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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]

What were the causes and consequences of the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe? The causes lie in the exhaustion of the model of Soviet-type economic organization, the failure of reform efforts in the USSR, and the persistence of opposition to Soviet-type rule in Central Europe. The ramifications of the events are examined through the prism of three questions: (1) how do they change our evaluation of the past?; (2) what was the significance of 1989 as a moment in time?; and (3) how have they shaped the present? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]