Institutional Choice and Development in Postcommunist Europe’s Democratization.

This study compares the origins and development of electoral systems and constitutions in postcommunist Europe and observes marked differences in relative institutional staying power. While typically the first to be put in place, electoral laws were frequently replaced, whereas constitutions, once ratified, were not. Electoral laws also tended to be easier to amend than constitutions. Despite these patterns, our theories of institutional effects presently consider both constitutions and electoral systems to be formal political institutions and treat them as functional equivalents. The paper argues that we may need to draw some basic distinctions within the category of formal political institutions and render explicit the implicit role of duration in our theorizing if we are to avoid a distorted understanding of stable democracy’s foundations. At the most general level, the findings therefore highlight the critical importance of tackling questions of institutional stability and change concurrently rather than attempting to analyze them as discrete phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]