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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]

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]

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]