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This paper investigates attitudes towards the welfare state measured as government responsibility towards the standard of living of the unemployed and the old. The article focuses on the differences between post-communist countries and the rest of Europe, contextualised using the self-interest theory, specifically economic strain. Data on thirty one European countries gleaned from the European Social Survey collected in 2008 and 2016 are analysed using multilevel methods. The findings show that even though citizens in post-communist countries are purportedly more in favour of government intervention in regard to the welfare state, perceptible differences emerge based on individual characteristics, namely economic strain, combined with whether the respondent lives in a post-communist country. The cross-national differences in welfare support between post-communist countries and the rest of Europe are largely driven by differences in economic strain, with citizens in post-communist countries that struggle financially exhibiting higher support for welfare state provisions in comparison to their peers in countries without a communist legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2015 refugee crisis has held the attention of Romanian news media, as one of the most challenging issues for the European Union in the last decade, even though Romania is not situated on the main routes on which refugees arrive. Our research focuses on the variation of issue-specific news frames in time, according to media type, and by the countries covered, also addressing the locally salient issue of religion. Articles from the websites of the top-ranked six Romanian news outlets were analyzed, including three quality papers and three tabloids (N=6,183), from 1 April 2015 to 30 September 2017. Using a computer-assisted, cluster-based frame analysis, we identify six primary, mutually exclusive and six secondary, nonexclusive frames: European crisis, context/victimization, relocation/distribution, international conflict, and social problem, national costs, religious issues, US immigration policy, humanitarian/international. The variations in their salience follow the general European tendency toward securitization. At the same time, the emphasis on the issue as a European crisis indicates a tendency characteristic of Central and Eastern European media coverage. Co-occurrence patterns of frames and specific countries also indicate that the salience of some globally recurrent frames varies by countries covered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue in historical and memory studies analyzes two interrelated processes. It explores how the dissident past has been negotiated, contested, or reclaimed since 1989 and how key post-dissident actors have employed their own pasts as a moral and political resource after 1989, with what consequences. The issue approaches post-dissident history and the memory of dissent after 1989 in a regional-comparative frame while paying ample attention to transnational dynamics, such as interactions between Western recognition and national contestation. The issue thus analyzes the varied meanings east Europeans have assigned to dissident pasts and post-dissident presents and how the contests over such meanings have come to shape their politics and culture. Individual contributions focus on post-dissident actors, their representations, or their impact. A focus on actors enables in-depth exploration of post-dissident politics across the Visegrád countries and how the dissident experience was translated, via a politics of consensus, into liberal politics during the early years of "transition." This focus also yields studies that analyze how post-dissidents have drawn on the intellectual authority and moral credibility they derived from their dissident pasts. Other studies in the collection trace transformation in the representation of forms of dissent in the decades since 1989 and the changing political and cultural values such representations have conveyed. Still other studies explore and reflect on the reasons behind the backlash against the post-dissident canon and its leading representatives while also considering ways in which "dissident heroes" have been posthumously reclaimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the political dimension of dissident legacies, we need first to understand the components that "made" the dissidents and follow their reconfiguration after 1989, leading to initial empowerment followed by gradual demise of the liberal post-dissident elite. Dissidence in the form that first appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in central and eastern Europe constituted a particular mode of political practice, combining open, non-violent dissent with universalist moral claims. The phenomenon of dissidentism was transnational, as political empowerment of oppositionists was achieved through a particular network of relationships between domestic audiences, repressive regimes, and Western media, social movements, trade unions, political parties, and policymakers. The specificities of the dissidents' empowerment can partly explain key features of post-dissident politics and the visible backlash against former prominent dissidents, which has contributed to the rise of illiberalism and to democratic backsliding. This article traces the post-1989 trajectories of a few who belonged among central Europe's most prominent representatives in this symbolic category, to try to explain the causes and character of the swift backlash against them—or as Václav Havel put it, their "expulsion from the fairytale." Three pillars of dissident political power turned into the roots of their demise. First, critics question the dissidents' uniqueness and rewrite their master narrative. Further, we see a clash of representations that results from the dissidents' transnational empowerment, and third, the broader anti-elite and anti-intellectual tendencies that always accompanied dissidence as its shadow became amplified by more recent populist rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's central question is how former dissidents and their engagement in post-1989 nascent democratic politics contributed to the emergence of what was later retrospectively labelled the "liberal consensus." I look at the earliest stages of this consensus before it started to lock in the conditionality of the EU accession process. To this end, I first discuss the "liberal consensus" from a retrospective and past prospective perspective. I define the notions of "post-dissent" and liberal politics emerging after 1989 on the dissident platform. I discuss the theoretical background and historical contours of the notion of dissident "politics of consensus." The empirical core of the study is an analysis of the birth of post-dissident liberal parties in the process of the disintegration of broad consensual democratization movements of the 1989 revolutions. The study offers a comparison of the Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish cases, analyzing their similarities and less obvious but significant differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contributes a better understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the intertwining of national and religious identity at the individual level in (some) former Communist and socialist European countries. It starts by retracing from a historical perspective the place religion occupied under the regimes, then paying attention to how, once politicized and ethnicized by the hand of a new class of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, religion became "the hallmark of nationhood." This excursus allows us to better contextualize both the theoretical argument and findings. The intertwining of national and religious identity is investigated from two main theoretical sources. The first is the debate within sociology and political science on different ideas of nationhood, while the second consists of socio-psychological models of intergroup relations. The empirical investigation is based on survey data from the European values study (EVS, 2017). A comparative approach is used that includes four countries having Catholic large majorities (Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary) and, as a benchmark, Romania, having an Orthodox majority. To test the hypotheses, a structural equation model is specified. The causal model seeks to unravel to what extent different conceptions of nationhood (ethno-religious vs. civil), together with national attachment, influence the intergenerational transmission of religious values and distrust of people of another religion/nationality. The research results are in line with the current European trends pointing in the direction of a stronger overlap between the religious and the national in tailoring collective identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the thematic cluster "Who Cares for Families? Narrative(s) of Return in Postsocialist Europe" identifies and analyzes its core concept—the narrative of return. Families of today are talked about differently, and how they are narrativized matters. The narrative that stresses that family is under threat and in need of defense or a special form of care, figuring care as restitution of the natural, traditional, or proper family, is termed the narrative of return. The trope of return is strongly normative and non-descriptive, as it relies on mythical temporalities that ought to be restored in our present. The article first defines the choice of concepts—narrative, return, care, and threat. Second, it applies this conceptual frame in the transnational context, particularly within the transnational anti-gender campaigns in the populist moment. Third, it focuses on the postsocialist part of Europe, where, as the entire thematic cluster aims to demonstrate, the narrative of return has gained particular currency. In eastern Europe, these narratives are integral to larger projects of restoration of national agendas and serve as a tool of double emancipation: from the Soviet past and from the present European Union. Political actors using narratives of return advocate and successfully push through fundamental changes in the political frameworks and value systems of the postsocialist countries. In sum, the introduction aims to demonstrate the conceptual background of a political tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that while nationalist discourses construct "the people" through positive identity practices, populist discourses articulate it through negative identity practices. Nationalism emphasizes who "the people" are, by identifying a number of core positive characteristics that they share, such as ethnicity, language, culture, history, religion, or political rights and civic traditions. Populism, on the other hand, defines "the people" primarily in a negative fashion in opposition to the elites. Here, "the people" do not share any positive characteristics beyond their oppression, exclusion, and marginalization by the elites. In order to empirically demonstrate the above distinction, I compare the political discourse of Rafael Correa in Ecuador during his first term in office (2007–2012) with that of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, primarily during his second term in office (2010–2014). The comparison between these two political projects not only spells out important differences between populist and nationalist articulations of "the people" but also highlights different types of anti-system politics that have emerged in Latin America and eastern Europe. [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 post-colonial face of Poland is rather problematic. Nationalistic right-wingers started using interpretations applying the post-colonial theory, and the theory itself seems to put little resistance to this type of appropriation. Rather than acknowledging such state of affairs as the fate of every idea falling into the hands of the natives, in this paper I would like to treat the problems of Polish post-coloniality as a very interesting test, both for the theory itself and for the analyses of the Polish reality. I shall compare the cases of nationalistic misuse with a more "mainstream" approach to the issue of applicability of the post-colonial theory to the situation in Eastern Europe, and particularly to the situation in Poland. As I shall try to demonstrate, this comparison will reveal many disturbingly common threads--which in my opinion are unjustified assertions and conclusions--resulting not only from errors in reasoning but the shortcomings of the theory itself. [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]

The article develops a concept of governance-induced migration, focusing on the aspect of migrant motivations that remains largely underexamined in current migration research. The wage differentials, family reasons, and availability of welfare benefits are often indicated as the aspects of the host state with a "magnetic" power of attraction. The article argues that other aspects of state development also may prominently influence the behaviour of immigrants and their readiness to settle in a receiving country. The case study presented here of Ukrainian migrant entrepreneurs in Poland (interviews with fifty-one respondents) demonstrates that their motivations for migration are more complex and diversified. They encompass not only the economic and family reasons but also the quality and efficiency of public institutions. Governance-induced migration is associated with the perception of the host state as more citizen-friendly, transparent, effective in ensuring safety, and providing an environment for development. The differences between Poland and Ukraine in the functionality of public institutions and the level of socio-political risks lead to enhanced migration flows and entrepreneurship drain from Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the rise of online communication and political divisions based on symbols, rather than structure (decrease in the importance of class-based voting), citizens are increasingly linked to news outlets that articulate and reinforce their views. The process is facilitated by the spontaneous processes of bottom–up communication that excludes, in an iterative process, people who express views that are inconsistent with the prevailing opinion. The emergence of "information verticals" is a significant influence on attitudes to some issues covered in political debate. These effects operate with regard to so-called easy issues, that is, those rooted in emotions and in the symbolic sphere. Our article is an empirical test of our hypotheses about the effects of media framing of "hard" and "easy" issues. We apply a survey experiment method to verify whether contact with news coverage has an effect on attitudes, taking into account the political orientation and cognitive skills of citizens. Our empirical analyses confirm that a hostile media framing of migration changes respondents' attitudes no matter their level of cognitive engagement. The data come from Poland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the debate on spatial variance of voting behaviour in Poland. Using empirical data from the 2015 Polish parliamentary election, two alternative explanations of observed patterns are tested. The first focuses on the role of economy while the second emphasises the importance of the urban–rural divide. The empirical analysis demonstrates higher relevance of the differences between urban and rural areas. Even after controlling for historical legacies, urbanization offers the best explanation of the differences in electoral results between spatial units. Furthermore, the effects related to the urban–rural divide are similar within the two broadly defined clusters of parties. Economic variables, on the contrary, matter only in certain socio-cultural contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-GrajperControversies over social memory form an important aspect of reality in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, there are debates about coming to terms with the communist past and the Second World War that preceded it (because important parts of the memory of the war were “frozen” during the communist era), and, on the other hand, and intimately connected to that, are discussions about the constant influence of communism on the current situation. This article presents some of the main trends in research on collective memory in the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and reveals similarities and differences in the process of memorialization of communism in the countries of the region. Although there are works devoted to a comparative analysis of memory usage and its various interpretations in the political sphere in the countries of Eastern Europe, there are still many issues concerning daily practices (economic, religious, and cultural) associated with varying interpretations of the war and the communist past which needs further elaboration and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the history of Yugoslavia to trace the unique ways in which the national airline Yugoslav Airlines (JAT) served as a powerful tool of Yugoslav, and then post-Yugoslav, Serbian state identity construction from 1975 to 2013, when JAT ceased to exist. I analyze the complete archives of the JAT Review to trace the stunning reconstruction of Yugoslav state identity over time: from the height of the Yugoslav “brand” in the 1970s as the country served a pivotal role in the Non-Aligned Movement, to the slow decline in pan-Yugoslav identity and the rise of sub-Yugoslav nationalisms throughout the 1980s, to the final dissolution of the country and collapse of Yugoslav identity in the 1990s. Building on insights from the nation-branding literature, I conduct a textual and visual analysis of articles, photographs, and ads that appeared on the pages of the JAT Review. The analysis points to the complex and often contradictory ways in which Yugoslavia constructed its multiple identities to project power and status in the international sphere, while simultaneously maintaining citizen loyalty at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the special cluster titled Social practices of remembering and forgetting of the communist past in Central and Eastern Europe, guest edited by Malgorzata Glowacka-GrajperIn this article, I argue against the primary perception of communist nostalgia as either longing for social security or the “dark ages” of anti-communist narratives. I suggest we look deeper into people’s everyday economic practices and ideas under communism, and their transmission and/or re-invention by contemporary populism, to understand the present-day role of nostalgia. Using material gathered mostly in Slovakia, I argue for a fuller understanding of the ambivalent role that communist modernization played in developing the specific model of livelihood strategies, ideas, and practices I call post-peasant. This people’s economy is widely remembered as an unintended consequence of communist modernization, not as an integral product of it. This economic model is further mobilized by skilled populist politicians. It is not the memory of socialism, but an understanding of a “people’s economy” and politics developed under socialism and transmitted across regimes, one I characterize as “post-peasant,” that people are actually nostalgic about. [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]

This article explores the subject matter of new political parties’ survival by analysing the recent trajectory of the Green party ORaH in Croatia. ORaH emerged in October 2013; it won 9.4 percent of the vote at the 2014 European Parliament election and subsequently rose to 18.5 percent of public support in October 2014, only to collapse to 1.7 percent of the vote at the parliamentary election held in November 2015. In order to explain ORaH’s initial meteoric rise and its later equally rapid demise, we will employ studies on new and niche parties while we further elaborate our analysis of ORaH’s programme by profiling ORaH’s voter base. We also address a recurrent weakness in political party research by analysing the role of the European level of competition in increasing the chances of a new party’s survival by developing a framework that better integrates domestic and international dynamics of political party development. Our main finding is that despite its success in the 2014 European Parliament elections, and even though its electorate shares important features of the European Green voter, ORaH failed to secure parliamentary representation because of the inability of the party’s leadership to steer the party away from its initial contender status and define OraH’s policy niche. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon a survey of more than three thousand respondents and forty in-depth interviews, the aim of this article is to examine the impact of migration on sexual resocialisation. In particular, we show how living in London influenced the attitudes of Central and East European migrants towards pre-marital sex and homosexuality. While the general acceptability of pre-marital sex was not affected by time spent in London, differences were noted in the meaning attached to sex outside marriage in the United Kingdom compared with Central and Eastern Europe. Particularly significant changes were observed in our respondents' attitudes towards homosexuality, with a greater liberalisation the result of extrication from mechanisms of social control, re-socialisation into new social norms regarding sex and sexuality, greater visibility of sexual difference in London and, in particular, inter-personal contacts with gays and lesbians. Limitations to the general liberalisation of attitudes were also noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the seemingly robust Central-Eastern European reactions to terrorist events in Western Europe, whilst examining the difference between how counterterrorism (CT) in Central-Eastern Europe looks in theory and how it works in practice. It constitutes the first comparative study, across eight case studies, focusing solely on CT-related issues of the post-2004 EU entrants, and one of the very first assessing CT developments in post-communist Europe available in English. The article addresses a serious gap in terrorism studies that are oriented towards works on terrorism or CT in Western Europe. It sets out five distinguishing features of CT routines in Central-Eastern Europe and consequently argues that Central-Eastern Europeans "reference" their CT arrangements from Western Europe in a copy and paste manner. Moreover, the Central-Eastern European CT, unlike that of their CT "referees" from Western Europe, is not linear in nature and does not stem from the local threat perception being filtered through CT legacies (developed norms, practices, and routines). By thematically analysing the haphazard manner in which the Central-Eastern Europeans develop their CT legacies, and depicting how eager they are in adopting the Western European rationale for countering a threat that is hardly present in their region, the article provides new empirical basis (derived from qualitative data, including sixty interviews with Central-Eastern European CT experts and officials) for a far-reaching argument about a West-East (old EU -- new EU) divide on CT in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a dozen new countries joined the European Union in the mid-2000s, political tensions spiked over disparities in corporate income tax rates. Since the time of enlargement, leaders have tried repeatedly to enhance corporate tax coordination within the EU, as a result of fears of downward pressure on corporate tax rates and states’ weakening ability to collect revenues. At the same time, leaders from new member states in Eastern Europe with low corporate tax rates have contended that regional efforts to coordinate tax policies are not worthwhile, given that corporate tax competition is a global phenomenon. This article argues that corporate tax competition is more acute at the regional than the global level. While corporate tax rates are falling inside and outside the EU, we demonstrate using a large multiyear, multiregional data set that Eastern European countries have extremely low corporate tax rates relative to other EU and non-EU countries, even when controlling for multiple domestic economic and political factors. These findings support the potential efficacy of pursuing regional corporate tax reform to address the downward spiraling of rates in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An influential contingent of Catholic clergy in Poland reacted to Poland’s entry into the European Union by developing a narrative positing the Catholic foundation and ownership of Europe and all its constituent “nations.” This narrative, which I call national-European theology, identifies the Catholic Church as the progenitor of both European and Polish existence and guarantor of their continuity of identity. In this way, it remedies some Catholics’ anxieties about both the integrity of Poland’s national sovereignty and the allegedly secularizing and liberalizing cultural influence of other EU member countries. I argue that national-European theology can be fruitfully conceived as a hereditary ownership narrative, framed by moments of spiritual foundation and subsequent inheritance from spiritual founders, and that this narrative structure characterizes both nationalism writ large and Europeanization as an analogous modern identitarian project. I suggest that taking heredity as a lens through which to understand nationalism and its attendant notions of legitimation allows us to move past debates about the “content” of nationalist claims (ethnic, religious, linguistic, etc.) and toward the mechanism by which group reproduction is culturally defined and sanctioned. To do this, I first sketch a theory of nationalism as a hereditary ownership narrative, drawing upon the Polish case, and liken it to the “Europe-building” project of the EU. Second, I present a brief historical outline of Poland’s accession to the EU and the anxieties generated thereby. Finally, I turn to the rhetoric of the Polish clergy who best represent the national-European current in contemporary Catholic political theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the activity of non-governmental actors in Latvia in advocating their interests on national and European Union legislative proposals. The findings draw on primary data gained from 122 responses from interest organizations in Latvia in an online survey. Despite the large number of societal actors (thirteen thousand registered organizations), the interest group population in Latvia consists of small and financially underequipped NGOs. Their lobbying activities are characterized by predominantly influencing domestic authorities, that is, national route strategies, although there is some variation across the types of interest groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does Eastern Europe contribute to the debate over EU’s democratic deficit from an electoral perspective? Does Eastern Europe challenge our theoretical understanding of what motivates European citizens to participate and express their opinions in European Parliamentary elections? While there is no overarching consensus in the academic community regarding these questions, this essay aims to illustrate how a deeper understanding of one post-communist case and a bottom-up perspective on attitudes and political behavior in one locale, Romania, allowed the researcher to delve deeper into the taken-for-granted dynamics that European citizens from the South, East, and West engage in when voting in European Parliamentary elections. The approach of “ethnographic sensibility” mentioned in the workshop’s discussions and illustrated in several contributions to this volume (see e.g. Kubik 2013; Knott 2015) constitutes then a useful starting point in deconstructing conventional knowledge. Moreover, during the process of moving up the ladder of generality and building inferences from one case study to a region, Eastern Europe still shares enough characteristics to deserve its own dummy variable, so to speak, in large-N continent-wide analyses covering the 2004 and 2009 European Parliamentary (EP) elections. Yet, as Joshua Tucker (2015) mentions in his contribution, it is unclear whether the historical legacies discussed at the workshop and further elaborated on by Grigore Pop-Eleches (2015) will continue to play a role in a priori distinguishing Eastern Europeans’ political attitudes and behaviors from other EU citizens in the South or West in future EP elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the study of post-communism has transformed comparative politics by adding a substantial role for external actors to existing theories of democratization. The big, overarching finding is dramatic: external actors can, under certain conditions, tip the balance in favor of democracy by offering strong rewards to elites, conditional on complying with tough requirements. External actors can also influence the performance of the state—and how the state treats its citizens. The main causal player is the European Union. This simple finding is consequential for all three major strands of democratization theory. The article goes on to explore how the leverage of the European Union has shaped the trajectories of political change in the new and credible future EU members in East Central and South Eastern Europe. The great variation among existing and candidate members can be largely explained by different domestic conditions, even though there are many areas where the EU’s use of its leverage could have been improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay outlines theoretical visions or paradigms that have underpinned empirical and historical work on the great transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. Such paradigms shaped “sociological imaginations” and analytical lenses through which scholars generated important questions and developed their research interests and projects. The study of post-communism was influenced by three such paradigms: the first focused on the immediate communist past as the main constraint on post-1989 transformations; the second attempted to transcend the specificities of post-communism and integrate the study of the region with the general comparative politics enterprise; and finally, the third signified the return to a disciplined exploration of historical and cultural contexts and their role in shaping the outcomes of transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on party competition structure in eastern Europe varies between aggregated large-N studies that propose uniform patterns of party competition across the region on the one hand, and disaggregated, case-focused studies identifying a plurality of country-specific patterns on the other. This article finds that both suffer from theoretical weaknesses. The aggregated works, arguing for common unidimensionality of party competition in the region, overlook significant cross-national differences, while the case-focused works, suggesting country-specific multidimensionality, do not identify commonalities. In effect, both sets of research fall short in explaining the variance of party competition in eastern Europe. This article consequently argues for the importance of bridging these findings of aggregate uniformity and idiosyncratic diversity through the use of refined theoretical explanations of party competition patterns in the region. To demonstrate the plausibility and utility of such an approach, the article builds a theoretical model of party competition in eastern Europe, and tests it by estimating the vote for left-wing parties across ten eastern European countries using the 2009 European Election Study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Until recent events intervened, Eastern European Studies found themselves under attack at my home university and other institutions for being, among other things, “non-strategic.” We see the same notion, if not the same terminology, applied increasingly to the humanities and non-quantitative social sciences, which lose ground daily to the so-called STEM disciplines in both educational policy and practice. How do we defend the study of Eastern European literature and culture in the current academic climate? This essay defends the centrality both of literary and Eastern European studies in the twenty-first-century curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citizen participation in decision making is being promoted in many countries transitioning from centralized to decentralized governance. Despite their common underlying premise, participatory programs vary in scope and nature. This study investigates the outcomes of promoting citizen participation in decision making in the municipality of Kuçova (Albania) where participation did not emerge from the community but rather was promoted by municipal leaders. Findings suggest that a top-down approach to participation in tandem with a bottom-up approach can be promising in a context that lacks a tradition of democratic participation. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the participatory program and draw several conclusions for promoting participation in decision making in a context characterized by a strong legacy of centralized governance and distrustful relationships between the local elite and community members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on a social constructivist framing, this article seeks to address the gap in the literature on the impact of Europeanisation on the national interest group political culture in general and in the post-communist context in particular. The impacts of Europeanisation on interest group domestic policy behaviour, in terms of national interest groups networking with their European counterparts, their contacts with EU-level decision makers, and their access to EU funds, are tested based on the panel surveys that were conducted in 1996 and 2012 of the most influential interest groups in eleven policy fields in Slovenia. Our key findings are that Europeanisation does support changes in the national interest group political culture in the direction of a more pro-active approach in influencing national policy processes. However, Europeanisation explains only a small portion of the variability among the domestic policy behaviour of interest groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Today the Eurozone faces financial and economic problems that, if left untended, threaten the fate of the EU itself. Several paths lay open to European leaders: deeper integration, more piecemeal crisis resolution, or a possible exit from the Euro of one or more countries. Yet there are few historical examples of a currency union break-up that we can use to understand implications of the third option. This essay draws lessons from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire after World War I—the best historical case study of a disintegrating currency union—for the Eurozone. The creation of new national currencies in Central Europe in the 1920s came at a very high cost, took years to stabilize, involved extensive international monitoring, created great risks for Europe’s multinational banking enterprises, and helped create the conditions for economic instability in the 1930s. European leaders could expect similar challenges to arise were Greece, Portugal, or Spain to exit the Eurozone today. One crucial factor absent in the 1920s, and still absent today, was and is a robust European-wide financial regulatory system. Ultimately, the Habsburg case study suggests that the economic costs of preserving the Euro and creating such a banking system would be much lower than those arising from allowing one or more countries to leave the currency union. [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]

Croatia represents in many respects a unique case in the world in the way it standardized the right to vote, the electoral model, and the pattern of political representation of the diaspora in the national parliament. Besides standard theoretical arguments that explain the right of diaspora members to vote in parliamentary and presidential elections in the country, the authorities made use of a number of contextually specific political, economic, military, and moral reasons for that. It was shown that principled reasons which were used to justify legalizing diaspora voting rights and institutionalization of special electoral models as well as the patterns of political representation in the Croatian parliament were subordinated to the interests to symbolically integrate the Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the political system of Croatia, who would then, as a sort of generic voters, secure safe votes and bonus seats for the Croatian Democratic Union. [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]

A military report of September 1919 singled out Polish troops from the formerly Prussian province of Poznania as particularly abusive of, and prejudiced against, Belarusian Jews. This appears to have been a rather unusual case of German anti-Semitism in its Polish version. The Poznanians' prejudice against Eastern Jews, so characteristic of German anti-Semitism, was exacerbated by their hostility against Poznanian Jews, with whom they had been in longstanding conflict. Experiencing a culture clash upon entering the settlements of Eastern Jews, they regarded their inhabitants not only as very strange and unfamiliar but also as far less civilized and even more Jewish than their Poznanian coreligionists. This attitude was compounded by the Poznanians' twofold sense of superiority. First, Poznania was much more developed and contained a much smaller proportion of Jews than did Congress Poland, Galicia, and especially Betarus. Second, the Poznanians considered themselves the best unit of the Polish army and therefore looked down upon units from Congress Poland and Galicia, and especially on their officer corps, which they considered "Jew-ridden." Many of these prejudices were shared by the Poznanian officer corps whose members, in any event, were reluctant to punish their men for anti-Jewish excesses because of their own sense of insecurity. As a result, the Poznanians were much more likely than any other Polish troops to abuse Belarusian Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Bulgaria as a case study, this article investigates what has limited the impact of the European Union (EU) on minority rights in accession countries. It is possible to identify a number of factors. They include a lack of internal minority rights standards, an emphasis on the acquis communautaire, missing expertise on minority issues, the superficial monitoring of candidate states, a lack of concern for human rights, and a failure in addressing public attitudes towards minorities. The case of Bulgaria differed from that of its neighbors in lacking involvement of the High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM) of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study intends to show how politics and policies of immigration articulate on multiple layers of agency: supranational and transnational bodies, states, local networks, and migrants. Examining migration patterns of Romanian and Moldovan citizens in the European Union, the article suggests that to understand the course of immigration policies, students of immigration need to include accounts of the practices of knowledgeable migrants, as actors who enact, in both senses of the word, the authorities' rules and regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the power as well as the limits of the EU's leverage on domestic governance in candidate countries from Eastern Europe through the cases of Bulgaria and Romania. It argues that the reasons for Bulgaria and Romania's lagging behind in meeting the EU accession criteria have to do with a set of domestic factors. Powerful veto players and institutional structures embedded in the domestic sociopolitical context have obstructed reform in the sectors most susceptible to political influence and least likely to be reformed without external pressure. The EU's leverage helps explain why the two laggards did succeed in breaking the vicious circle of semireforms and in ultimately qualifying for EU membership. The EU conditionality has tilted the political balance in favour of a consensus on pro-EU reforms, but before these reforms can take root, they need to generate further demand 'from below.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the increased salience of corruption in East-Central Europe. It shows that press coverage of the issue is much greater than in the past and also greater than in other regions with comparable or higher levels of corruption. This finding is relevant because anticorruption rhetoric can have an important impact on political and economic developments, one that is partially independent of the actual levels of corruption. The study investigates several domestic and international factors that may have led to this development and finds that the role of intergovernmental organizations has been essential in bringing the issue to the forefront of public debates. Moreover, it shows that the European Union has recently been more effective in raising the salience of corruption in the region than other organizations. The article concludes with a discussion of the effect that EU membership may have on future anticorruption rhetoric and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of communism reshaped European debates on minority fights. By the 1980s, the different institutionalizations of turn-of-the-century perspectives created an ideational divide between East and West. Since 1989, Western norms have not simply transferred East, as intellectuals and politicians in the region challenged and reinterpreted the norms in novel ways. Fifteen years later, European minority norms are elaborated in much greater detail than ever before, but consensus on core issues remains elusive. The article first explores the roots of this ideational divide and how recent trafficking of ideas between East and West Europeans has caused both to reexamine their core assumptions on the rights of minority communities, particularly with regards to individualism, collective autonomy, and justice. The second part examines how these controversies over norm interpretation appear in minority policy debates in Eastern Europe, including minority autonomy, education, and the Hungarian Status Law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several authors argue that the heritage of dissident ideas and activity in East-Central Europe has hindered the development of post-communist political society. But this proposition has not been subject to systematic analysis. This article focuses on one part of that proposition: whether dissident ideas corresponded to the features of ‘ethical civil society’ that some argue harm political society. Concentrating on Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, it differentiates eight varieties of dissident thought. It then assesses the relation of the three most important varieties to ethical civil society, finding that one variety resembled ethical civil society very closely, another only marginally, and the third not at all. It finally draws out implications for the study of political society in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a number of East Central European (ECE) governments have undertaken to radically alter the territorial structures of their public administration. Some have suggested that this development represents the growing Europeanization of ECE politics, in particular the role of the European Union. This article questions that view by examining the crucial role of domestic party politics in the enactment and implementation of regional governance reform. It does so through a close comparison of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euroscepticism of the Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS) is well known but has been rarely examined in detail. This is surprising, given how poorly ODS fits the profile of eurosceptic parties. These are usually marginal radical groupings. This article maps the developing euroscepticism of the Czech centre-right between 1991 and 2002. It notes a shift from a euroscepticism stressing neo-liberalism and Czech and Central European distinctness to one stressing the defence of "national interests" against German-inspired eurofederalism. Existing explanations of ODS euroscepticism present it as simultaneously ideologically dogmatic and opportunistic. A similar ideology-versus-strategy dichotomy informs much emerging euroscepticism literature. Such new centre-right parties in post-communist Europe, which originated as vehicles for post-communist transformation, challenge this view. As they become strategically and ideologically exhausted in an era of increasingly "normal" party competition, euroscepticism may enable them to combine ideological renewal and the development of new catchall appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asserts the networks-focused and path-independent interpretation of the transformation of communist economies in Europe as of 1990. Distinction between market orientation and market coordination; Harmony of non-market coordination with the high-performance market orientation.

Focuses on the European tradition originated in the French Revolution. Intuition of the multicultural character and tradition of inter-ethnic harmony of Europeans; Discussion of the harmony between economy and politics; Concepts of sovereignty and citizenship.

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.

The article introduces several reports within the issue including one by Stefano Bottoni on ethnic conflict management, another by Wolfgang Mueller on communist party takeovers in Austria, Germany and Hungary, and one by Andrzej Waśkiewicz on memory culture.

Throughout the 1990s, Romania's transition from authoritarianism was witness to repeated instances of intense collective violence. Specifically, miners from the country's Jiu Valley region descended on Bucharest—attacking civilians, offices of the free press, and the headquarters of opposition parties. This article attends to the strikes of June 1990 and, in so doing, addresses the broader issue of political violence during the early phases of a political transition. As one of the few cases of (nonethnic) transitional violence in Central and Eastern Europe, the miners' strikes have been put forward as evidence of an oft-cited Romanian ‘exceptionalism.’ However, this article's focus on the perceived extrainstitutional threat to the weakly legitimate National Salvation Front government, and the violent response to that threat by the government (which coordinated the miners' attacks), leads to a conclusion in which Romania's posttransition violence is seen as a rational—albeit devastating—manifestation ,of regular politics, by ‘other means.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, post-socialist states faced a critical dilemma: how to privatize and transform thousands of firms in the absence of domestic entrepreneurs with enough capital to assume control of the state's industrial patrimony. In the fifteen years of post-socialism, the elites created by the processes of transformation have been a decisive force in the economic and political development of Eastern Europe. Yet few studies focus on these early winners of reform. This article explores the interactions between the new economic elite, their firms, and the Polish state to construct a multilayered framework of state-society relations in post-communism. It concludes that the structure of state-firm relations and heightened political pluralism was crucial in limiting the predatory behavior of the new economic elite during the period of restructuring and privatization despite. This was critical in avoiding the rampant corruption present in other post-socialist countries and placed Poland on a markedly different path. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]