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The structural sources of postcommunist regime trajectories
Abstract
Regime trajectories in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU) have diverged considerably since the collapse of communism. We argue that this variation is the product of two largely structural factors: the salience of anti-Soviet nationalism and the opportunity for membership in the European Union (EU) that was mostly the product of geography. In Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, anti-Soviet nationalism and the stimulus of EU democratic conditionality contributed to the rise of a non-communist elite that confronted serious internal and external pressure to democratize. By contrast, weaker anti-Soviet nationalism and dearth of pressure from the EU allowed for the persistence of communist elites who faced relatively weak external constraints on autocratic behavior. We argue that these structural factors played a more important role in accounting for variation in democratization across the postcommunist world than factors such as institutional design. At the same time, the different character of structural forces in Eastern Europe and the FSU has likely created greater room for voluntarist factors in determining regime variation within the former Soviet Union than within Eastern Europe.
... Lithuania, like Estonia, joined the EU in 2004 and implemented significant reforms that have boosted its economic growth (Randma-Liiv and Drechsler, 2019). Latvia has followed a similar path, benefiting from EU integration and adopting market policies (Way and Casey, 2018). ...
... processes that took place in these countries (Berkowitz and DeJong, 2003;Tiits et al., 2008), due to the belief in socioeconomic profits of market-oriented economies to achieve economic convergence (Randma-Liiv and Drechsler, 2019). This phenomenon will allow countries to achieve GDP levels so that they can focus on activities to promote sustainability from an economic, sociocultural, and environmental approach (Lucan Ahmad Way and Casey, 2018). Thus, developing an efficient policy of allocation of public resources (which can be measured by government size) is crucial to achieve a sustainable long-term socioeconomic growth. ...
... The possibility of entering the European Union also influenced these reforms (Lucan Ahmad Way and Casey, 2018), which had even more impact than the institutions mentioned above by the standardisation of policies and rules, investment funds, and access to one of the most important markets worldwide (Karo and Kattel, 2015;Randma-Liiv and Drechsler, 2019). Even China and the Arab World had influenced aspects regarding corruption and transparency in the FSU countries (Drechsler, 2015;Breslauer, 2019). ...
There are 15 independent countries that emerged (re-emerged) from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics since its collapse in 1991. The process of independence of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) countries was followed by massive economic, political, and institutional reforms that, in most cases, sought the transition from centralised systems to market economies.
... The weaker salience of anti-Soviet nationalism in several post-Soviet republics helped officials of the former regime to remain in power. (Way and Casey, 2018) ...
... Where capacity was constrained, incumbents failed in concentrating power, even when the political "playing field" was skewed in their favor -such cases were characterized as "competitive authoritarianism," with a higher degree of pluralism. Lucan Way and Adam Casey (2018) hold that the set of geo-historical structural factorsabove all anti-Soviet nationalism and conditionalities to join the EUconstrained the strategies available to Eastern European political elites, giving greater linearity to their democratization process. 16 The absence or low intensity of these factors in post-Soviet states, however, provided space for voluntarist 14 According to Levitsky and Way (2010), the persistence or reformulation of security institutions established in the communist period, as successor local bodies of the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB), guaranteed coercive power to authoritarian leaders, skewing the political "playing field". ...
Almost thirty years after the demise of the socialist bloc, states in Eastern Europe and the Post-Soviet Space (Eurasia) still face challenges and obstacles regarding the prospects for democratization and democratic consolidation. The bargains and tradeoffs concerning the simultaneous implementation of huge political and economic reforms posed additional difficulties. This article presents a brief overview of the literature on political transition in these regions.
... The weaker salience of anti-Soviet nationalism in several post-Soviet republics helped officials of the former regime to remain in power. (Way and Casey, 2018) ...
... Where capacity was constrained, incumbents failed in concentrating power, even when the political "playing field" was skewed in their favor -such cases were characterized as "competitive authoritarianism," with a higher degree of pluralism. Lucan Way and Adam Casey (2018) hold that the set of geo-historical structural factorsabove all anti-Soviet nationalism and conditionalities to join the EUconstrained the strategies available to Eastern European political elites, giving greater linearity to their democratization process. 16 The absence or low intensity of these factors in post-Soviet states, however, provided space for voluntarist factors to acquire greater relevance, which accounts for the higher regional variation in regime types and their lower democratic performance (see Annex 1 -Democracy ratings). ...
“Russia and Russians in Different Contexts” provides an overview of the situation in Russia at different times, from the 19th to the 21st century, including revisionist critical analyses of crucial events such as the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the transition to current post-Soviet Russia.
... This control has been curtailed since the collapse of the USSR, including through NATO expansion to the East. Accordingly, Russia's loss in economic relevance at the world level, combined with the loss of control over the Eastern European (now semi-) periphery, has fostered the emergence of ultranationalist ideology and the neo-imperial revisionism of the Russian regime, which ultimately resulted in its invading Ukraine [27]. ...
The European Union’s relative disregard for the economic, geopolitical and climatic concerns of its peripheral Eastern countries has contributed to making the war in Ukraine possible. Its consequences are now returning in the form of energy dependence and economic instability on the Union as a whole and the risk of economic crisis and deindustrialisation. This should prompt a re-assessment of the EU’s strategy towards its eastern neighbours, particularly in the energy and climate policy field. This evaluation starts from the issue of control over cheap energy as a key material foundation of state and interstate power. On this basis, we analyse the struggle between Russia and the European core states over Ukraine in terms of the ability to extract an economic surplus through the unequal exchange of energy. The current escalation should be understood as an attempt by the Russian petrostate to preserve the economic basis of its regime, which is threatened by the prospect of a low-carbon transition in Europe. We conclude that a massive acceleration of the transition away from fossil fuels is the key to economic, geopolitical and climate stabilisation, highlighting possible policy instruments the EU could use to secure its production system and protect citizens’ security.
... That said, the contributions to this special issue are complementary rather than competitive. Lucan Way and Adam Casey argue that while structural conditionsnamely, the prospect of membership in the European Union, and anti-communist nationalismmay explain the major regime divide between Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia in the post-communist world, there is room for voluntarist interpretations of the differences within the group of countries of post-Soviet Eurasia (Way and Casey 2018). Henry Hale, in turn, proposes an institutionalist account with emphasis on the varieties of "patronal presidentialism" in post-Soviet Eurasia, their effects on the emergence of monopolistic or competitive "power pyramids," and how their configuration determines the divergence of political trajectories in the region (Hale 2018). ...
Über drei Jahrzehnte nach den 1989/90 erfolgten politischen und wirtschaftlichen Umbrüchen in Mittel-und Osteuropa wird die Region häufig noch immer als eine homogene Gruppe von Staaten wahrgenommen, deren Mitglieder ähnliche politische Entwicklungen durchlaufen und mit ähnlichen, teils mit dem sozialistischen Erbe in Verbindung stehenden Herausforderungen zu kämpfen hätten. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht und typologisiert die post-transformatorischen Entwicklungspfade der europäischen Staaten des östlichen Europa seit Abschluss ihrer Transformationen ab etwa 1991/1992 bis heute. Die zentrale Frage ist, wie die Regimeentwicklung in den Staaten der Region verlief und welche Entwicklungsmuster erkennbar sind. Dabei wird das vorrangige Muster in der Regimeentwicklung eines Staates in der Phase der Post-Transformation als post-transformatorischer Entwicklungspfad (PTEP) bezeichnet. Induktiv werden fünf idealtypische PTEPs identifiziert: 1) eine pfadabhängige Autokratisierung; 2) Pfadwechsel in beide Richtungen (von Demokratie zur Autokratie und vice versa); 3) die Nicht-Konsolidierung der Demokratie; 4) eine pfadabhängige Demokratisierung und 5) Regimezyklen. Die PTEPs erfassen dabei nicht primär das Ergebnis (d. h. Regimetypus und Regimequalität zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt), sondern den Prozess der Regimeentwicklung. Damit wird dem Umstand Rechnung getragen, dass die Entwicklung in den Staaten zumeist sehr dynamisch war und noch immer ist und diese Dynamik durch eine bloße Zuordnung zu Regimetypen, welche nur Momentaufnahmen darstellen, nicht abgebildet wird. Der Beitrag zeigt, dass die Staaten der Region teils sehr unterschiedliche Entwicklungen durchlaufen haben und wir daher keinesfalls von einer homogenen Gruppe sprechen können.
После распада Советского Союза страны бывшего социалистического лагеря вступили в новую историческую эпоху. Эйфория от краха тоталитарных режимов побудила исследователей 1990-х годов описывать будущую траекторию развития этих стран в терминах либеральной демократии, но вскоре выяснилось, что политическая реальность не оправдала всеобщих надежд на ускоренную демократизацию региона. Ситуация транзита породила режимы, которые невозможно однозначно категоризировать с помощью традиционного либерального дискурса. Балинт Мадьяр и Балинт Мадлович поставили перед собой задачу найти работающую аналитическую модель и актуальный язык описания посткоммунистических режимов. Так появилась данная книга, предлагающая обновленный теоретический инструментарий для анализа акторов, институтов и динамики современных политических систем стран Центральной Европы, постсоветского региона и Китая.
Как в автократиях нейтрализуются институты демократического публичного обсуждения? Почему Китай можно назвать «диктатурой, использующей рынок»? В чем разница между западными популистами и популистами из посткоммунистических стран? Вот лишь небольшой список вопросов, на которые дает ответы эта книга. Балинт Мадьяр – венгерский социолог, политик, бывший министр образования и культуры Венгрии. Балинт Мадлович – венгерский политолог, экономист и социолог, MA in political science Центрально-Европейского университета.
This article aims to assess the role of local agency and the local socio-cultural context in the internalization of externally promoted political norms. When external norms are diffused to the domestic level, they are reinterpreted and adapted to the local normative context. Conceptualized as a dynamic process, norm internalization implies that norms undergo a modification in terms of law, discourse, and practice. To add to the scholarship that offers power-based explanations when discussing how EU political norms are embraced locally, we discuss the internalization of norms at the national level, taking into consideration local reactions and the (re)interpretation of external norms. To do so, this article scrutinizes the local dynamic of the internalization process by showing how local agency and the cultural match between external and internal norms plays a role. Following the constructivist study of norm diffusion, this research uncovers how Moldovan social and political elites use societal pressure dynamic and elite learning dynamic in the case of implementation of the anti-corruption norm. In addition, this article puts emphasis on the importance of cultural match for a norm to be internalized by discussing post-Sovietness in Moldova.
In this article I consider Russian online databases that collect, digitize and organize film-based photographs showing Russian victims and participants of the twentieth-century political cataclysms, primarily World War II (WWII) and Stalin’s political terror. Most of these photographs are pre-WWII portraits from private photographic collections and family albums. The article focuses on their transformation into heritage assets which arguably occurs once they become publicly accessible through inclusion in online databases created by politically-motivated organizations such as the Memorial society, the Sakharov Center, Immortal Regiment, Immortal Barrack and Immortal Regiment of Russia. Through discussion of the structures of the databases, analysis of the ways in which they display the photographs, and comparison between them, the article shows that the digitization of the photographs is able to offer political presence to missing people through the multiplication and maintenance of their appearances in the public sphere. This presence is used in two different ways. First, the digitization of the photographs discussed here has enabled liberals in Russia to use them for the purpose of commemoration, which has turned them into a form of an online memorial to the victims of political cataclysms. At the same time, the digitized portraits of WWII veterans have been used by the Immortal Regiment of Russia for what can be called “the political mobilization of the dead.”
Статья посвящена анализу взаимовлияний между постсоветскими/российскими исследованиями (Russian Studies) последних трех десятилетий, с одной стороны, и динамикой современной политической науки в целом и сравнительной политологии, в частности, — с другой. На материале аналитического обзора публикаций по проблематике (1) предпосылок демократии и демократизации, (2) авторитарной модернизации без демократических реформ, (3) возможностей и ограничений институционального подхода, (4) роли государства и государственной состоятельности, (5) разновидностей постсоветского авторитаризма и (6) субнациональных измерений постсоветской политики обосновывается вывод о конструктивном использовании в постсоветских исследованиях общих политологических теоретико-методологических новаций,а также обсуждается вклад этих исследований в развитие современной политической компаративистики и политической науки в целом.
The literature on civil society in postcommunist regimes highlights its weakness as compared with civil society in other democracies. In this article the authors make a general argument on how different patterns of antecedent dictatorship affect the development of civil society across a range of democracies. They examine the slow emergence of two behaviors associated with a robust civil society-participation in organizational life and in protest-and explain variation across countries as a function of regime history. They draw their individual-level data from the World Values Survey and analyze the behavior of over forty-one thousand citizens from forty-two democracies. Using methods of hierarchical linear modeling to control for both national-level and individual-level factors, the authors find that different types of dictatorship and variation in their duration produce different negative legacies for the development of civil society.
EU enlargement continues in the Western Balkans in the 2010s because the underlying dynamics remain largely unchanged: EU Member States still see enlargement as a matter of national interest, bringing long-term economic and geopolitical benefits. The risk of instability in the Western Balkans has made the dividends from the EU's ‘democratizing effect’ especially substantial. I argue that the enlargement process continues to have a ‘democratizing effect,’ as Western Balkans candidates and proto-candidates respond to the incentives of EU membership: political parties have changed their agendas to make them EU-compatible, and governments have implemented policy changes to move forward in the pre-accession process. Yet the EU is taking on candidates with difficult initial conditions. I explore the changes the EU has made in order to exercise its leverage more effectively in the Western Balkans and check whether these helped overcome the pre-accession process' earlier problems with expertise, consistency and legitimacy.
Why do some autocrats survive for decades, and others fall soon after taking power? The authors argue that when authoritarian rulers need to solicit the cooperation of outsiders or deter the threat of rebellion, they rely on political institutions. Partisan legislatures incorporate potential opposition forces, giving them a stake in the ruler's survival. By broadening the basis of support for autocrats, these institutions lengthen their tenures. An analysis of all authoritarian rulers in power during the 1946-1996 period provides evidence of the effect of nominally democratic institutions on their political survival.
At the end of the Cold War, semipresidentialism became the modal constitution of the postcommunist world. In Russia and other post-Soviet states, however, this system of government has impeded consolidation. Semipresidentialism combines a popularly elected head of state with a prime minister responsible to the legislature; though this framework seemed to promise the best of all constitutional worlds, when put into practice in many countries during their transitions, the framework began to pose serious design dilemmas and facilitate democratic backsliding rather than consolidation.
The collapse of postwar political arrangements in Eastern, and to some extent Western, Europe, the former Soviet Union, Africa, and Asia in the past decade has re-mapped geopolitical space and challenged social science to find new ways to conceptualize cultural and social transformation. The fall of long-established regimes coupled with vast shifts in migration flows have catapulted political identity, with its concomitant issues of nationalism, ethnicity, and citizenship, to the forefront of social scientific research. Macrosociological interest in political identity tends to focus principally upon the legal institution of citizenship, the problem of immigration, and juridical issues of membership and group rights. This chapter recasts citizenship as a cultural as well as legal mode of political incorporation and underscores the symbolic and emotional practices that nation-states marshal to mobilize affection for the polity. Wedding emotion and citizenship expands the concept of membership to include the felt experience of national belonging.
The aim of this book is to highlight and begin to give 'voice' to some of the notable 'silences' evident in recent years in the study of contentious politics. The seven co-authors take up seven specific topics in the volume: the relationship between emotions and contention; temporality in the study of contention; the spatial dimensions of contention; leadership in contention; the role of threat in contention; religion and contention; and contention in the context of demographic and life-course processes. The seven spent three years involved in an ongoing project designed to take stock, and attempt a partial synthesis, of various literatures that have grown up around the study of non-routine or contentious politics. As such, it is likely to be viewed as a groundbreaking volume that not only undermines conventional disciplinary understanding of contentious politics, but also lays out a number of provocative new research agendas.
The quality of political competition at the moment of transition explains the divergence in the domestic trajectories of East European states, steering Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic towards liberal democracy, and Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia towards illiberal democracy after 1989. From 1989 to 1994, the European Union (EU) exerted only passive leverage on its democratizing neighbours, reinforcing liberal strategies of reform but failing to avert illiberal ones. After 1995, the EU exerted active leverage on the domestic politics of credible future members through the enlargement process. The benefits and requirements of EU membership, combined with the structure of the EU’s pre-accession process, interacted with domestic factors to improve the quality of political competition and to accelerate political and economic reforms in candidate states. The enlargement of the EU has thus promoted a convergence towards liberal democracy across the region. I unpack the consequences of the pre-accession process for the quality of democracy in the new members, the dynamics of the negotiations between the old members and the candidates, and the impact of the 2004 enlargement on the future of European integration. I conclude by exploring the usefulness of the EU’s active leverage in promoting liberal democracy in other prospective members such as Turkey and the states of the Western Balkans, and the trade-offs of further enlargements for the EU itself. The most successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement—and this book helps us understand why and how it works.
From 1989 to 1992, all of the socialist dictatorships in Europe (including the Soviet Union) collapsed, as did the Soviet bloc. Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia dismembered, and the Cold War international order came to an abrupt end. Based on a series of controlled comparisons among regimes and states, Valerie Bunce argues in this book that two factors account for these remarkable developments: the institutional design of socialism as a regime, a state, and a bloc, and the rapid expansion during the 1980s of opportunities for domestic and international change. When combined, institutions and opportunities explain not just when, how, and why these regimes and states disintegrated, but also some of the most puzzling features of these developments - why, for example, the collapse of socialism was largely peaceful and why Yugoslavia, but not the Soviet Union or Czechoslovakia, disintegrated through war.
That natural resources can be a curse as well as a blessing is almost a truism in political analysis. In many late-developing countries, the "resource curse" theory predicts, the exploitation of valuable resources will not result in stable, prosperous states but rather in their opposite. Petroleum deposits, for example, may generate so much income that rulers will have little need to establish efficient, tax-extracting bureaucracies, leading to shallow, poorly functioning administrations that remain at the mercy of the world market for oil. Alternatively, resources may be geographically concentrated, thereby intensifying regional, ethnic, or other divisive tensions. In Hard Times in the Land of Plenty, Benjamin Smith deciphers the paradox of the resource curse and questions its inevitability through an innovative comparison of the experiences of Iran and Indonesia. These two populous, oil-rich countries saw profoundly different changes in their fortunes in the period 1960-1980. Focusing on the roles of state actors and organized opposition in using oil revenues, Smith finds that the effects of oil wealth on politics and on regime durability vary according to the circumstances under which oil exports became a major part of a country's economy. The presence of natural resources is, he argues, a political opportunity rather than simply a structural variable. Drawing on extensive primary research in Iran and Indonesia and quantitative research on nineteen other oil-rich developing countries, Smith challenges us to reconsider resource wealth in late-developing countries, not as a simple curse or blessing, but instead as a tremendously flexible source of both political resources and potential complications.
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 of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology-the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies’ lasting influence on public opinion, Communism’s Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.
Focusing on regime trajectories across the former Soviet Union, Pluralism by Default posits that political competition in “new democracies” has often been grounded less in well-designed institutions, democratic leaders, or emerging civil society and more in the failure of authoritarianism. Lucan Way contends that pluralism has persisted in many cases because autocrats lack the organization, authority, or coordination to steal elections, impose censorship, repress opposition, or keep allies in line. Attention to the dynamics of this “pluralism by default” reveals a largely unrecognized contradiction in the transition process: the same factors that facilitate democratic and semi-democratic political competition may also thwart the development of stable, well-functioning democratic institutions. National divisions or weak states and parties-typically seen as impediments to democracy-can also stymie efforts to crack down on political opposition and concentrate control. Way demonstrates that the features that have made Ukraine the most democratic country in the former Soviet Union also contributed to the country’s extreme dysfunction and descent into war in 2014.
The literature on the legacies of communism for democratization has focused almost exclusively on explaining variation in the democratic experiences within the postcommunist space. While this is useful in many ways, it says little about a communist legacy in comparison to other types of antecedent regimes. We take a different approach, looking at the question by comparing postcommunist legacies to those of other states through the prism of democratic survival. One key implication of this shift in perspective is that the literature on democratic survival highlights a range of social and economic factors that are likely to help postcommunist democracies survive, which stands in stark contrast to the postcommunist democratic performance literature that emphasizes potential disadvantages. We assess these competing and contradictory implications by analyzing the relative likelihood of democratic survival using a sample of all third-wave democracies from 1970 to 2010. We find that postcommunist democracies are neither systematically more nor less likely to fail than other democracies. Further, we find no evidence that the prospects of failure are significantly affected by past membership in the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc, the type of communist regime, or the number of years under communist rule. These findings provide little evidence that the problems of postcommunist democratization pose a more difficult set of conditions for democratic survival.
From 1998 to 2005, six elections took place in postcommunist Europe that had the surprising outcome of empowering the opposition and defeating authoritarian incumbents or their designated successors. Velerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik compare these unexpected electoral breakthroughs. They draw three conclusions. First, the opposition was victorious because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries. Second, the remarkable run of these upset elections reflected the ability of this network to diffuse an ensemble of innovative electoral strategies across state boundaries. Finally, elections can serve as a powerful mechanism for democratic change. This is especially the case when civil society is strong, the transfer of political power is through constitutional means, and opposition leaders win with small mandates.
Over a decade has passed since the collapse of communism, yet citizens of post-communist countries are still far less likely to join voluntary organizations than people from other countries and regions of the world. Why do post-communist citizens mistrust and avoid public organizations? What explains this distinctive pattern of weak civil society? And what does it mean for the future of democracy in post-communist Europe? In this engaging study, Marc Morjé Howard addresses these questions by developing a provocative argument about the powerful and enduring impact of the communist experience on its countries and citizens. Howard argues that the legacy of the communist experience of mandatory participation in state-controlled organizations, the development and persistence of vibrant private networks, and the tremendous disappointment with developments since the collapse of communism have left most post-communist citizens with a lasting aversion to public activities. In addition to analyzing data from over 30 democratic and democratizing countries in the World Values Survey, Howard presents extensive and original evidence from his own research in Eastern Germany and Russia, including in-depth interviews with ordinary citizens and an original representative survey.
Although Russia experienced dramatic political breakthroughs in the late 1980s and early 1990s after shedding the shackles of Soviet rule, it subsequently failed to continue progressing toward democracy. M. Steven Fish offers an explanation for the direction of regime change in post-Soviet Russia, relying on cross-national comparative analysis as well as on in-depth field research in Russia. Fish demonstrates that Russia's failure to democratize has three causes: too much economic reliance on oil, too little economic liberalization, and too weak a national legislature.
Why have dominant parties persisted in power for decades in countries spread across the globe? Why did most eventually lose? Why Dominant Parties Lose develops a theory of single-party dominance, its durability, and its breakdown into fully competitive democracy. Greene shows that dominant parties turn public resources into patronage goods to bias electoral competition in their favor and virtually win elections before election day without resorting to electoral fraud or bone-crushing repression. Opposition parties fail because their resource disadvantages force them to form as niche parties with appeals that are out of step with the average voter. When the political economy of dominance erodes, the partisan playing field becomes fairer and opposition parties can expand into catchall competitors that threaten the dominant party at the polls. Greene uses this argument to show why Mexico transformed from a dominant party authoritarian regime under PRI rule to a fully competitive democracy.
For two decades, Hungary, like the other Eastern European countries, followed a general policy of establishing and strengthening the institutions of democracy, rule of law, and a market economy based on private property. However, since the elections of 2010, when Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party came to power, Hungary has made a dramatic U-turn. This article investigates the different spheres of society: political institutions, the rule of law, and the influence of state and market on one another, as well as the world of ideology (education, science, and art), and describes the U-turn’s implications for these fields and the effect it has on the life of people. It argues against the frequent misunderstandings in the interpretation and evaluation of the Hungarian situation, pointing out some typical intellectual fallacies. It draws attention to the dangers of strengthening nationalism, and to the ambivalence evident in Hungarian foreign policy, and looks into the relationship between Hungary and the Western world, particularly the European Union. Finally, it outlines the possible scenarios resulting from future developments in the Hungarian situation.
Corruption is widespread throughout the former Communist states, and it is particularly severe and entrenched in Russia. Despite the fact that Russia's contemporary corruption has recently become a subject of analysis, there is, however, no study that has addressed the role of the Communist legacy in the development of various aspects of corruption. This paper contributes to the debates through, first, disentangling the complex phenomenon that is corruption, and focusing on its three aspects: supply, demand, and the attitude of the population. Second, the paper also contributes to the literature on modern corruption by explicitly focusing on the role of the historical legacy in these different aspects of corruption. The study is based on several rich data-sets on corruption and on an original data-set compiled to measure the percentage share of Communists in various regions of Russia in the last decades of the USSR (1970s-1980s). The analysis presented in the paper uncovers different roles of the Communist legacies across the development of various aspects of corruption. By doing so, the paper contributes to the literature on historical legacies in general, on Communist legacies in particular, as well as to the broader literature on the causes of corruption in transitional societies.
Communism, or as Ken Jowitt prefers, Leninism, has attracted, repelled, mystified, and terrified millions for nearly a century. In his brilliant, timely, and controversial study, "New World Disorder", Jowitt identifies and interprets the extraordinary character of Leninist regimes, their political corruption, extinction, and highly unsettling legacy. Earlier attempts to grasp the essence of Leninism have treated the Soviet experience as either a variant of or alien to Western history, an approach that robs Leninism of much of its intriguing novelty. Jowitt instead takes a 'polytheist' approach, Weberian in tenor and terms, comparing the Leninist to the liberal experience in the West, rather than assimilating it or alienating it. Approaching the Leninist phenomenon in these terms and spirit emphasizes how powerful the imperatives set by the West for the rest of the world are as sources of emulation, assimilation, rejection, and adaptation; how unyielding premodern forms of identification, organization, and action are; how novel, powerful, and dangerous charisma as a mode of organized identity and action can be. The progression from essay to essay is lucid and coherent. The first six essays reject the fundamental assumptions about social change that inform the work of modernization theorists. Written between 1974 and 1990, they are, we know now, startlingly prescient. The last three essays, written in early 1991, are the most controversial: they will be called alarmist, pessimistic, apocalyptic. They challenge the complacent, optimistic, and self-serving belief that the world is being decisively shaped in the image of the West - that the end of history is at hand.
In recent years, observers have raised concerns about threats to democracy posed by external support for authoritarianism coming from regional powers such as Russia, China and Venezuela. This article assesses the efficacy of autocracy promotion through a close examination of Russian efforts to shape regime outcomes in the former Soviet Union. It finds that while Russian actions have periodically promoted instability and secessionist conflict, there is little evidence that such intervention has made post-Soviet countries less democratic than they would have been otherwise. First, the Russian government has been inconsistent in its support for autocracy – supporting opposition and greater pluralism in countries where anti-Russian governments are in power, and incumbent autocrats in cases where pro-Russian politicians dominate. At the same time, the Russian government's narrow concentration on its own economic and geopolitical interests has significantly limited the country's influence, fostering a strong counter-reaction in countries with strong anti-Russian national identities. Finally, Russia's impact on democracy in the region has been restricted by the fact that post-Soviet countries already have weak democratic prerequisites. This analysis suggests that, despite increasingly aggressive foreign policies by autocratic regional powers, autocracy promotion does not present a particularly serious threat to democracy in the world today.
This article uncovers a new mechanism linking oil wealth to autocratic regime survival: the investigation tests whether increases in oil wealth improve the survival of autocracies by lowering the chances of democratization, reducing the risk of transition to subsequent dictatorship, or both. Using a new measure of autocratic durability shows that, once models allow for unit effects, oil wealth promotes autocratic survival by lowering the risk of ouster by rival autocratic groups. Evidence also indicates that oil income increases military spending in dictatorships, which suggests that increasing oil wealth may deter coups that could have caused a regime collapse.
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 are drawn from a comprehensive theoretical framework of the effects of communist legacies on political behavior in post-communist countries that we have previously developed. Our analysis suggests that three mechanisms were particularly salient in explaining this deficit: first, the demographic profile (including lower religiosity levels) of post-communist countries is less conducive to civic participation than elsewhere. Second, the magnitude of the deficit increases with the number of years an individual spent under communism but the effects were particularly strong for people socialized in the post-totalitarian years and for those who experienced communism in their early formative years (between ages six and seventeen). Finally, we also find that civic participation suffered in countries that experienced weaker economic performance in the post communist period, though differences in post-communist democratic trajectories had a negligible impact on participation. Taken together, we leave behind a potentially optimistic picture about civic society in post-communist countries, as the evidence we present suggests eventual convergence toward norms in other non post-communist countries.
This piece combines parts of Chapter 1 (Introduction) with Chapter 2 (theoretical framework) of an early draft of our book manuscript. The chapters that will eventually follow cover each of five regions: the Americas, Central Europe, former Soviet Union, East Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Why are independent courts rarely found in emerging democracies? This book moves beyond familiar obstacles, such as an inhospitable legal legacy and formal institutions that expose judges to political pressure. It proposes a strategic pressure theory, which claims that in emerging democracies, political competition eggs on rather than restrains power-hungry politicians. Incumbents who are losing their grip on power try to use the courts to hang on, which leads to the politicization of justice. The analysis uses four original datasets, containing 1,000 decisions by Russian and Ukrainian lower courts from 1998 to 2004. The main finding is that justice is politicized in both countries, but in the more competitive regime (Ukraine) incumbents leaned more forcefully on the courts and obtained more favorable rulings.
Based on a detailed analysis of Belarusian politics and the rise of Aliaksandar Lukashenka in the early 1990s, this article explores the sources, character, and impact of authoritarian incompetence and skill on regime outcomes after the Cold War. One type of incompetence—deer in headlights—emerges out of the disorientation and persistence of older regime practices in the face of rapid political change. This type of incompetence was one important but largely unrecognized source of political contestation in the former Soviet Union and other parts of the developing world in the early 1990s. Rapid change in the international environment that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War created novel demands that existing autocrats often did not know how to deal with—even when they had the structural resources to survive. The result was greater contestation and more incumbent turnover than would have existed otherwise.
Contemporary Poland continues to struggle with its economic and sociopolitical adjustments post-1989, with communist-era monuments and architecture in its history's peripheral view. The heritage reclaimed by Poles through the Solidarity movement is reflected in the symbols used to battle communism from the 1950s to the 1980s. Symbols of hope, freedom, and solidarity expressed through religious icons, roses, and the crowned Polish Eagle remain an integral aspect of social collective memory and culture for Poles. In addressing whether Solidarity was primarily a grassroots movement of workers who were motivated by unfair wages and starvation, or an intellectual movement defined by a need to reassert Poland's identity by dismembering communist rule, the historian is presented with the fair and complex reality that the movement was from its inception an intimate combination of both influences. With the thirty-third anniversary of the initiation of the official Solidarity movement in 2013, memory not only correlates with a usable history but also acts as a continuing force motivating Poles to strive for greater independence from their oppressive recent past.
Explanations of the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa have focused on absent prerequisites of democratization in the region, including weak civil society, state-dominated economies, poor socioeconomic performance, and nondemocratic culture. By contrast, the region's enduring authoritarianism can be attributed to the robustness of the coercive apparatus in many Middle Eastern and North African states and to this apparatus's exceptional will and capacity to crush democratic initiatives. Cross-regional comparison suggests factors both external and internal to the region that account for this exceptional strength.
A fundamental political-institutional question that has only recently received serious scholarly attention concerns the impact of different constitutional frameworks on democratic consolidation. Little systematic cross-regional evidence has been brought to bear on this question. This article reports the findings of the analysis of numerous different sources of data, all of which point in the direction of a much stronger correlation between democratic consolidation and the constitutional framework of pure parliamentarianism than between consolidation and pure presidentialism. The systematic analysis of these data leads the authors to conclude that parliamentarianism is a more supportive constitutional framework due to the following theoretically predictable and empirically observable tendencies: its greater propensity for governments to have majorities to implement their programs, its greater ability to rule in a multiparty setting, its lower propensity for executives to rule at the edge of the constitution and its greater facility in removing a chief executive if he or she does so, its lower susceptibility to a military coup, and its greater tendency to provide long party-government careers, which add loyalty and experience to political society. In contrast, the analytically separable propensities of presidentialism also form a highly interactive system, but they work to impede democratic consolidation by reducing politicians' degrees of freedom.
The extent to which post-communist European and Eurasian countries have instituted democratic politics varies widely. The countries possessing the generally accepted attributes of a democratic polity are without exception members of the European Union and most of the countries that have moved in that direction in recent years are prospective members. This article examines the association between membership in the EU and the development of a democratic polity. It suggests the aspiration to membership and awareness of the EU's political condition for membership contributed, along with attributes related to spatial location, political antecedents, transitional politics, and economic ties, to the development of a democratic polity.
An important source of the post-Communist divide between a relatively democratic Central and Southeastern Europe on one side and a highly autocratic former Soviet Union on the other is the different character of the international environments in the two regions. Post-Communist countries differ along two key dimensions of the post–cold war international environment: Western leverage, or governments' vulnerability to external pressure; and linkage to the West, or the density of a country's economic, political, organizational, social, and communication ties to the European Union and the United States. High linkage and leverage in Central and Southeastern Europe generated intense international democratizing pressures, contributing to democratization even under unfavorable domestic conditions. By contrast, weaker linkage and leverage in the former Soviet Union has produced a much more permissive international environment. As a result, democratization has failed in the absence of a strong domestic push.
Why has the national idea played such a powerful role, both positive and negative, in the regime, state, and economic transitions that have taken place in post-communist Eurasia? This article emphasizes the powerful but variable effects of imperial rule in this region, beginning with the Habsburgs and continuing through the more recent experiences of the Soviet bloc and the Yugoslav, Soviet, and Czechoslovak ethnofederations. The national idea, a product of very different experiences in the West, was transformed when moving eastward in the nineteenth century, largely because imperial contexts are not state contexts. The political empowerment of the national idea continued when imperial dynamics returned to the region with the rise of communism. As a result, post-communist Eastern Europe was unusually well situated to privilege nationalism in the struggles over new states and new economic and political regimes.
Scholars continue to grapple with the question of the relationship between economic development and democratization; prominent recent research has focused on the effects of economic inequality. Boix suggests that democratization is likelier when inequality is low, whereas Acemoglu and Robinson argue that democratization is likelier when inequality is at middling levels. Both assume that democratization is a function of autocratic elites’ fear of the extent to which a future median voter would redistribute under different levels of inequality. Drawing on contractarian political theory, the authors suggest that democratization is instead a function of demands by rising economic groups for protection from the state. This alternative approach suggests that land and income inequality affect democratization differently: Autocracies with equal land distribution are indeed more likely to democratize, but contrary to the conventional wisdom, income inequality is more likely to promote democratization.