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This paper proposes a framework to analyze the varying understanding of democratic developments. Based on the theory of frame-analysis, it distinguishes six brackets within which democratic developments can be interpreted. This framework is applied to identify the nature of international rankings of domestic democracy and to compare the framing of developments in Polish democracy in reports on democratic developments from international organizations. The conclusion is that sense-making of democratic developments in general varies enormously, and that this is also visible in the international rankings of democracy. Democratic developments in Poland are also assessed in different ways, resulting in varying claims about the nature of the developments in Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most political science interpretations of the post-2010 Orbán regime have been written either within the framework of populism or in the democratization paradigm. We have learned much from these papers about Hungary's drift in an authoritarian direction, but they also have drawbacks. This article aims to fill the gap between these two approaches and offers a theoretical framework to analyze the impact of populism and other trends of contemporary politics (like de-alignment, growing electoral volatility, citizens' disengagement, personalization, legitimacy problems, the decline of party membership and partisanship, the mediatization of politics, etc.) on the political regime. It argues that these trends add up to an authority and regime type that can be conceptualized by Weber's concept of plebiscitary leader democracy (PLD). PLD forms a new hybrid regime type that differs from comparative authoritarianism and other hybrid regime types known from the literature in three respects. First, PLD is less about institutional framework and procedures than about the sources of legitimacy; second, it serves better to understand how the regime works than measuring its distance from liberal democracy; third, it is an ideal type that aims to reveal the endogenous logic of democracy that generates authoritarian elements of the regime. The article also demonstrates the suitability of the concept of PLD for empirical research through presenting a structured case study of the Orbán regime. The PLD model enables us to reveal the endogenous logic of the Orbán regime and the impact of populist governance on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We define tribalism as a mode of articulation that draws an antagonistic frontier between societal groups. Unlike populism, tribalism does not have a hegemonic character. It articulates groups through a horizontally oriented, shared value system; whereas populism is an essential part of a democratic system, tribalism disregards democracy. To conceptualize tribalism as a separate theoretical frame from populism or (ethno)nationalism, we used discourse theoretical analysis to analyze the Facebook pages of four political party leaders in Slovakia (Marian Kotleba, Krisztián Forró, Igor Matovič, and Boris Kollár). Kotleba's page showed tribalistic features by articulating an antagonistic divide between "us," the people, linked by shared values and identities, and anyone not sharing those values, or "them." His representation of his party's fight against oppressive forces, combined with their apathetic stance toward democracy, makes his a prime example of a tribalist party. While populism is an ever-expanding area of research and a framework widely used to analyze political entities and events, it is a word often thrown around and thus overused. Tribalism offers an alternative approach to analyze political instances in a national and transnational context in a more nuanced way, and to gain a better understanding of previously overlooked phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leninism and the central role that violence played in it is most commonly presented as a hindrance to democratic development in post-communist Eastern Europe. This paper reconsiders this proposition in light of the classics of comparative historical analysis. These classic works maintain that the long-term consequences of revolutionary violence sometimes counteract its short-term anti-democratic impact. Social change unleashed by revolution can contribute to the emergence of democracy in subsequent periods by removing pre-modern barriers to democracy. Two aspects of Leninist violence are highlighted as having such effects: forced modernization and the civilizing process. Communist modernization altered pre-modern social structures which had served as impediments to democracy prior to the Leninist seizure of power. The resulting social structures and the values reinforced by the communist version of the “civilizing process,” patterned on those of bourgeois conventions of the early twentieth century, helped some post-communist countries overcome obstacles to the introduction of liberal democracy encountered in earlier attempts in the region after World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shrinking of civil society—a problematic trend in a growing number of countries—often involves enacting legal measures to curtail the activity of civil society organizations and vilifying and/or harassing such organizations. Poland has been at the forefront of this trend since 2015. This article examines the mechanisms promoting elite replacement in Polish civil society, with a specific focus on the ways in which civil society actors have responded to these changes and the effectiveness of the state's efforts to establish new hierarchies of power. The article discusses the complex relation between research on civil society and elite theory, and examines the anti-elitist discourses concerning Polish civil society and the strategies employed by the state to gain more control over the third sector. Next, the analytical section focuses on the ways in which civil society actors respond to state-sponsored elite change and examines three types of relations between the state and NGOs in contemporary Poland: (1) resistance, (2) assimilation, and (3) opportunistic synergy. In closing, the article shows ways in which analyses of the transformation of civil society in Poland and other countries can be enriched by drawing on elite theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both political parties and differentiated integration (DI) play an ambivalent role in regard to democratic backsliding. Parties' positioning towards democratic backsliding has not always been straightforward, and DI has been seen as facilitating it. We analyse whether party actors view democratic backsliding as a problematic issue for the EU, if they think DI facilitates it, and how they consider the EU should respond to it. Drawing on thirty-five interviews and a survey of forty-two party actors in seven member states, we show that many do view backsliding as problematic. Moreover, around half worried that DI could facilitate backsliding, though others did not link the two. Finally, almost all considered it legitimate for the EU to address democratic backsliding. Although centre-of-left actors are most likely to worry about democratic backsliding and favour EU intervention, actors across the political spectrum are sceptical about accepting DI in matters pertaining to Article 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How reliable are the EU's reports when assessing its Eastern neighbouring countries' progress towards democracy? To explore this question, I first developed an original scale that enables to identify the variation in the quality of the EU's assessment reports across the partner countries and over time. Subsequently, by employing both quantitative and qualitative research techniques, I carried out a systematic analysis of the key structural factors that tend to influence and compromise the quality of the EU's assessments. The main results of the study suggest that the more dependent partner countries are on the EU as a source of development aid and export market, the less lenient the EU's institutions appear in their assessment reports. Furthermore, the findings of the study show that somewhat counter-intuitively, the more authoritarian the regime in question is, the less willing the EU appears in criticizing the country's poor democratic performance. However, when a certain level of political liberalization is underway, the EU institutions become rather critical in their assessment reports by explicitly and openly denouncing the country's poor democratic performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The seemingly random triumph and demise of new political parties in Central and Eastern Europe actually represent a durable subsystem with relevance for party systems around the world. This article supplements existing research on volatility with new measures of party age distribution that reveal clear patterns of disruption, turnover and restabilization. These patterns emerge from stable and coherent party subsystems that follow a simple model based on three dynamics: losses by established parties, rapid gains by uncorrupted newcomers, and equally rapid newcomer losses to even newer parties. Confirmed both by electoral evidence and computer simulations, this model offers insight into the endurance of these subsystems, particularly since the very mechanisms that generate new parties’ success can preclude their ability to survive in subsequent elections. Central and Eastern European party systems offer a laboratory for understanding trends in party system volatility that are emerging in Western Europe and across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the author demonstrates how representations of the assassination and funeral of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Dindić enacted politics, reshaping the relationship between citizen and state during a time of political crisis. The expression of citizen-state relations through public mourning grounded in intimate, familial loss produced a break between a violent, nationalist past and a possible democratic future. This process relied on the deployment of normative assumptions about gender and kinship. The figure of Zoran Dindić represented a heteronormative, democratic masculinity that evoked a new relationship between family, citizen, state, and nation in the Serbian context. In contrast, those held responsible for his assassination were presented as antifamily and part of a clan structure based on nonreproductive, criminal connections that evoked a contrasting and undemocratic form of masculinity. Such representations masked ways that current political institutions and public figures were implicated in past state violence by focusing on a story about Dindić and his killers as certain kinds of men, rather than about structural features of politics and government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study challenges a well-supported institutionalist theory in comparative politics that links democracy with higher levels of redistribution as well as studies that link authoritarianism with welfare state liberalization. Using pooled cross-sectional data for ten post-communist countries spanning twenty-five years and a dynamic model specification, the study shows that, contrary to what the institutionalist theory predicts, post-communist democratic governments redistribute about 0.6 percent less of their GDP on social protection in the short term and 1.3 percent less in the long term than post-communist autocrats do. However, consistent with the cultural legacies hypothesis, there are no differences when it comes to redistribution of life chances through health care and education. I attribute the finding that post-communist autocracies redistribute more via social spending and are reluctant to liberalize their welfare states to their need to maintain popular legitimacy in a region where citizens are accustomed to high levels of redistribution and popular protests often lead to regime turnover. I argue that post-communist democracies have other available mechanisms to maintain their legitimacy, namely, free and fair elections, while post-communist autocratic governments have to rely on redistribution to do so. The findings have implications for our understanding of authoritarian resilience in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If democracy is a discussion, then the exclusion of radical leftist economic perspectives may hamper democracy. Does this exclusion take place and if so, how? In this case study an analysis of the discourse in the Slovak evening panel discussion Dinner with Havran shows the various ways in which the exclusion (and marginalization) of such perspectives is achieved. This exclusionary discursive practice is then explained through interviews with the team behind the show and the norms and constraints that guide the production of the show. The analysis is based on Stuart Hall's critical paradigm and, confirming Hall's insights, it argues that the show is independent from the dominant political and economic forces in Slovakia, yet at the same time the show contributes to the functioning of the Slovak public broadcasting service as an ideological state apparatus that is biased in favor of the interests of economic elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why, when, and how does populism emerge in a stable democracy? This article investigates the political logic and ideological appeal of a rarely explored form of populism: technocratic populism. Technocratic populism uses the appeal of technical expertise to connect directly with the people, promising to run the state as a firm, while at the same time delegitimizing political opponents and demobilizing the electorate by instilling civic apathy. Technocratic populism is an anti-elite ideology that exploits competence to create the appearance of authenticity and proximity to ordinary people. It is less exclusionary than nativist or economic forms of populisms and its broad appeal is therefore arguably more threatening to representative democracy. In order to understand the appeal of technocratic populism, as well as why it arises at critical junctures when dominant ideologies are in turmoil, we argue that one must not ignore its historical roots, which shows that it transcends both regime changes and the traditional left–right divide. The article develops and examines these points using evidence from communist-era populist campaigns against "elitist" dissidents (from Charter 77) in the Czech Republic, and demonstrates how post-1989 politicians have exploited and also adapted ideas and strategies from the authoritarian past for the new democratic setting. The article highlights the adaptive character of technocratic populism across political regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Parties and Democratic Linkage in Post-Communist Europe, guest edited by Lori Thorlakson, and will be published in the August 2018 issue of EEPS [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of technocratic caretaker governments in several European countries in the wake of the Great Recession (2008–2009) and the Eurozone crisis led to renewed academic interest in such administrations. Although such governments are often assumed to be illegitimate and democratically dysfunctional, there has been little empirical consideration of if and how they legitimate themselves to mass publics. This question is particularly acute given that, empirically, caretaker technocrat-led administrations have been clustered in newer, more crisis-prone democracies in Southern and Eastern Europe where high levels of state exploitation by parties suggest a weak basis for any government claiming technocratic impartiality. This article uses Michael Saward’s “representative claims” framework to re-examine the case of one of Europe’s longer-lasting and most popular technocratic administrations, the 2009–2010 Fischer government in the Czech Republic. The article maps representative claims made for Fischer and his government, as well as counterclaims. Claims drew on the electoral mandate of sponsoring parties, the government’s claimed technocratic neutrality, and on Fischer’s “mirroring” of the values and lifestyle of ordinary Czechs (echoing some populist framings of politics). The article argues that the Fischer government benefited from multiple overlapping representative claims, but notes the need for robust methodology to assess the reception claims by their intended constituency. It concludes by considering the implications of actors’ ability to combine populist and technocratic claims, noting similarities in technocratic governments and some types of anti-establishment party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the past ten years the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization–Democratic Party for national Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) has progressively extended its control over Macedonian political, social, and economic life, restricting the space for democratic discourse and limiting completion. Throughout this period it has acted in concert with elites representing the country’s Albanian minority and has included Albanian political parties, currently the Democratic Union for Integration (DUI) as minority coalition partners. This article will examine the conditions that gave rise to illiberalism in Macedonia and the interaction between ethnic politics and the retreat from democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The four Visegrad states (V4) of Central Europe play an important role in facilitating closer relationship between the European Union (EU) and its eastern neighbours. In particular, they seek to achieve this through increased cross-border mobility as a means of supporting institutional reforms, sharing know-how, and promoting cross-border economic development. Such approach is of particular interest in highlighting the V4's different response to preventing uncontrolled migration from the southern neighbourhood, in contrast to managing legal migration across the Union's eastern border. Previous studies of the Visegrad states' role in the eastern neighbourhood often point to the historical discourse, or simply assume unspecified existing "interests." However, an assessment lacks into the extent to which the V4's increasing role in the neighbourhood is based on a historical discourse seeking to revive past connections, or an interest (security)-based approach shrouded in normative agenda. The article argues that while the V4 states might pursue visa liberalisation with the eastern neighbours for diverse reasons (ends), the four states employ a shared normative agenda (means), which includes (1) a shift from the "exclusive" impact of Fortress Europe towards "politics of inclusion" and (2) recognition of the transformational impact of cross-border mobility in areas as diverse as minority rights, promotion of democratic governance, and economic cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accession of the East-Central European (ECE) countries carried a promise of enhancing and enriching the EU’s Eastern policy. The new member states had the strongest interests among EU member states to ensure that countries in the East are prosperous, stable, and democratic. Yet, the EU’s Eastern policy has been largely criticised for its ineffectiveness. So why have they not been able to address the shortcomings in the EU’s Eastern policies? The article argues that the ECE countries supported the way the EU’s Eastern policies were conceived and implemented because they saw it as a potent vehicle to promote their own transition experience not only in the region but also within the EU. We argue that the ECE states have experienced three types of challenges when promoting their transition experience. First, uploading to the EU level remained largely at a rhetorical level. Second, there are conceptual and practical difficulties in defining what constitutes transition experience and harnessing it, as well as coordinating its transfer between the ECE states. Finally, while using transition experience as the basis for their development assistance strategies, the ECE countries actually insufficiently conceptualised the “development” aspect in these policies. Being so driven by their own experience, they have not drawn the lessons from enlargement to use in a non-accession context, especially by incorporating the broader lessons with regard to development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the years 2011–2014, Latvia experienced a significant increase in the adoption and use of militant democracy measures—constitutional amendments, refusals of party registration, restrictions on referendums and popular initiatives. These events, triggered by a widely attended referendum on the introduction of Russian as the second state language, highlighted the problematic relations between democracy and nation-building in Latvia. Despite earlier expectations that the original militancy of Latvian democracy would decrease with the gradual integration of the Russophone minority, recent developments show that the defence of a particular type of nation-building has become an integral part of Latvian democracy. Contrary to earlier attempts to describe Latvia as an example of ethnic democracy, this article argues that the nation-building proceeds on the basis of a not fully consistent combination of elements of ethnic and liberal republican approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the rise of political antisemitism during the 1905–1907 Revolution in the Russian-controlled Kingdom of Poland. Extensive, diachronic discourse analysis of political leaflets reveals the role antisemitism played as a political device assisting the construction of new political identities and their dissemination through political mobilization. National Democracy and their labor branch, the National Workers Union, took the nation as the basic form of affiliation. The forging of such national unity, however, was difficult to engender among the workers owing to unique historical circumstances, the experience of exploitation, and longstanding socialist agitation. This process was aided, however, by the reference to a strong negative figure of the Other. When “nationalism began to hate,” antisemitism appeared to be an extremely effective mobilizing device, and the Jews started to act as a negative, constitutive point of reference for the construction of national unity among the Poles. The analysis of the mobilization process and focus on discourse as a main factor in shaping political identities demonstrates that National Democratic antisemitism was neither an automatic activation of already present popular anti-Jewish sentiments due to the rise of mass politics nor a sheer creation of nationalist ideologues. It was, rather, the logic of discourse that ushered in a need for a negatively evaluated outsider, Jews being easily invested in this place due to a particular sociodemographic conjuncture and older judeophobic tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poland is often pointed to as the regional leader of transition processes with regard to the development and sustainability of civil society. This article presents a critical perspective on the direction in which Polish civil society has evolved after 1989. The author reconstructs existing frames of civil society within Polish elite NGO discourse and argues that one specific understanding of civil society—civil society as third sector/service provision—has gained a hegemonic position, marginalizing other conceptions and thus other functions of civil society. Civil society as moral blueprint, civil society as control power, and civil society as neoliberal gobbledygook are identified as coexisting, potentially counter-hegemonic frames. Thus, the quasi-public function, that is, providing services that the state does not, has become the dominant understanding of civil society suppressing its socialization and political functions, once so prominent in Central and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing up in Bulgaria during the “transition” years, as a then fifteen-year old, I spent the summer of 1990 queuing up at the neighborhood newsstand waiting for the daily delivery of freshly printed newspapers. Shortages of goods, including food and gasoline, caused long lines in front of many stores, but the crowd waiting at the kiosk was eager to read about the latest political developments, and especially popular were the newspapers published by the newly established opposition parties. While there was no scarcity of political news via television and radio, there was always something special about the print media, much of which, including entertainment weeklies, were such a novelty. Twenty or so years later, I spent another summer among newspapers, in the archives of the National Library in Sofia, poring through the pages and—with no digitization of archives—collecting photographs of news articles published before each of the national legislative elections since 1990. Much has changed in the media environment since then, yet the study of media in post-communist societies and especially its relations to voters, parties, and politics in general is still in its infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Eastern Europe continues to be defined and redefined not just by the actual patterns of socio-economic and political reproduction of the distant and proximate regimes governing the region but also through the perceptions of such legacies as generating fundamental similarities. Such perceived similarities, whether or not closely mapped on the objective parallels among countries in Eastern Europe, facilitate intra-region diffusion that results in (further) spatio-temporal socio-economic and political similarities specific to the region. To illustrate this relationship between precommunist and communist legacies, intra-region diffusion, and the production of Eastern Europe, the article examines Slovakia’s diffusion entrepreneurship in the wave of electoral breakthroughs in Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This article contributes to the literatures on Eastern Europe and comparative democratization in two main ways. First, it adds to the work on the impact of spatio-temporal dependence on transition outcomes, such as democratization, in Eastern Europe. Second, by doing so, the article also documents the impact of an understudied set of democracy promoters—the Eastern European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the transformations which have taken place in the territory of the former USSR, Ukraine has entered—according to Thomas Carothers—a “gray zone.” In the Ukrainian case, it is a zone of ambivalence between evolution toward the Russian model of the political system and transformation toward a West European democracy. It appears that the latter variant is quite likely. This is evidenced by the events connected with the “Orange Revolution” and the social reaction to President Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union. The integration of this country into the Euro-Atlantic area clearly calls into question the possibility of Moscow returning to the role of sole hegemonic leader in post-Soviet territory. Over the past several years, Moscow’s policy toward Ukraine has been legitimized by the idea of a civilizational community—the “Russkiy Mir.” This is based on the assumption that, allegedly, a cultural and spiritual unity exists among the “Orthodox nations.” Their consolidation would underwrite—among other things—a civilizational clash with the West. This article aims to answer the question of how the idea of the Russkiy Mir is perceived in Ukraine. It appears that the idea of constructing an Orthodox civilizational community clashing with the West is not compatible with the core unarticulated knowledge which shapes the rules of contemporary social and political life in Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“Reading newspapers, watching television, taking part in public meetings, and also listening to the ‘popular voice,’ one can have an impression that Poland is a country full of frustrated, manipulated, ignored people who have been pushed to the margin and deprived of the respect they deserve,” claim the authors of the book Cudze problemy (Problems of Others) in 1991. From this perspective, it is impossible to overestimate the role played in the system of “popular democracy” by institutions of social control, worker/peasant inspections, bureaus of letters and complaints, and also by books of complaints and requests, which were supposed to act as substitutes for nonexistent democratic institutions. This article, based on a historical Old Polish tradition of laments and supplications, will contextualize the articulation of injustice in the trade discourse popularized in the period of the Polish People’s Republic through books of complaints and requests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies, which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest festival designed to boost participation in Save Roşia Montană, the most prominent environmental campaign in Romania. In contrast to its Western counterparts, Romania has seen markedly lower levels of involvement in voluntary organizations that are a key setting for mobilization into collective action. Concurrently, experience with participation in physical protests is limited amongst Romanians. Specifically, the article probes recent indications that social network sites provide new impetus to protest participation as an instrumental means of mobilization. Dwelling on a distinction between experienced and newcomers to protest, results indicate that social network site usage may make possible the casual participation of individuals with prior protest experience who are not activists in a voluntary organization. Whilst this finding may signal a new participatory mode hinging on digitally networked communication, which is beginning to be theorized, it confounds expectations pertaining to a net contribution of social network site usage to the participation of newcomers to protest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much of the political science literature suggests that a cohesive political community is advantageous—if not a precondition—for a stable democracy. Forging a cohesive community is obviously a more complex matter in a multi-ethnic setting. This article will consider the prospects of building political communities in the Baltic countries—three countries that, to various extents, struggle to balance ethnic pluralism, nation building, and democracy. The article examines the relationship between political community and democracy from a theoretical perspective, followed by an outline of the nation-building strategies taken by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania after re-establishing independence in the early 1990s. Drawing on survey data, we use territorial attachment to tap the sense of political community in the three countries. Notably, our figures disclose that most of the Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia and Latvia identify themselves as “Russians,” and not at all with the country they reside in. This suggests that the contested issue of citizenship rights in the two countries has not been particularly conducive for creating cohesive political communities. We then move to the political regime and set out to examine the character of regime support in the three countries. Can we envisage solid support for democracy and its institutions in the absence of a cohesive political community? As it appears, regime support is not contingent on territorial identity. Our data disclose that many Baltic inhabitants draw a clear distinction between their own experiences with different political systems and what they perceive as relevant regime options today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The manuscript analyzes negative developments in Bulgarian and Romanian politics in the aftermath of the two countries’ accession to the European Union, with a special focus on the worsening corruption problem, the destabilization of previously coherent normative frameworks, and the reversal of processes of state building. It also explores the main characteristics of a novel form of elite behavior, post-accession hooliganism, which began to emerge as soon as Bulgarian and Romanian political leaders felt strong and confident enough to disregard the demands of their West European counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the twenty years since communism’s collapse, scholars of postcommmunist Central and Eastern Europe have increasingly converged on the insight that long-run continuities reaching back to the nineteenth century are crucial in shaping some of the most important contemporary macro- and micro-level political outcomes in the region. Today’s political cleavages, political discourses, patterns of partisan affiliation, institutional choice, and the quality of democracy itself all appear to correlate to a remarkable degree with patterns from the “deep past.” To date, social scientists, however, have not sufficiently reflected on what might explain this finding and how to study the impact of the general phenomenon of the long-run in the region. This article makes two contributions. First, we contend that in general, long-run continuities may ironically be more important in contexts of discontinuous institutional change such as in Central and Eastern Europe since frequent institutional disjunctures paradoxically open chasms between formal and informal institutions, preventing gradual change and producing patterns of institutional mimicry to cope with institutional ruptures. This insight may travel to other contexts of weak institutionalization. Second, we reject efforts to identify “deep causes” of contemporary outcomes without specifying how intervening events and crises intersect with these longer-run patterns. The article resuscitates Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue duree to propose a new cumulative approach to the study of the long-run that complicates accounts that too starkly juxtapose precommunist and communist-era “legacies” on the present and argues that scholars should study how these periods reinforce each other and jointly determine contemporary outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Soviet Union and post-communist states are outstanding case studies of the changing meaning of expatriation and citizenship. The historical shifts in voluntary and forced expatriation and the relationship between the two signify the changing perceptions of citizenship. Although there appears to be a disjunction between the two periods, I argue that this difference is mainly in scale and is symbolic rather than a transformation of the philosophical principle that allows free movement and free emigration. Both philosophically and legally, the right to exit one's country and emigrate is considered a basic democratic human right. However, like all philosophical and actual manifestations of this right, during both the communist and post-communist periods the right to leave was conditional. Similarly, most post-communist countries adhere to the traditional conception of citizenship that sees dual citizenship as a violation of the exclusiveness of national political membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a consensus is emerging about the importance of state building and state capacity for democratization in both post-communist and developing countries, comparatively few explicit attempts have been made to provide empirical support for the relationship between the two concepts. Even more problematic is to find an explicit causal mechanism linking high state capacity with democracy. State capacity can be understood as the capability of the state to penetrate society, regulate social relations, extract resources, and appropriate or use resources in determined ways. In other words, strong states have high capabilities to complete these tasks, while weak states struggle to compete with private actors over extraction and appropriation of resources. But what makes strong states more likely to be democratic and, in turn, weak states less likely to be democratic? This article explores whether or not state capacity correlates with the outcomes of founding elections, that is, the first open elections in post-communist countries. In other words, do voters in states with higher initial capacity also tend to "throw the communist rascals out" in the founding elections? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the dissolution of the extreme right Workers’ Party by the Czech courts in 2010. It situates the case in the historical development of party closures by militant democracy on Czech territory and explains why the Workers’ Party was the first party to be dissolved in the Czech Republic after the fall of the Communist regime. It also describes the legislative framework in contemporary Czech law for the dissolution of political parties. It details the political and legal repercussions of the ruling and the wider discussions it provoked, not only in political and expert circles but also among the general public. Given the fact that the case was taken to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, the European dimension of the dissolution of the Workers’ Party is also analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the impact of national identity on democratization and market reforms in Russia and Ukraine. We develop a concept of hegemonic national identity and demonstrate its role in Russian and Ukrainian post-communist political development. The article argues that Russia’s slide toward authoritarianism was to an important degree an outcome of the notions of national identity adopted by the main political players and society at large. In Ukraine, on the other hand, a hegemonic identity failed to emerge and the public discussion of issues of national identity led to the adoption of much more liberal and democratic notions of identity by a considerable part of the political elite. Adoption of this more liberal identity, in turn, was one of the main reasons for the Orange Revolution. The main theoretical implications of this argument are as follows: (a) choices of national identity profoundly affect the prospects for democracy in the newly democratizing states; (b) institutions do shape identities; (c) elites’ preference for (or opposition to) liberal democracy is not simply a consequence of their understanding of their self-interest in gaining and preserving power but also is dependent to a significant extent on their choices of political identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2004 Orange Revolution and election of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who had a stellar reputation in previous positions as National Bank Chairman and Prime Minister, was viewed as a new era in Ukrainian politics, ushering in deep seated reforms and a battle against corruption. Five years on, his opponent, Viktor Yanukovych, whose election in 2004 was annulled over election fraud, replaced him as President. The failure of the Yushchenko presidency to implement the majority of the hopes placed in it by millions of voters and protestors, specifically to decisively change the manner in which politics and economics are undertaken, is a good opportunity to analyse why Ukraine is a difficult country, an immobile state, in which to undertake change of any type. Yanukovych’s first year in office points to Ukraine undergoing a regression from the only tangible benefit to have emerged from “orange” rule; namely, democratization, media freedom, and free elections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research tests the hypothesis that social identities play a key role in the success or failure of democracy, since individuals often hold ethnic and regional identities in particular in a mutually exclusive fashion, resisting calls to act politically on other identities that cut across them. Activists in women's non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were interviewed in Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine, in order to examine the policy process in an area that cuts across ethnic and regional lines. In newer democracies, the effects of identities should be strongest, since institutions are new, and have less ability to constrain political behavior. The hypothesis that ethnic and regional divisions inhibit cooperation within and between NGOs was tested against alternative hypotheses that attribute cooperation, or the lack of it, to outside funding. The results support the argument that ethnic and regional divisions harm cooperation on women's issues, though the other hypotheses cannot be ruled out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes and compares Czech and Slovak party politics after 1989. The concept of cleavages is used as a theoretical starting point. The authors point out that although the communist period overshadowed the traditional cleavages dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, it is possible to analyze some politically-based cleavages in the respective party arrangements of the two countries. The main conclusion of the article is as follows: that despite differing trajectories of political development during the 1990s, at the present time, both the Czech and Slovak party systems show great similarities in terms of the prevalence of the socioeconomic cleavage. Socioeconomic cleavage emerged quite early after 1989 in the Czech Republic; in Slovakia the socioeconomic cleavage has become dominant only in recent years. This has contributed to the stabilization of the classic left-right model of political competition and the consolidation of the two countries' party systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploring the "federalization debate" that occurred in the context of the Prague Spring, this article highlights the diversity of opinions among political elites in Slovakia regarding the federalization and democratization discussions in 1968. The language Slovaks used to call for federalization reveals how they conceive of democracy and democratization, and it shows the variety of meanings Slovaks ascribed to federalization and to the popular slogan, "First federalization, then democratization." Federalization and democratization were mutually dependent in the minds of many Slovaks. The author argues that Slovak political and cultural figures writing in the late 1960s saw federalization as a necessary precondition for democracy; they regarded the nation as one of the basic units of democracy, which led them to champion institutional safeguards for Slovak national rights as a prerequisite for successful democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joining the European Union (EU) has changed the nature of democracy in the new member states. The EU's membership has complicated the structure of democratic decision making by making it more multilayered and multi-centered. EU membership has enhanced the powers of nonmajoritarian institutions such as the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and various regulatory agencies. National parliaments tend to be less powerful democratic players after a country joins the European Union—and even before, as the EU accession process has shown. EU membership has also broadened the democratic public space. As a consequence, democratic decision making within the European Union has to accommodate a more diversified set of interests and cultural orientations. Providing citizens with greater access to the European decision-making process seems to be most urgent in the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe, whose citizens feel particularly detached from this process. The article tries to suggest some ways of achieving this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political party competition is critical to fostering good governance and preventing corruption. However, several aspects of competition—the number of parties, their vote share, or their specific ideology—have no demonstrable impact on corruption. In contrast, the robustness of competition is critical in constraining governments and monitoring policy. Parties have to clearly profile themselves, be credible coalition partners, and prioritize parliamentary monitoring above building organizations. Above all, political party competition must be inclusive: no party should be excluded a priori from governance or coalitions because of their ideology or the identity of the constituency they represent. This is especially the case in new democracies, where capable and stable competitors are in short supply. Consequently, former authoritarian parties need to be included: they have the greatest incentives to monitor the behavior of the new governing parties, and they often have the greatest capacity to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While in Central-Eastern Europe and in the Baltics democracy and market reform have been consolidated, culminating in entry to the European Union, in the states of the former Soviet Union democracy and economic reforms are still lagging, and in some cases we observe reversals in both political and economic reforms. The article identifies the risk of a ‘trap’ of partial reforms, both political and economic. Incentives for further reforms are weak for policy makers, and at the same time opposition to reforms by citizens increases. Lack of competition and concentration of economic power lead to opposition by wealthy people, while the lack of social safety nets leads to opposition by those adversely affected by reforms. An external anchor (e.g., entry or candidacy to entry in the European Union) seems to be crucial; lacking such an anchor, the process is much harder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social science literature on ethnically divided states is huge and varied, but suggestions for constitutional solutions are strangely uniform: "loose federations" of ethnically defined ministates, with minimal central authority that must act by consensus and thus cannot act at all on issues that are contested rather than consented. In Bosnia, the political system mandated by the international High Representative suffer the same structural flaws that were used to make the former Yugoslav federation and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina unworkable. Similarly nonviable systems were proposed in 1994 to 1995 for Croatia and in 1998 to 1999 for Kosovo and recently for Cyprus and for Iraq. This article analyzes the paradox of mandating consensus-based politics in ethnically divided states, inclusion in which does not have the consent of most members of at least one group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the patterns of intra executive conflict and cooperation in East European democracies that adopted semipresidential constitutional frameworks. It explores how the coexistence of popularly elected presidents and prime ministers is shaped by constitutional provisions, parliamentary fragmentation, and party system characteristics. The article emphasizes a critical role that party systems play in the evolution of intraexecutive relations across the region. It argues that variations in the political status of the cabinet, in the character of parliamentary composition, and in the constitutional powers of the president affect both the type and frequency of intra executive conflict experienced by semipresidential regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the European Union (EU) has in many ways supported democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, it has also imposed new constraints on the functioning of democracy. The article explores the indirect impact of EU integration on the Eastern applicant countries by exposing the underlying logic of enlargement and analyzing the implications of that logic for democratic politics. The empirical analysis focuses on the preaccession process of one of the new member states, Estonia, but it also examines the overall EU policy toward Eastern candidates, pointing to the limits of enlargement as a form of democracy promotion. It highlights that the principles and norms that dominated enlargement—most notably inevitability, speed, efficiency, and expertise—constrained democratic politics in the applicant countries and limited their EU accession to a narrow sphere of elites and experts. The author links the findings with the democratic deficit in the EU and draws some conclusions concerning future prospects of democracy in and democracy promotion by the enlarged EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the democratic regime in the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1920-1938. Czechoslovak political system's maintenance of constitutional and democratic rule; Extremist groups challenging the republic; Legal protection of democracy.

Explores the nature and direction of post-communist democracy in Hungary. Ideological changes of the young democrat group Fidesz; Liberalism; Conservatism.

Focuses on the dispute related to transitology and consolidology theory of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Significance of political culture; Role of international influences in the process of democratization; Interpretations of the democratic transistions.