Post-communist Regime Research Articles

Post-communist regime types: Hierarchies across attributes and space

In this article we order the 28 post-communist countries in a theoretically informed typology of political regime forms. Our theoretical expectation is that a hierarchy exists in the extent to which the post-communist countries fulfill democratic criteria concerning electoral rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law. More particularly, we expect that the countries are doing better with respect to electoral rights than civil liberties and that they fare worst regarding the rule of law. The analyses confirm three – ever stricter – versions of this hypothesis, in the end establishing the presence of an almost perfect hierarchy across the attributes in the form of a Guttman scale. Furthermore, a systematic cross-spatial distribution is identified, which lends support to the notion that the present political differences must be traced back to structural constraints and are, therefore, likely to subsist.

The three worlds of post-communism: revisiting deep and proximate explanations

Since the upheavals of 1989–1991, the post-communist countries have embarked upon three distinct political trajectories: a path leading to democracy in the Western part of the setting, a path leading to autocracy in the Eastern part of the setting, and an intermediate path – both in geographical and political terms – leading to ‘defective’ democracy. This article seeks to explain the emergence of these three worlds of post-communism. Using typological theory as the principal methodological tool, we revisit Herbert Kitschelt's distinction between deep (structural) and proximate (actor-centred) explanations. The empirical results show that the post-communist setting is characterized by striking regularities in the form of clustering in the explanandum as well as the explanans. The orderings of referents on both the deep and the proximate attributes show a remarkable co-variation with the political pathways of post-communism – and with each other. The presence of such systematic empirical regularities lends support to two conclusions. First, both kinds of explanations elucidate the present variation in post-communist political regime types. Second, the variation on the deep factors largely explains the variation on the proximate factors. Kitschelt's general plea to dig deeper is thus supported, and the explanatory quest turns into a challenge of theoretical integration.

Public Administration Development and Reform in a Post-Communist Regime: The Case of Mongolia

This article analyses public administration reforms in Mongolia following the collapse of the communist regime, and interprets the current administrative system in terms of the consequences of waves of reform. First, we examine ideas of public administration reform in Mongolia, comparing them with contemporary civil service reform models. We find that many elements of these models have been present in the transition after 1990. Second, we analyse the implementation of these reform processes in the context of Mongolia’s distinctive social-economic, cultural and political conditions. Third, we interpret the current administrative system in terms of the paradoxical results of these overlaying reform waves, identifying it as an evolving mixed administrative system.

Institutional change and stability in postcommunist countries, 1990–2002

Abstract. This article deals with the institutional change of 27 political systems in postcommunist countries, 1990–2002. The authors show that institutional change after the institutionalization of the postcommunist regime is limited and lock‐in effects are strong. This applies to the more democratic and affluent countries as well as to the more authoritarian regimes. The authors do not find evidence for theories of institutional change that see institutional development as a linear function of socio‐economic factors such as affluence or of domestic political power distribution. The European Union and NATO have an effect that is limited to the overall democratic character of the system.

Was Liberty Really Bad for Russia? (Part II)

Like Providence in reverse, the Russian government seeks to arrange for the better not the future, but the past.-Aleksandr HerzenIt is very much in the Russian and, even more so, Soviet political tradition for rulers to deprecate their predecessors. As they ascend the power ladder, the would-be Kremlin occupants must profess complete loyalty to the current leader to succeed. Once in the country's new masters bolster their authority by dissociating themselves from previous leaders. Along with Russia's weak political institutions, which undermine the transitions' legitimacy, such repudiations almost inevitably result in the personalization of as the new occupants mold the political, social, and economic systems to their liking. Hence, Russian and-and especially-Soviet history have often resembled succession of distinct political regimes-indeed, sometimes different states under the same name.Thus, at first blush, this Kremlin's castigation of the 1992-99 period, which is portrayed as an unmitigated disaster, is not unusual. It is described as time of gratuitously and maliciously inflicted humiliation, of a failed state, and, most of all, of chaos.2 Advanced relentlessly, many Russian commentators (who quickly recovered their Soviet skill of line-toeing), and some leading Western media, editorialists, and pundits, have adopted this line of argument.3 The fact that booming economy has sprung from the alleged calamities of the preceding years, like Athena who appeared fully armed from Zeus's head, does not trouble the latter.4For all its conformity to national tradition, the propaganda campaign has several features that do not fit the usual pattern. First, President Vladimir Putin was-and continues to be-very popular, and does not need to gain additional legitimacy at his predecessor's expense. In the 1990s, moreover, the breadth and intensity of public criticism of the government (in newspapers, on television, and in the parliament) were unprecedented in Russian, let alone Soviet, history. All the many warts and boils, real and imagined, of the Boris Yeltsin regime were exposed and lanced at the time. Indeed, many Russian pollsters believe that much of Putin's popularity is due to his not being the late Yeltsin: very sick, often inebriated, and increasingly unsteady and erratic in public. Thus, harping on the very real failures and hardships of the Yeltsin years can hardly be expected to lower the public's opinion of them more than it already is.A plausible explanation is that the chaos mantra's aim is much higher. As often happens in Russia, the past is invoked to shape the present and the future. In this case, the denunciations of the 1990s may, the Kremlin hopes, help manage the tense transition ahead (or the risks of Putin's decision to rewrite the constitution and run again) and, more importantly, establish the direction that should take in the long run. No one disputes that in the 1990s, was the freest it had ever been, save for the nine months between February and November 1917. Just as undeniable is the ideology of the first postcommunist regime. As leading Russian political analyst stated, it was based on two simple ideas: that personal liberty is the foundation of progress of modern state and that Russia has no other way but to follow the Western model of development.5It is this ideology and this model that the current regime is determined to stamp with the cliche. If the freest in history produced nothing but misery and disorder, then liberty is, in principle, bad for it. Ergo, Putin's protoauthoritarian sovereign democracy and the vertical of power, in which the executive controls (or owns outright) other branches of government and key sectors of industry.Such fateful implications make the veracity of the chaos claim worth exploring. Specifically, one needs to ascertain, first, whether economic liberalization and democratization bear the primary responsibility for the chaos, and, second, whether there was anything but chaos in the 1990s. …

Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change

This article shows that post-communist regime trajectories have been largely circumscribed by historical legacy differences, but the question about which particular legacy matters most is much harder to answer, since statistical results are sensitive to model specification and to the choice of democracy indicator. While some of these discrepancies reflect the inherent limitations of traditional statistical methods, others reflect the different dimensions of democracy captured by different indicators. Therefore, the article contributes to a more nuanced explanation of post-communist democratization by showing that different legacies drive different aspects of democratization. Finally, the results demonstrate that several prominent alternative explanations—initial election outcomes, institutional choices, geographic diffusion, and external conditionality—played a relatively modest role in explaining democratization patterns beyond the constraints imposed by historical legacies.

Systems of Distribution and a Sense of Equity: A Multilevel Analysis of Meritocratic Attitudes in Post-industrial Societies

Meritocratic attitudes are defined as general beliefs that education and its correlates should determine personal economic outcomes. Using the International Social Survey Project (ISSP): Social Inequality Module (1992), we examine both individual-level and country-level determinants of pro-meritocratic attitudes. According to self-interest and rational-action theories, individuals with high educational attainment and high personal income are expected to have strong meritocratic beliefs because meritocracy is in their best interest-they would gain under such a system. At the same time, both modernization and post-industrial theories imply that persons living in countries with a high degree of societal meritocracy hold stronger meritocratic beliefs than persons living in countries with low degree of societal meritocracy. Results of the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis on a data set including 7,972 persons from 14 countries indicate that the impact of individuals' education and income on meritocratic attitudes occurred as theoretically predicted. We also demonstrate that the relationship between the degree of societal meritocracy and the degree of support for such a system is statistically significant even if national wealth and educational stock (as well as individual-level variables) are controlled. In addition, we discovered that at the beginning of the 1990s a post-communist regime had a negative effect on support for meritocracy.

The Handbook of Political Change in Eastern Europe by S. s> Berglund J. Ekman , F. H. Aarebrot (review)

REVIEWS I79 own right, Igor Timofeyev's chapter on the development of Russian liberal thought after I985 is an impressive and interesting paper on the interplay between the political changes that Gorbachev introduced and the emergence of liberal voices in Russian politics. One could query what the substance of Russianliberalismwas (oris)since its core valuesmoved about and in the end seemed to be little more than anti-ideologism (except perhaps in economics). However, a more serious issue is why liberalism is privileged with a chapter over other strandsof political thought, most notably nationalism. Liberalism arguably defeated Marxism-Leninismin the short run amongst a section of the elite but, as T. H. Rigby points out in his concluding comments, MarxismLeninism 'sdemise was not complete and any vitality it has had since the end of the USSR has come from its interaction with other intellectual traditions such as nationalism. The story of the 'rise' of liberalismis only one aspect of the demise of Marxism-Leninism. All in all then, there is some good materialin this updated edition, but it is a book of partsratherthan a workthat demands to be read cover to cover. Department ofPoliticsandPublic Administration NEILROBINSON University ofLimerick Berglund, S., Ekman, J. and Aarebrot, F. H. (eds). TheHandbook of Political Change inEastern Europe. Second edition. EdwardElgar, Cheltenham and Northampton, MA, 2004. xvii + 626 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. References . Indexes. ?95.??. THIs volume is a celebration of the degree to which the study of postCommunist countries has become integrated into comparative political science. All the chaptersofferextensive and in-depth analysesof partysystem development and cleavage structuresin thirteen of these countries:the three Baltic states, the four Visegrad states together with Slovenia and Croatia as well as Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Moldova. Most of them include considerablesurveymaterialfor trackingparty supportand structuralfactors over time. And, all chapters offer useful and rich information in tables on election results,government composition, the electoral systems, the constitutional frameworksin outline plus, in some cases, regressionsor specifications of the data analysis. It is these appendices in the countrychapters,runningin total to I41 pages, that bring this volume closest to the descriptionof a conventional handbook, although it has to be said as no adversereflectionon the qualityof the work here that the title is misleading. It is much more like an edited volume about party development and evolving cleavage structures than it is a handbook for reference on 'political change', although such change indeed forms the main backgroundleitmotif of the discussion.As such, it is excellent in that most of the chaptershave analyticalflairand versatilitywithjust a few offering mainly descriptive chronological summaries of party development. The volume showswell-organized editorialdirection although the comparative chaptersby the editors themselves (theintroduction, the conclusion and a i8o SEER, 84, I, 2006 chapter on 'the challenge of history') are disappointingly mundane with no new insightsfor the specialistin post-Communist studies. This is the second edition issuedsixyears since the firstedition publishedin I998. Three countries(Croatia, Serbia and Moldova) have been added to the original ten but, most of all, this second edition isjustified by the time lapse since the first one. Within the period of a decade and a half since postCommunist regime change began, this is a significant slice of time with presumablygreaterevidence of progresstowardsdemocratic consolidation at least in most of these countries. As the editors note, there has been a 'normalization'of the new democraticpolitical life 'in many places in Central and Eastern Europe'. Most of all, more than half of these countries have joined the EU and NATO as an external recognition of their political progress by 2004 with the othersmoving albeitslowlyin the samedirection. Yet, remaining systemic problems are also identified, such as uncertain economic prospects in some of the countries, populist tendencies and the common problem of lack of trust in political elites and institutions. Furthermore , centralto thisvolume's argument,cleavagesareweaklycrystallizedand rooted in social structures.This lastproblem should be takenas evidence of a long processof democraticconsolidation in CEE -one undoubtedlyaffected by the simultaneous economic transformation and, in several of these countries, remaining difficultieswith nation-building,as demonstratedby the salience of the ethnic cleavage. Comparative students of cleavages will find interest in the conceptual discussion of cleavages in some of the chapters which altogether vary somewhat in...

The Resource Curse in a Post-Communist Regime: Russia in Comparative Perspective. By Younkyoo Kim. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2003. xiv, 181 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. $84.95, hard bound.

The Resource Curse in a Post-Communist Regime: Russia in Comparative Perspective. By Younkyoo Kim. Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2003. xiv, 181 pp. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. $84.95, hard bound. - Volume 64 Issue 2

The Internet and Democratization: The Development of Russian Internet Policy

The survival of Russia's hybrid postcommunist regime, first under President Boris Yeltsin and then under President Vladimir Putin, poses difficult challenges for students of democratization. One of these challenges is exploring how regimes such as the Russian one resist both consolidation of democracy and a return to full-blown authoritarianism. The development of the Russian Internet policy is of special interest, as it brings forth two interesting puzzles related to this process: (1) Can governments of countries in political transition such as Putin's Russia allow for more freedom to increase their political control? and (2) Can we identify a learning process that a government such as Putin's undertakes on its transition path? The evidence presented here shows that the answer to both questions is yes. This article challenges the assumption that proliferation of Internet technology in transition countries such as Russia will lead to an increase in freedom of speech and further democratization. (1) It does so by identifying a method by which a government in transition cannot restrict or control the Internet directly but instead can use it actively to stifle political freedom. In this respect, the case of the Russian Federation is a first. It shows the problems created by governments learning how to appropriate the benefits of the information technology (IT) revolution to increase their control over the public information space. In virtue of its unique architecture and its speed of proliferation, the Internet should hold a potential to liberalize the information space and subsequently lead to democratization, especially in states where governments tightly control traditional media such as the newspapers, radio, and television. (2) Although in developed democracies the Internet is seen as a means to develop a more informed, pluralistic, and participatory electorate, the contribution of the Internet in authoritarian and democratizing states is more basic. The focus in this article is on the potential of the Internet to liberalize the information space, weaken the political control of all authoritarian government, and increase both individual freedom in the short run and the hope of democracy in the long run. Although estimates indicate that Russia has experienced a marked growth of Internet use (figure 1), this coincided with a drop in both political rights and civil liberties, as measured by Freedom House (FH) in the 1995-2003 period. Figure 2 shows that Russia performed below the world average in FH scores, and the marked decrease of freedoms in Russia contradicts the initial expectations of liberalization and democratization following the dissolution of the Soviet propaganda apparatus and the turbulent relationship of President Yeltsin with the emerging free media. [FIGURE 1-2 OMITTED] While freedoms in Russia markedly decline, the Russian government is aggressively targeting Internet development. The number of Russians online has just surpassed the 10 percent mark and, as early as 2002, the government announced a plan to invest $2.6 billion in the IT industry. To comply with demands of the World Trade Organization, the Russian Duma passed the Law On Electronic Signatures, which was the first law exclusively targeting Internet use. At the beginning of 2004, the new Law on Communications put into power new attempts to restructure the telecommunications market. However, the aggressive measures to promote further Internet development are only the most recent stage of Russian Internet policy. The initial stage of Internet proliferation in Russia was handled by an unprepared government that dealt with the new medium in the ways similar to those that its Soviet predecessor dealt with national media and technology regulation. The government's first-round response also included attempts at direct censorship of the Internet, but the general assumption about the inherent democratic nature of the Internet architecture proved true: Internet use in Russia escaped tight regulation, as the government was initially unprepared for the challenge. …

Разрытая могила: голод 1932–1933 годов в украинской историографии, политике и массовом сознании

SUMMARY: Georgii Kasianov explores the emergence of a new, integrative historical narrative aimed at creating loyal citizens of the new state in Ukraine in the past two decades. In the center of his discussion is the debates surrounding the man-maid famine of 1932–1933 in the context of Ukrainian historical memory. Kasianov notes that memory of the Soviet period in Ukraine is shaped first by the fact that most people experienced the Soviet regime first hand, and, second, due to the presence of virtually unreformed state institutions and elites. Correspondingly, the new elite attempts to build positive memories of the Soviet past in the new narrative of the national past, whereas negative memory of the Soviet period serves to legitimize the post-Communist regime. Memory is effectively turned by the elite into a “buffer zone” that protects the regime from attacks by those who demand a post-Communist “Nurnberg”. The emerging consensus between former Communists and current nationalist democrats with respect to Ukrainian statehood allowed for the creation of a standardized narrative of the national past, into which memory of the famine of 1932–1933 is written. Unlike famines of 1921–1923 and 1947, which were reported by Soviet historians, the famine of 1932–1933 were covered up by the Soviets. Due to the attention paid in recent years to the famine of 1932–1933 (called Holodomor after the émigré Ukrainian tradition), it became the major symbol of national past with multiple roles in the public discourse and politics. Kasianov surveys attempts by émigré Ukrainians to bring forward a discussion of the famine during the Soviet period as well as discusses the process of gathering momentum in revealing information about it in the late 1980s. As the society learned more about the horrors of the famine, the return of the memory occurred in the context of the emerging Ukrainian national narrative of the past and the famine became one of the central pillars of the national traumatic past. It also served to prove that the Bolshevik regime was a force external to Ukraine. Despite official participation in events commemorating the famine, the post-Communist regime was also careful to brake before demands for a trial of those responsible could gain ground. The famine became the instrument of different fractions of the political elite in their struggles for the appropriation of the national narrative of the past. Kasianov explores various interpretations of the famine by historians, discussing the range of terms used to describe the hunger (“famine”, “famine-genocide”, “ethnocide”, “Holodomor”, “Ukrainian Holocaust”, etc). Despite the ambivalence of the term, Kasianov argues in favor of describing the famine of 1932-1933 as genocide on the basis of the UNO Convention of 1948. Kasianov also discusses the numbers of victims and notes that for the most part public discourse on that aspect of the tragedy is mired in politics. Overall, Kasianov concludes, the discovery of the genocidal famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine became a founding element of the national narrative of the past and debates about it helped distance Ukraine from the Soviet past and forge and strengthen a sense of belonging to the Ukrainian national community. At the same time, memory of the famine was always present, especially among the rural population, which facilitated the topic becoming a central element of the public discourse. As the situation changed and the by the beginning of the 2000s the issue of the genocidal famine acquired the status of a national tragedy and part of the national mythology, the discourses on the famine by historians and by the public increasingly parted, as the first became more rational and the second remained trapped in the mythological stage. The famine remains an instrument of political struggles, while at the same time there is more discussion of non-Ukrainians as victims of the genocide. Nevertheless, there is little discussion of the local executioners of the Moscow-directed policy. Finally, Kasianov believes that there is no single structure in the debates on the famine and that Ukraine did not acquire “a Holocaust industry” of its own.

From Higher Party Schools to Academies of State Service: The Marketization of Bureaucratic Training in Russia

What does a postcommunist regime do with its bureaucratic inheritance? Without a replacement bureaucracy at hand, the political leadership in Russia had no choice but to govern through state employees whose values and patterns of behavior were instilled in the Soviet era. Given this reality, one might have expected Russian reformers—and their overseas supporters— to have developed an aggressive and comprehensive policy on retraining officials of state. But instead of a coordinated effort to educate new and existing personnel in a spirit of public, rather than state, service, one finds only a gradual and haphazard reform of bureaucratic training. In this article, Eugene Huskey argues that the driving force behind such training has been the market in higher and continuing education and not a conscious and consistent policy emanating from the presidency or other central institutions of state. The major player in that market is the system of state service academies, which inherited many of their faculty and facilities from the old Higher Party Schools of the communist era. But the market, taken together with the fragmentation of state power, has consistently undermined attempts by the academies to serve as the sole purveyors of training to the bureaucracy. What is as yet unclear is whether the marketization of bureaucratic education and re-education, which discourages the emergence of a coherent national approach to remaking the bureaucracy, is facilitating or impeding the modernization and liberalization of Russian officialdom.

Searching for Transitologists: Contemporary Theories of Post-Communist Transitions and the Myth of a Dominant Paradigm

A political scientist investigates the claim that the field of post-communist studies is and has been dominated by a transitology paradigm whose teleological biases lead to faulty analysis. Based on a comprehensive analysis of post-communist regime change studies published in 10 leading area studies and comparative politics journals between 1991 and 2003 as well as a broader review of the post-communist transition literature, this article seeks to clarify the terminological confusion that is a prominent feature of critiques of transitology and to examine the claim that a single mode of analysis dominates the study of post-communism.

A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System. By Juliet Johnson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 244p. $29.95.

For the field of Russian comparative politics, the collapse of Soviet communism abruptly shifted attention from commissars and commanders to businessmen and bankers. Since the mid-1990s, it has become increasingly evident that a small cohort of newly rich financiers was influencing the course of Russia's transition. Yet it was not always clear in what ways and to what extent these upstart tycoons were acting as political players. With this book, the field at last has an authoritative, systematic rendering of the banking sector. Juliet Johnson chronicles the good, the bad, and the ugly of Russia's big bankers during the postcommunist regime's formative decade.

The Political Foundations of Post-communist Regimes

This article explores the causes of differing post-communist regime transitions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, emphasizing the increasingly prominent thesis that economic liberalization promotes political democratization. We explore this argument in light of findings from other regions that have emphasized modernization, agrarian class structure, and international influences. Our results are based on a multilevel design strategy, first analyzing data on 26 post-communist countries over a 7-to 9-year period using time-series/cross-sectional methods and then turning to a comparative analysis of four purposively selected cases to explore the causal mechanisms implied but not tested in the quantitative analysis. Our results suggest that faith in economic liberalization as a cause of democratization may be misplaced. However, there is support for the notion that large agrarian sectors are unfavorable to democratic development, whereas positive democratic conditionality from outside agents can play an important role in transition dynamics.

Post-Communist Regime Support in Space and Time Context

In the early 1990s Central and East European countries began their twin transformations from planning to the market and from authoritarianism to democracy from very different starting-points. Some countries, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Estonia, had favourable institutional contexts. Others, such as Belarus and Ukraine, presented unfavourable conditions. These initial conditions are a good predictor of the level of support for the new economic systems in different countries. Support for new economic systems, in turn, is the strongest predictor of support for the new political systems. Subsequent divergence in economic performance across the region tends to reinforce cross-national differences in levels of regime support. Regime support as a feedback mechanism may constitute a crucial link in path-dependent processes of economic and political development.

The Return of Populism ‐ The 2000 Romanian Elections

During The Years Immediately Following The Fall Of The Ceausescu regime in 1989, Romania fulfilled the requirements of an ‘electoral democracy’. Free and reasonably fair elections regularly produced parliaments (1990, 1992) and governments dominated by the communist successor parties run by Ion Iliescu, a member of the old nomenklatura. Once elected, these institutions operated in principle within the framework of procedural democracy, but in practice often broke the rules and norms accepted in the West as characteristic of liberal democracy. When this occurred public opinion was either too weak, or divided, or simply too indifferent to demand more accountability. Further impoverishment of the poorest citizens due to mismanagement of the economy and rampant corruption contributed to the demise of the post-communist regime in 1996, which in turn led to the hope that with electoral democracy established, the development of democratic institutions and government accountability would follow.

Preference for Presidentialism: Postcommunist Regime Change in Russia and the NIS

The recent wave of democratic transitions has stimulated scholarly interest in a previously undeveloped area of study: comparative presidentialism. Comparative presidentialism seeks to define variant types of presidentialism that have emerged from transition processes, to identify the conditions that shape institutional choice and to understand more clearly the causal relationship between institutional choice and democratic regime outcomes. Using the postcommunist transitions, this paper contributes to the emerging comparative presidentialism literature by suggesting a revision to the argument that presidentialism leads to failed democratic transitions. The paper focuses attention away from the institutional rules of the game and toward the actors who actually make the institutional choice. Three postcommunist cases, distinguished by their different regime outcomes, are compared: Russia, Uzbekistan, and Estonia.

The impact of the electoral system on post-communist party development: The case of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections

This paper uses a case study of the 1993 Russian parliamentary elections to explore the influence of proportional representation and plurality electoral systems on party formation in a post-communist regime. The mixed PR-plurality electoral system used by Russia in the 1993 elections is a particularly useful case for such analysis for it allows the simultaneous study of these two electoral systems under the same set of social, economic, and cultural conditions. This study found that common emphasis placed on the number of parties allowed by PR versus plurality systems is misplaced in the context of Russian politics. The vital impact of electoral systems under post-communist conditions is their permeability to independent candidates. PR systems tend to impose party labels on the electorate and elites and thus bolster the status of parties as electoral agents. Plurality systems allow independents to compete on a level playing field with partisan candidates, robbing parties of the preferential treatment they need to get established in the initial years of democratic governance.

Explaining Political and Economic Change in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

This article presents a framework for the analysis of regime change in post-Communist Eastern Europe. It examines two competing approaches, the “legacies of the past” and the “imperatives of liberalization,” as alternative causal factors shaping the trajectories of regime change. The article argues that the debate between these two approaches has important implications for comparative research methodology and design; to the extent that past legacies dominate the path of post-Communist regime change, comparisons with other regions emerging from an authoritarian past will yield less insight. The authors claim, however, that the immediate context of norms, institutions, and international pressures shapes the particular way that legacies influence outcomes. Thus they conclude that cross-regional research is likely to be fruitful and should be pursued.