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A weasel word is a term used in academic or political discourse whose meaning is so imprecise or badly defined that it impedes the formulation of coherent thought on the subject to which it is applied, or leads to unsubstantiated conclusions. In this symposium we consider several key terms central to the study of postcommunist politics and discuss the extent to which they fall into this category. The terms discussed here include regime terminology, the notion of postcommunism, the geographic entity "Eurasia," socialism, populism, and neoliberalism. While the authors come to different conclusions about the extent to which these terms are weasel words, they also provide pointers for how to deploy terms in ways that are consistent with the underlying concept and thus aid in the cumulation of knowledge about the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on the legacies of communism for democratization has focused almost exclusively on explaining variation in the democratic experiences within the postcommunist space. While this is useful in many ways, it says little about a communist legacy in comparison to other types of antecedent regimes. We take a different approach, looking at the question by comparing postcommunist legacies to those of other states through the prism of democratic survival. One key implication of this shift in perspective is that the literature on democratic survival highlights a range of social and economic factors that are likely to help postcommunist democracies survive, which stands in stark contrast to the postcommunist democratic performance literature that emphasizes potential disadvantages. We assess these competing and contradictory implications by analyzing the relative likelihood of democratic survival using a sample of all third-wave democracies from 1970 to 2010. We find that postcommunist democracies are neither systematically more nor less likely to fail than other democracies. Further, we find no evidence that the prospects of failure are significantly affected by past membership in the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc, the type of communist regime, or the number of years under communist rule. These findings provide little evidence that the problems of postcommunist democratization pose a more difficult set of conditions for democratic survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the nearly quarter century since the collapse of communism, a great many outcomes in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, from patterns of democratic consolidation to state–society relations, have been attributed to legacies of the past. Yet despite the common goal of understanding the influence of the past, there is little consensus on how to conceptualize historical legacies. Through a focus on post-communist outcomes and their relation to prior outcomes and causal precursors, this article assesses what counts as a historical legacy and how legacies differ from non-legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Eastern Europe continues to be defined and redefined not just by the actual patterns of socio-economic and political reproduction of the distant and proximate regimes governing the region but also through the perceptions of such legacies as generating fundamental similarities. Such perceived similarities, whether or not closely mapped on the objective parallels among countries in Eastern Europe, facilitate intra-region diffusion that results in (further) spatio-temporal socio-economic and political similarities specific to the region. To illustrate this relationship between precommunist and communist legacies, intra-region diffusion, and the production of Eastern Europe, the article examines Slovakia’s diffusion entrepreneurship in the wave of electoral breakthroughs in Eastern Europe in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This article contributes to the literatures on Eastern Europe and comparative democratization in two main ways. First, it adds to the work on the impact of spatio-temporal dependence on transition outcomes, such as democratization, in Eastern Europe. Second, by doing so, the article also documents the impact of an understudied set of democracy promoters—the Eastern European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including East European studies in the post-communist era, the influence of religious groups on public policy in post-communist polities, and the concept of historical legacy.

The essay introduces five principles of an approach that helps to combine context sensitivity with generalizing ambition necessary for any serious comparative work. It also offers a list of five areas where East European experts are or should be making major contributions to the “general” knowledge while remaining attentive to the “specificities” of their region. It emphasizes a dialogue among scholars of several theoretical and methodological persuasions. Such synthetic/syncretic studies—also in the study of power and politics—may and often do begin with the work of researchers who construct panoramic vistas (via large-N statistical work) and/or reconstruct mechanisms of individual decision making (via game theoretic models). Nevertheless, they cannot do without the work of those who delve into the details of social processes (via sociological analysis); those who decipher the intricacies of meaning creation, transmission, and decoding (via interpretive work); and those who are able to place all of this in proper historical contexts. [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]

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 argues that bottom–up, people-centered research which uses ethnographic and everyday approaches is crucial but underutilized in research on identity politics in Eastern Europe. In order to understand what concepts such as ethnicity and citizenship mean in the context of people’s everyday lives, it is vital to understand whether taken-for-granted political concepts are appropriate and the make-up of data such as census data. The article first introduces the methods of political ethnography and bottom–up interviews by discussing how they can be applied and their value within political science. The paper uses data gathered from interviews in Moldova and Crimea (when it was still a de jure and de facto part of Ukraine) to demonstrate the value of this approach. It shows how interview data can add significantly to the understanding of kin-state relations within political science by adding a richness of context and a bottom–up perspective that quantitative and elite-level interviews fail to provide. Lastly, the paper draws on experiences gained from research design to discuss how bottom–up research in political science can be conducted rigorously. The article argues that this approach can deepen the understanding of identity politics and kin-state relations or, more broadly, important post-communist questions such as democratization and Europeanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing up in Bulgaria during the “transition” years, as a then fifteen-year old, I spent the summer of 1990 queuing up at the neighborhood newsstand waiting for the daily delivery of freshly printed newspapers. Shortages of goods, including food and gasoline, caused long lines in front of many stores, but the crowd waiting at the kiosk was eager to read about the latest political developments, and especially popular were the newspapers published by the newly established opposition parties. While there was no scarcity of political news via television and radio, there was always something special about the print media, much of which, including entertainment weeklies, were such a novelty. Twenty or so years later, I spent another summer among newspapers, in the archives of the National Library in Sofia, poring through the pages and—with no digitization of archives—collecting photographs of news articles published before each of the national legislative elections since 1990. Much has changed in the media environment since then, yet the study of media in post-communist societies and especially its relations to voters, parties, and politics in general is still in its infancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the contribution of Eastern European scholarship to the study of human rights and transitional justice? This essay takes stock of the most significant empirical and theoretical contributions of the study of Eastern Europe, specifically the study of the difficult case of the former Yugoslavia, to the scholarship on transitional justice. I identify three main challenges the scholarship on the former Yugoslavia has presented to the larger field of transitional justice: the political challenge of multiple overlapping transitions, the inability of international institutions to effect domestic social change, and the dangers of politicization of past violence remembrance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a critical analysis of the view that Marx’s critique of capitalism provides the analytical lenses necessary to understand post-communist transformations. The author examines the problematic premises underpinning this view—for example, that capitalism can be created by design, and that in the early 1990s the former “second world” constituted a tabula rasa—and insists that a proper answer to the question “How did capitalism emerge in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union?” is yet to be given. The text also identifies the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical difficulties that might ensue if analyses of post-communist politics are reduced to a critique of neoliberal capitalism. [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]

The question “Whither Eastern Europe?” prompts the author to reflect upon the interplay of area studies and political power in the United States. Concerns about the future of East European studies tend to originate outside of academe: in the real or imagined declining relevance of Europe in the U.S. foreign policy orbit. Sadly, perhaps, as the region’s complex history and contemporary politics seem to attest, it is highly unlikely that it will lose its strategic importance anytime soon. Therefore, the most important dimension of East European continued significance might be the normative one. Whither to/for whom? Who are the audiences that we are addressing and what is our responsibility to them? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the theoretical rationale (and funding opportunities!) for considering Eastern Europe as a distinct region diminish as we move farther away from the momentous events of 1989, the value of including East-Central European countries in comparative studies has only increased. This article outlines how comparative studies of political behavior involving East-Central European countries have evolved in the author’s own research from comparative studies including Russia along with four East European countries, to more broadly based comparative studies including multiple East European countries and former Soviet Republics, to studies where behavior is analyzed in both East European countries and more established democracies, and finally to large cross-national studies focused on questions related to post-communist politics (namely, the legacy of communism on post-communist attitudes and behavior) but relying on the comparative analysis of survey data from countries around the world. In a way, the research has come full circle, from studies of East European political behavior to better understand East European political behavior, to studies including East European countries to better understand general questions of political behavior not specific to post-communist countries, to now the most extensive comparative studies that are, however, designed once again to better understand East European political attitudes and behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe is again a divided continent. When it comes to governance, political economy, or values, two contrasting poles have emerged: one Western, liberal, and democratic, another Eastern, statist, and autocratic. The dividing line between them has become ever sharper, threatening to separate Europe into two distinct worlds. This new divide in Europe arises from a clash between two geopolitical concepts for the continent: One is the Western project of a “Europe whole and free,” an enlarging zone of economic cooperation, political interdependency, and democratic values. The other is the Russian project of a “Eurasian Union” to rival the European Union. This article shows how these two sides of Europe have grown further apart in their conceptions of the European space, their values, governance, and economic models. It explores the reasons for the belated Western responses to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s program to divide Europe. The Russo-Georgian war was a turning point, but the West took a long time to recognize the full implications of Putin’s policy. The current confrontation between Russia and the West is not exactly like the Cold War. Russia’s position is weaker. And the battle will be fought out primarily with economic instruments. However, it is clear that this conflict places Central and Eastern Europe back on the front lines of a divided Europe, raising any number of demons from the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses two distinctive approaches for thinking about historical legacies in the post-communist context. The first approach, which builds on the work of Ken Jowitt, emphasizes the distinctiveness of Leninist socioeconomic and political legacies, while the second approach, rooted in the writings of Andrew Janos, highlights the significant and resilient pre-communist, communist, and post-communist diversity of the countries of the former Soviet bloc. The empirical evidence reviewed in this paper suggests that both types of legacies continue to matter after a quarter-century of post-communist transitions. Thus, whereas we can still discern a distinctive and fairly uniform communist imprint in areas such as primary education and the importance of the state sector in the economy, in other areas of socioeconomic development, either communism was unable to reverse longer-term intraregional differences (e.g., with respect to GDP/capita or the size of the agrarian sector) or its initially distinctive developmental imprint has been fundamentally reshaped by post-communist economic reforms (as in the case of the massive increase in income inequality in a subset of ex-communist countries). In political terms, there is an interesting contrast between institutional trajectories (such as regime type), which largely follow pre-communist developmental differences, and individual political attitudes and behavior, where communist exceptionalism generally trumps post-communist diversity. [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]

Levels of both religiosity and of religious influence on public policy vary enormously across the countries of post-communist East Central Europe. This variation poses a challenge to existing explanations, which have focused on religious competition and alliances with political parties to explain religious participation and policy influence, respectively. The legacy of religious nationalism instead helps to explain both the vibrancy of religious participation and the influence of churches on democratic public policy. This variation also calls for greater scrutiny of “historical legacies”: while some patterns are durable and reach back centuries, others are recent innovations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a critical review of political science journals applying the theories of democratization to East European cases. Analysis of literature on postcommunism by non-East Europeans; Empirical inaccuracies presented in the literature; Problems on the interpretation of data in the literature.

Explains the failure of interwar Polish democracy using the crafting and strategic-choice approaches. Discussion on the initial context of the construction of democratic institutions; Discussion on the relative strengths of political forces within the Constituent Sejm and the formulation of a constitution; Review on the formation of the March Constitution of 1921.

The article discusses the arrests of participants and bystanders in the June 25, 1976 strikes in Poland. The strikes were in response to a proposed rise in the prices of foodstuffs by Polish workers. The strikes took place in 130 or more factories across the country. The strikes were generally peaceful, however, there were some militant and even violent responses on the part of the workers. Moving quickly on the same day, the Polish party-state withdrew the proposed price increases to address the strikes. After the strikes, selective groups of worker activists and several innocent bystanders were subjected to a variety of party-state repression.