East European Politics and Societies

The countries of East-Central Europe (ECE) embarked on a democratic transition in 1989 were proclaimed consolidated democracies when they joined the European Union (EU) in 2004. Today most of the new democracies are experiencing “democratic fatigue” and some seem vulnerable to an authoritarian turn. The EU, seen as the guarantor of the post-1989 democratic changes, is experiencing an unprecedented economic, financial, and democratic crisis with the combined challenges of technocracy and populism. The article explores the different approaches to the study of democracies in ECE, their specific features and vulnerabilities, and tries to provide an interpretation of the premature crisis of democracy in ECE in a broader transeuropean context.

The manuscript analyzes negative developments in Bulgarian and Romanian politics in the aftermath of the two countries’ accession to the European Union, with a special focus on the worsening corruption problem, the destabilization of previously coherent normative frameworks, and the reversal of processes of state building. It also explores the main characteristics of a novel form of elite behavior, post-accession hooliganism, which began to emerge as soon as Bulgarian and Romanian political leaders felt strong and confident enough to disregard the demands of their West European counterparts.

In this article, we test the effect of communist-era legacies on the large and temporally resilient deficit in civic participation in post-communist countries. To do so, we analyze data from 157 surveys conducted between 1990 and 2009 in twenty-four post-communist countries and forty-two non-post-communist countries. The specific hypotheses we test are drawn from a comprehensive theoretical framework of the effects of communist legacies on political behavior in post-communist countries that we have previously developed. Our analysis suggests that three mechanisms were particularly salient in explaining this deficit: first, the demographic profile (including lower religiosity levels) of post-communist countries is less conducive to civic participation than elsewhere. Second, the magnitude of the deficit increases with the number of years an individual spent under communism but the effects were particularly strong for people socialized in the post-totalitarian years and for those who experienced communism in their early formative years (between ages six and seventeen). Finally, we also find that civic participation suffered in countries that experienced weaker economic performance in the post-communist period, though differences in post-communist democratic trajectories had a negligible impact on participation. Taken together, we leave behind a potentially optimistic picture about civic society in post-communist countries, as the evidence we present suggests eventual convergence toward norms in other non post-communist countries.

Media scholars looking into the relationship between political and media systems in the former communist countries have mainly worked on the assumption that parties seek control over the media in order to suppress critical voices and to gain favourable coverage so that they can influence voting behaviour, but have barely explored political actors’ other possible motivations. Meanwhile, political scientists studying the region’s countries have often focused on parties’ relationship to the state and the resources that they extracted from state institutions such as ministries and municipalities but largely ignored the relationship between parties and the media. This article, written as part of the project Media and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, attempts to link these two traditions of research. Introducing the concept of the party colonisation of the media, it looks into what benefits other than suppressing criticism and gaining favourable coverage parties may gain from controlling the media. It uses the example of Hungary to illustrate how the party colonisation of the media works. It also intends to assess how different patterns of media colonisation affect media freedom.

In the twenty years since communism’s collapse, scholars of postcommmunist Central and Eastern Europe have increasingly converged on the insight that long-run continuities reaching back to the nineteenth century are crucial in shaping some of the most important contemporary macro- and micro-level political outcomes in the region. Today’s political cleavages, political discourses, patterns of partisan affiliation, institutional choice, and the quality of democracy itself all appear to correlate to a remarkable degree with patterns from the “deep past.” To date, social scientists, however, have not sufficiently reflected on what might explain this finding and how to study the impact of the general phenomenon of the long-run in the region. This article makes two contributions. First, we contend that in general, long-run continuities may ironically be more important in contexts of discontinuous institutional change such as in Central and Eastern Europe since frequent institutional disjunctures paradoxically open chasms between formal and informal institutions, preventing gradual change and producing patterns of institutional mimicry to cope with institutional ruptures. This insight may travel to other contexts of weak institutionalization. Second, we reject efforts to identify “deep causes” of contemporary outcomes without specifying how intervening events and crises intersect with these longer-run patterns. The article resuscitates Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue duree to propose a new cumulative approach to the study of the long-run that complicates accounts that too starkly juxtapose precommunist and communist-era “legacies” on the present and argues that scholars should study how these periods reinforce each other and jointly determine contemporary outcomes.

This article illustrates how the growing complexity of regulations regarding party funding in post-communist Romania is paralleled by practices employed by political parties in their attempt to gain increased access to state resources. Our document analysis indicate that political parties managed to exploit the weaknesses of the increasingly complex legislative framework. A cyclical process takes places: parties use the existing flaws in the legislation on party funding to indirectly obtain and exploit state resources for their (electoral) purposes, an improved law tackling those shortcomings is passed, but political parties are able to identify other flaws and use them to gain financial benefits. To make the case, we assess comparatively the evolution of legislative provisions and practices employed by political parties over two decades.

The initiative to establish a truth commission in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia (RECOM) presents a rich case study of the performance of the “toolkit” that transitional justice professionals propose on a global scale: an inclusive package that offers truth, justice, reconciliation and stability. Whether these goals could be achieved is the subject of a critical debate that questions overly ambitious projects of truth commissions, especially their sensitivity to local understandings and practices of transitional justice. We aim to contribute to this debate by examining the reception of RECOM in Kosovo, where most local actors remain either noncommittal or outright opposed to RECOM. What these actors share is the conviction that their own narratives be taken seriously, even when this means refusing the suppression of “truths” that can be divisive. We found that giving priority to “the local” implies more than adapting the received professional “toolkit”: it might require abandoning it.

Do warring sides in asymmetric conflicts always know what type of violence they use against civilians? This article relies on the case study of an anti-Soviet insurgency in Western Ukraine between 1944 and 1953 in order to demonstrate how selective violence used by insurgents can become indiscriminate under the influence of a counterinsurgency strategy rather than their conscious choice. It challenges two major theories of coercive violence that refer to exogenous factors to explain shifts in the character of violence and shows how insurgents may recognize such a shift only once they see its counterproductive effects. Using recently declassified documents, this article demonstrates how the insurgents’ decision to engage in a violent campaign against Soviet-led collectivization gradually turned the rural base of insurgency against them. Apart from shedding a new light on the Soviet–Ukrainian conflict in the late 1940s, the article has broader implications for the studies of insurgency campaigns and the reasons for civilian defection to the incumbent side.