Path Contingency in Postcommunist Transformations

Abstract

The surprisingly peaceful revolutions that swept the Soviet Union and eastern Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to present a golden opportunity for institutional design. The economic and political institutions of state socialism had been discredited and discarded, and these countries sought to create a new set of institutions to underpin their emerging market democracies. Indeed, institutional change was the essence of the postcommunist transformation process. The attempt to break with the Soviet era was defined by the reuse of old institutions to serve new ends, the creation of market-oriented institutions where none previously existed, and the redirection of institutions to act as links between state and society rather than as instruments to oppress society Yet the way in which institutional change has actually taken place in postcommunist states remains poorly understood. A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall our now cautious use of the word illustrates this uncertainty. These countries may be making a transition from Communism, but to what are they making a transition? Most observers no longer assume that they will inevitably transform themselves into western-style free market democracies. While significant change has indeed occurred, many old institutional forms and practices have persisted in postcommunist countries far longer than most would-be reformers initially expected. These lasting Soviet-era legacies have also been joined by new and sometimes disturbing institutional phenomena that arose as unexpected consequences of wellmeaning reformist policies. Consequently, scholars have sought to assign blame for the rocky, uneven nature of these transformations and to determine what, if any