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

by Edited by Grzegorz Ekiert , Stephen E. Hanson

• ISBN13: 9780521529853
• ISBN10: 0521529859
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-09-15
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Part I. Postcommunist Transformations and the Role of Historical Legacies: 1. Time, space, and institutional change in central and eastern Europe

2. Accounting for postcommunist regime diversity: what counts as a good cause?

Part II. Postcommunist Europe: Continuity and Change in Regional Patterns: 3. Patterns of postcommunist transformation in central and eastern Europe

4. Postcommunist spaces: a political geography approach to explaining postcommunist outcomes

Part III. Institutional Redesign and Historical Legacies: case studies: 5. Communist successor parties after 1989

6. Leninist legacies and legacies of state socialism in postcommunist central Europe's constitutional development

7. Historical legacies, institutions and the politics of social policy in Hungary and Poland

8. Postcommunist unemployment politics: historical legacies and the curious acceptance of job loss

9. 'Past' dependency or path contingency? Institutional design in postcommunist financial systems

10. Cultural legacies of state socialism: history-making and cultural-political entrepreneurship in postcommunist Poland and Russia.