The decline of communist power: Elements of a theory of institutional change

Abstract

There is considerable irony in the current search for the causes of the rapid political changes sweeping the communist world after 1988. In retrospect, it is not hard to single out a number of macrosocietal trends that led eventually to regime change: economic stagnation and consumer deprivation, deeply eroded commitment to official ideology and the growth of widespread cynicism, the corruption and weakening of the apparatus of rule, and the gradual enlargement of autonomous, self-organized spheres of social and intellectual life. It is ironic, however, that each of these macrosocietal developments, now the cornerstones of emerging explanations of rapid political change, were only recently treated as evidence of the remarkable comparative stability of communist regimes throughout the world in the last half-century. Economic inefficiency, consumer deprivation, and housing shortages were well evident in these societies for decades. The official ideology of these regimes was long met with public indifference and private derision. The party apparatus for decades operated as a collection of local political machines founded upon venality and patronage. Beginning as early as the mid-1950s, observers noted a gradual enlargement of tolerated private spheres of independent intellectual and political discourse: today's independent political groups are the descendants of yesterday's dissidents; and yesterday's dissidents are the descendents of yesteryear's prison camp inmates. While today we can look back upon an inexorable cumulative crisis; a few years ago one could just as easily be struck by how little all of these deeply rooted problems seemed to shake these stable and stagnant regimes.