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Changing configurations of national elites are shaping the prospects for democracy in the countries of postcommunist Eastern Europe. In several countries (Serbia, Bulgaria, Russia) there are unchecked power struggles between elites, with regimes oscillating between democratic and authoritarian tendencies. In other countries (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic) restrained elite competitions are being institutionalized and are leading to stable democratic regimes. These and other outcomes are analyzed for the region as a whole.
Legislators are entrusted with key parliamentary functions and are important figures in the decision-making process. Their behaviour as political elites is as much responsible for the failures and successes of the new democracies as their institutional designs and constitutional reforms. This book provides a comparative examination of representative elites and their role in democratic development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that as the drivers of the transformation process in CEE, individual and collective parliamentary actors matter. The authors provide an in-depth analysis of representatives from eleven national parliaments and explore country-specific features of recruitment and representation. They draw on an integrated dataset of parliamentary elites for individual, party family, and parliamentary variables over the 20 years following the collapse of Communism and develop a common framework for the analysis of variations in democratisation and political professionalisation between parliaments and political parties/party families across CEE. This unique volume will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, elite research, post-communist politics, democratisation, legislative studies, and parliamentary representation.
This wide-ranging overview of the processes of democratization in post-Communist Europe, places the transitions in East-Central Europe within a broad European and global context. The authors begin with a introduction to the concept and theories of democracy and then examine the emerging politics of the new democracies to set the post-Communist transitions in longer-term comparative perspective with earlier and existing processes of democratization in Southern Europe, Latin America, and East and Southeast Asia. Finally the politics of EU accession are introduced to place the transitions within the wider context of European integration. Concluding with a summary of recent critiques of modern democracy and looking toward future theories, this text provides a comprehensive introduction to what will remain the key contemporary issue for all students of political science.
This volume presents a shared effort to apply a general historical-institutionalist approach to the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe. It brings together a number of leading senior and junior scholars with outstanding reputations as specialists in postcommunism and comparative politics to address central theoretical and empirical issues involved in the study of postcommunism. The authors address such questions as how historical 'legacies' of the communist regime be defined, how their impact can be measured in methodologically rigorous ways, and how the effects of temporal and spatial context can be taken into account in empirical research on the region. Taken as a whole, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature by utilizing the comparative historical method to study key problems of world politics.
Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.
Examines democratic party competition in four post-communist polities in the 1990s. The work illustrates developments regarding different voter appeal of parties, patterns of voter representation, and dispositions to join other parties in alliances. Wider groups of countries are also compared.
The Oxford Handbook of Populism presents the state of the art of research on populism from the perspective of Political Science. The book features work from the leading experts in the field, and synthesizes the main strands of research in four compact sections: concepts, issues, regions, and normative debates. Due to its breath, The Oxford Handbook of Populism is an invaluable resource for those interested in the study of populism, but also forexperts in each of the topics discussed, who will benefit from accounts of current discussions and research gaps, as well as a map of new directions in the study of populism.
A distinguished group of scholars examine recent transitions to democracy and the prospects for democratic stability in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Portugal, Spain and Uruguay. They also assess the role of elites in the longer-established democratic regimes in Columbia, Costa Rica, Italy, Mexico and Venezuela. The authors conclude that in independent states with long records of political instability and authoritarian rule, democratic consolidation requires the achievement of elite 'consensual unity' - that is, agreement among all politically important elites on the worth of existing democratic institutions and respect for democratic rules-of-the-game, coupled with increased 'structural integration' among those elites. Two processes by which consensual unity can be established are explored - elite settlement, the negotiating of compromises on basic disagreements, and elite convergence, a more subtle series of tactical decisions by rival elites which have cumulative effect, over perhaps a generation.
Edited by two of the world's leading analysts of post-communist politics, this book brings together distinguished specialists on the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. The authors analyse the patterns of post-communist democratization in these countries, paying particular attention to the process of party formation, electoral politics, the growth of civil society, and the impact of economic reform on the emergence of interest groups. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott provide theoretical and comparative chapters on post-communist political development across the region. This book will provide students and scholars with detailed analysis by leading authorities, plus the latest research data on recent political and economic developments in each country.
This book seeks to inject fresh thinking into the debate on democratic deterioration in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), viewing 'democratic backsliding' through the prism of a range of cases beyond Hungary and Poland, to redress the imbalance in current scholarship. Over the past decade a consensus has emerged that democracy in CEE is sharply deteriorating, perhaps even 'backsliding' into new forms of authoritarianism. Debate has, however, so far focused disproportionately on the two most dramatic and surprising cases: Hungary and Poland. This book reflects on the 'backsliding' debate through the experience of CEE countries such as the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Latvia, and Estonia; as well as neighbouring post-communist regions such as the Western Balkans and former Soviet Union (cases such as Moldova and Ukraine), whose patterns of failing or partial democratisation may be newly instructive for analysing the development of CEE. Contributors present less frequently considered perspectives on 'democratic backsliding' in the CEE region, such as the role of oligarchisation and wealth concentration; the potential of ethnographical approaches to democracy evaluation; the trade-offs between democratic quality and democratic stability; and the long-term interplay between social movements, state-building, and democratisation. This book was originally published as a special issue of East European Politics. equently considered perspectives on 'democratic backsliding' in the CEE region, such as the role of oligarchisation and wealth concentration; the potential of ethnographical approaches to democracy evaluation; the trade-offs between democratic quality and democratic stability; and the long-term interplay between social movements, state-building, and democratisation. This book was originally published as a special issue of East European Politics.