Chapter 7 The development of political systems in post-communist countries

This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years

Assessing Institutional Determinants of MP Behaviour: Survey Data from the Baltic States

To what extent do electoral & legislative institutions affect the behaviour of parliamentarians in new democracies? This article examines this question on the basis of a wide-ranging survey of MPs in the Baltic states from January 2000. Given substantial differences in the types of institutions existing in the three states, the research tests whether these differences are reflected in MPs' responses to key questions about their relationship to & interaction with (1) parliamentary work, (2) their party & faction, (3) individual voters, (4) the interests of their district or constituency, & (5) interest groups. The results corroborate a number of existing theoretical postulates, while leaving unconfirmed others

The development of political systems in post-communist countries

The political development of post-communist Europe has generally been seen as a relatively successful march toward democracy. This chapter seeks to flesh out this understanding by examining the region through the prism of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. V-Dem allows us to look at many underlying dimensions of democratic development, including its liberal, participatory, egalitarian and deliberative components. The chapter therefore examines the main post-communist countries of the EU across various V-Dem indices and measures, and discusses what is new in the dataset that enhances our existing narrative about democratic change in the region. While unsurprisingly V-Dem displays some of the same cross-national differences (between e.g. Czech Republic and Slovakia) that we see in other indices, it also shows more precisely where these gaps actually lie. The chapter concludes with reflections on how V-Dem’s institutionalist approach to democracy needs to be coupled with attitudinal measures in order to understand the latest phase of democratic backsliding in post-communist Europe

Balancing between consolidation and cartel. The effects of party law in Estonia.

Over the last decade the institutionalist study of political parties has taken a new turn. The turn has been toward the in-depth study of party law and party regulation. Such institutions ostensibly operate as uniform determinants of behavior, regardless of population size. Hence, the case of Estonia, while being small in size and population, is interesting because it has been one of the more successful post-communist party systems to consolidate over the last 20 years. The argument in this chapter is therefore that this outcome has been a combination of increasing regulation in five particular domains: constitutional provisions, electoral rules, party registration requirements, parliamentary rules, and party finance. These are profiled as they appear across a chronological overview of changes in party law and party regulation over the last 20 years

Estonia's Constitutional Review Mechanisms: A Guarantor of Democratic Consolidation?

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Assessing Institutional Determinants of MP Behaviour: Survey Data from the Baltic States

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Chapter 7 The development of political systems in post-communist countries

This book focuses on social transformations as one of the central topics in the social sciences. The study of European social transformations is very valuable in the context of universal discussions within social sciences: explaining invariable, universal attributes of societies and examining changing attributes. The book consists of 20 chapters on European social transformations, written from the perspectives of distinguished scholars from such disciplines as economics, political science, educational science, geography, media and communication studies, public management and administration, social psychology and sociology. The temporal and spatial range of the book is wide, including such global changes as time-space compression, focusing particularly on change processes in Europe during the last two decades. The book consists of four main parts, beginning with an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches, and then focusing separately on post-communist transformations, institutional drivers of social transformations in the European Union, and European transformations in the context of global processes. The book presents current theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches that complement the scientific literature on social transformations. This book is both an invaluable resource for scholars and an indispensable teaching tool for use in the classroom and will be of interest to students, academics, and policy-makers studying how this diverse region has changed over recent years

Dealing with the Past: Transitional Justice and De-communization

This chapter reviews the literature around the study of post-communist transitional justice. It begins by comparing how different scholars have conceptualized transitional justice, particularly the range of empirical phenomena that authors have decided to encompass when they have dealt with truth and justice issues. Secondly, the chapter shows how, depending on an author’s empirical delineation of the phenomenon, the independent variables chosen across time or across countries have also varied. Thirdly, the chapter turns the methodological equation around and examines those (albeit far fewer) scholars who have examined transitional justice as a causal phenomenon and sought to answer what transitional justice actually brings to society. Lastly, the overview presents a set of sub-themes in the field of post-communist transitional justice, namely the comparative study of institutions devoted to TJ, the growing importance of international influences on TJ, and the place of specifically post-conflict TJ in the context of former Yugoslavia

Capturing time: Measuring the age of party systems

The wide-ranging literature on political development shares a common focus on analyzing changes through time and using continuity as one of its key concepts.1 It is filled with terms like institutionalization, consolidation, or path dependency, which all denote continuity through time. The literature on political development also differentiates levels of continuity using nominal categories like high, medium, or low. These nominal categories are vague and limit the precision with which political development can be analyzed. This paper therefore introduces age as an indicator that allows measuring spatial and temporal variations of continuity in a precise and quantitative fashion. Specifically, it presents the notion of effective party system age (EPSA) to measure the organizational and electoral continuity of party systems. The paper has three parts. First, it describes the basic intuition behind the measure and discusses its operationalization. Second, it illustrates the measure’s utility by presenting a few of the prototypical developmental trajectories that we found in the analysis of 27 post-war party systems. Third, it contrasts EPSA with other widely used party system indicators and demonstrates the distinct ways in which it captures temporal dynamics as well as explicates the distinct ontological assumptions on which it rests