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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]

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]

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]

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]

Abstract: The author argues that political opportunism, an attitude common among communist party members before 1989, turned into both the blessing and the curse for post-communist parties in Poland. Once hopeful of secure careers in the authoritarian structures of the old regime, after the regime breakdown communists found themselves in a situation where the only chance for such a career could be associated with the party reinventing itself as a player in the field of pluralist democracy. Opportunistic attitudes of communist apparatchiks and nomenklatura members were instrumental in transforming them, individually and collectively, into effective actors in market economy and competitive politics. Yet the same attitudes doomed the post-communists once the opportunities associated with access to political power opened up widely. The same people who in the 1990s were so apt in turning the rules of democratic game into their collective advantage, in the 2000s acted with a sense of impunity and lack of any consideration for political accountability that in democracies arrives at the end of any election cycle. Plagued by corruption scandals, they lost their popular base: the economically disadvantaged groups to nationalistic populists, the urbane libertarians to liberal democrats. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]