Capitalism and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe : assessing the legacy of Communist rule

Including essays by several leading contemporary specialists, this volume addresses the extent to which postcommunist societies have successfully institutionalized democratic politics and capitalist market economies over a decade after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. As the first volume to apply a systematic "comparative historical" approach to the subject matter, it reveals the precise social, cultural, and geographical constraints and opportunities facing postcommunist reformers. Time, Space, And Institutional Change In Central And Eastern Europe / Grzegorz Ekiert And Stephen E. Hanson -- Accounting For Postcommunist Regime Diversity: What Counts As A Good Cause? / Herbert Kitschelt -- Patterns Of Postcommunist Transformation In Central And Eastern Europe / Grzegorz Ekiert -- Postcommunist Spaces: A Political Geography Approach To Explaining Postcommunist Outcomes / Jeffrery S. Kopstein And David A. Reilly -- Redeeming The Past: Communist Successor Parties After 1989 -- Anna Grzymala-busse -- Leninist Legacies And Legacies Of State Socialism In Postcommunist Central Europe's Constitutional Development / Allison Stanger -- Historical Legacies, Institutions, And The Politics Of Social Policy In Hungary And Poland, 1989-1999 / Thomasz Inglot -- Postcommunist Unemployment Politics: Historical Legacies And The Curious Acceptance Of Job Loss / Phineas Baxandall -- Past Dependence Or Path Contingency? Institutional Design In Postcommunist Financial Systems / Juliet Johnson -- Cultural Legacies Of State Socialism: History Making And Cultural-political Entrepreneurship In Postcommunist Poland Russia / Jan Kubik -- From Area Studies To Contextualized Comparisons / Paul Pierson. Edited By Grzegorz Ekiert, Stephen E. Hanson. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. 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 The momentous political and economic transitions that followed the events of 1989 have moved East European studies into the mainstream of social science research.