Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule

Front Cover
Grzegorz Ekiert, Stephen E. Hanson
Cambridge University Press, Sep 15, 2003 - History - 375 pages
This volume presents a shared effort to apply a general historical-institutionalist approach to the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe. It brings together a number of leading senior and junior scholars with outstanding reputations as specialists in postcommunism and comparative politics to address central theoretical and empirical issues involved in the study of postcommunism. The authors address such questions as how historical 'legacies' of the communist regime be defined, how their impact can be measured in methodologically rigorous ways, and how the effects of temporal and spatial context can be taken into account in empirical research on the region. Taken as a whole, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature by utilizing the comparative historical method to study key problems of world politics.
 

Contents

Time Space and Institutional Change in Central and Eastern Europe
15
Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity What Counts as a Good Cause?
49
Patterns of Postcommunist Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe
89
Postcommunist Spaces A Political Geography Approach to Explaining Postcommunist Outcomes
120
Redeeming the Past Communist Successor Parties after 1989
157
Leninist Legacies and Legacies of State Socialism in Postcommunist Central Europes Constitutional Development
182
Historical Legacies Institutions and the Politics of Social Policy in Hungary and Poland 19891999
210
Postcommunist Unemployment Politics Historical Legacies and the Curious Acceptance of Job Loss
248
Past Dependence or Path Contingency? Institutional Design in Postcommunist Financial Systems
289
Cultural Legacies of State Socialism History Making and CulturalPolitical Entrepreneurship in Postcommunist Poland and Russia
317
From Area Studies to Contextualized Comparisons
353
Index
367
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 1 - Social structures, types and attitudes are coins that do not readily melt. Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of this ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national...
Page 1 - Once they are formed they persist, possibly for centuries, and since different structures and types display different degrees of ability to survive, we almost always find that actual group and national behavior more or less departs from what we should expect it to be if we tried to infer it from the dominant forms of the productive...

Bibliographic information