the drivers and consequences of such covert forms of control. We theorize that sub-national variation in communist infiltration is driven by...

This introductory essay outlines the key themes of the special issue on the long-term impact of autocracies on the political attitudes and behavior of their subjects. Here, we highlight several important areas of theoretical and empirical refinements, which can provide a more nuanced picture of the process through which authoritarian attitudinal le...

Covert forms of authoritarian repression remain an understudied strategy of authoritarian survival. This article uses the infiltration of the Catholic Church with secret collaborators in communist Poland to study the drivers and consequences of such covert repression. We theorize that sub-national variations in communist infiltration are driven by...

How harshly should perpetrators of past abuses be punished, to reinforce the legitimacy of a new democracy? Drawing on sociopsychological theories, we hypothesize that prodemocratic mass attitudes are favored by the perception that defendants in transitional justice trials have been punished in a way that is morally proportional to their offenses....

Online Appendix – Supplementary Information “Democracy and Retribution: Transitional Justice and Regime Support in Post-War West Germany” Comparative Political Studies, 2020

Communist regimes were avowedly leftist authoritarian regimes, a relative rarity among autocracies. The growing literature on regime legacies would lead us to expect that postcommunist citizens would be more likely to exhibit “left-authoritarian” attitudes than their counterparts elsewhere. Finding that this is the case, we rely on 157 surveys from...

The analysis of attitudinal effects of transitional justice (TJ) programs has typically focused on the general population or on victims of past abuses. The attitudinal effects on defendants have been much less studied. These effects acquire a particular political relevance for the legitimacy and viability of the new democratic regime when TJ progra...

Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the relationship between ethnicity, language practice, and civic identities on the one hand and political attitudes on the other. We find that while ethnic identities and language practices change little on the aggregate level over the period, there has been a...

It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism’s Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment...

This chapter discusses the attitudinal imprint of communism on the second main ideological pillar that differentiated communist regimes form their Western rivals: support for market-based economic principles. In line with the findings about democratic support in the previous chapter, the empirical evidence from the first two decades of post-communi...

This chapter provides a more focused living through communism model to explain attitudinal divergence among post-communist citizens. In particular, it lays out the specific variables expected—based on the history of communism and how it developed in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—to have potentially increased the intensity of the commun...

This chapter looks at the questions of data and methodology. It is divided into three parts. The first part introduces in much greater detail the intuition behind the study's methodological approach. The second part provides information regarding the modeling choices made in the analyses, the justification for doing so, and a discussion of some of...

This concluding chapter analyzes the results of this book's study, addressing what is suggested both for one's understanding of post-communist politics and for the study of legacy effects more generally. The major finding of this study is that there is much stronger empirical support for the living through communism model than for the living in a p...

This chapter analyzes the mechanisms underlying the large and temporally resilient democratic values deficit among residents of post-communist countries. While a number of pre-communist and post-communist demographic, political, and economic factors affect democratic support patterns, these features of living in a post-communist country alone canno...

This chapter addresses the question of the temporal resilience of communist socialization effects. To do so, it develops three stylized models of attitudinal change, which carry very different implications for the temporal evolution of both aggregate-level post-communist exceptionalism and within-country attitudinal differences between different ag...

This chapter examines the mechanisms underlying the greater support for an active welfare state among residents of post-communist countries. The analysis found very strong evidence that additional years of exposure to communist rule were correlated with greater support for state responsibility for social welfare. Moreover, and in line with the find...

It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. This book instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the le...

This chapter explores attitudes toward gender equality as the fourth issue area for assessing the effect of communist legacies. The baseline finding from initial examinations of the raw data, the bivariate analyses, and all living in a post-communist country analysis was somewhat surprising: not only were the study unable to find any evidence of a...

This introductory chapter addresses the question of why post-communist citizens are less supportive of democracy and markets, and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The most intuitive answer to this question is that it is somehow a legacy of communism. However, as popular as it has become to attribute outcomes of interest in post-com...

Political elites in new democracies typically confront the problem of how to mitigate the destabilizing potential of large masses of alienated voters who might oppose the new regime, either because they are still ideologically linked to the past authoritarian regime or because they associate the democratic transition with the loss of material resou...

Comparable household income measures are crucial for most social science analyses of cross-national public opinion survey data. However, income questions in many cross-national surveys suffer from comparability and interpretability limitations that have not been adequately addressed by the existing literature. In this article, we examine the income...

We analyze patterns in three structural factors widely associated with democratization prospects—income, ethnic fragmentation and state quality. We find that while the profile of both fully democratic and closed autocratic regimes has improved since the 1980s, hybrid regimes have deteriorated. Moreover, the impact of structural conditions varies by...

A growing literature in comparative politics focuses on the role of elections in authoritarian regimes. While most see elections as a tool of authoritarian control, some argue that they represent a vehicle for political liberalization. We demonstrate that authoritarian elections can be disruptive of authoritarian rule but that electoral disruption...

The state remains the most important political unit of the modern world. In the most recent phase of globalization the role and position of the state has changed, but after a short intermezzo in which nothing less than the “end of the state” was frequently proclaimed, the social sciences have reached consensus about the ongoing centrality of states...

This article discusses two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical legacies in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on the work of Ken Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic and political legacies, while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew Janos, highlights the signifi...

This article analyzes the post-communist regime track record in comparative perspective and reevaluates the impact of modernization on the democratic prospects in developing countries. The analysis shows that ex-communist countries were less democratic than their socio-economic development levels would have predicted, and that the development-democ...

Although none of the color revolutions has proved to be completely successful in bringing about long-term democratic change, differences in outcomes among them cast light on both the possibilities and the limitations that countries face when liberalization opportunities present themselves. Comparison of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan is i...

We investigate the effect of individual exposure to communism on support for democracy and capitalism. We examine whether this effect varies across different types of communism, at different periods of people's lives, in different countries, and across different types of individuals. To do so, we propose a modified approach to solving the APC probl...

This article lays out a methodology for studying the nature of communist legacies and their impact on current political behavior and attitudes. It identifies four possible linkages between the communist past and the present: early socialization, socio-demographic landscapes, and political and economic institutions.

In this article, we test the effect of communist-era legacies on the large and temporally resilient deficit in civic participation in post-communist countries. To do so, we analyze data from 157 surveys conducted between 1990 and 2009 in twenty four post-communist countries and forty-two non-post-communist countries. The specific hypotheses we test...

Twenty years after the collapse of communism, a rough consensus in the literature on postcommunist politics is that the past matters. Many questions remain, however, about exactly how, when, and why the past matters, especially in terms of political values and behavior. An original theoretical framework facilitates the consideration of the effect o...

A rapidly growing literature in comparative politics focuses on the role of elections as key moments of vulnerability for authoritarians and as a crucial mechanism through which liberalization can be achieved. However, in this paper we demonstrate that authoritarian elections can lead to deliberalization as well as liberalization. We argue that thi...

The left-right political spectrum sits at the heart of political analysis. Yet questions remain as to the appropriateness of the left-right spectrum for the comparative analysis of party systems: does the left-right spectrum mean the same thing in different political contexts, and in particular is it appropriate to compare left-right self-placement...

Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essay examines political reforms in Bulgaria and Romania since EU accession and, in particular, the ‘backsliding’ hypothesis—that these countries have abandoned or reversed the reforms they introduced in order to qualify for membership of the European Union...

The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (uops) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which...

This article documents and explains the puzzling lack of backsliding in political reforms among the new postcommunist EU members, even though these countries are no longer subject to the powerful incentives of the EU membership promise. Using a combination of cross-national statistics, expert interviews, and public opinion data, the authors show th...

Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development. By Leiva Fernando Ignacio. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 312p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper. - Volume 7 Issue 4 - Grigore Pop-Eleches

This article uses empirical evidence from Latin American and East European International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs from 1982 to 2001 to analyze the nature and the extent of preferential lending practices by the IMF. Unlike prior work, which focused on narrow political interference from large IMF member states, the present analysis differentiates...

This paper analyzes the changing role of partisan politics in the developing world since the 1980s. The analysis identifies two related but distinct dimensions of partisanship – ideology and institutional ties – and then tests their impact on IMF program initiation in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the last two decades. In addition to this con...

Voter turnout in post-communist countries has exhibited wildly fluctuating patterns against a backdrop of economic and political volatility. In this article, we consider three explanations for this variation: a “depressing disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are less likely to vote in elections when political and economic conditions are...

The wave of neoliberal economic reforms in the developing world since the 1980s has been regarded as the result of both severe economic crises and policy pressures from global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Using comparative evidence from the initiation and implementation of IMF programs in Latin America and E...

This article analyzes the reasons for the remarkable adaptability and electoral success of Communist successor parties in post-1990 Romania. The first part develops a three-dimensional classification scheme to identify Communist successor parties on the basis of their institutional, personnel and ideological continuity with the defunct Communist Pa...

This article analyzes the interaction between economic crises and partisan politics during International Monetary Fund program initiation in Latin America in the 1980s and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The author argues that economic crises are at least in part in the eye of the beholder, and therefore policy responses reflect the interaction betwee...

The wave of neoliberal economic reforms in the developing world since the 1980s has been regarded as the result of both severe economic crises and policy pressures from global financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Using comparative evidence from the initiation and implementation of IMF programs in Latin America and E...

This article shows that post-communist regime trajectories have been largely circumscribed by historical legacy differences, but the question about which particular legacy matters most is much harder to answer, since statistical results are sensitive to model specification and to the choice of democracy indicator. While some of these discrepancies...

Post-communist democracy promotion has been most important in “borderline” countries, which had less favorable structural conditions than the East-Central European frontrunners, but where a domestic democratic constituency nevertheless existed and could benefit from Western support. External democracy promotion efforts have ranged from “soft” diplo...

ithin the study of economic growth and development, there is a consensus of sorts that "institutions matter." However, decades after political scientists, sociologists, and dissident economists first suggested that institutions played a cru- cial role in promoting the explosive post-war economic growth of first Japan and then the East Asian "tigers...

Journal of Democracy 12.3 (2001) 156-169 In November and December 2000, Romania conducted largely free and fair elections for both parliament and the presidency, resulting in the second peaceful turnover of power in its short postcommunist history. But what might in theory have been considered a milestone of democratic consolidation was in practice...

This paper analyzes the reasons for the clear victory of the leftist Party of Social Democracy (PDSR) and its presidential candidate, Ion Iliescu in the 2000 Romanian elections, as well as the strong showing of the extremist Greater Romania Party (PRM) and its leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor. Based on an analysis of voter surveys, the paper argues that...

In recent years there has been a revival in political science in thinking about political cleavages and how cross-cutting cleavages can contribute to inter-ethnic cooperation. In this paper we argue that cross-cutting cleavages alone are not enough to generate cooperation and that much depends on the details of the cleavage structure itself. We foc...

This course will examine some of these patterns in order to help you to understand, analyze, and negotiate the politics surrounding public policy. We will explore the relationships between political and policy analysis, strategic thinking and bargaining, the role of material and symbolic incentives in policy actors' choices, and ways that organizat...

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This paper addresses the question of whether incumbents can buy political support through targeted public spending. Using a regression discontinuity approach which takes advantage of the quasi-experimental design of a recent Romanian government program that distributed coupons worth 200 Euros to poor families towards the purchase of a computer, we...

Alexis de Tocqueville Prizes in Social Studies--Harvard University, 1995. Thesis (A.B., Honors in Social Studies)--Harvard University, 1995. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Political Science)--University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2003. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 264-276).