Understanding Post-Communist Transformation

Understanding Post-Communist Transformation PDF Author: Richard Rose
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134016697
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
The fall of the Berlin Wall launched the transformation of government, economy and society across half of Europe and the former Soviet Union. This text deals with the process of change in former Communist bloc countries, ten of which have become new European Union (EU) democracies while Russia and her neighbours remain burdened by their Soviet legacy. Drawing on more than a hundred public opinion surveys from the New Europe Barometer, the text compares how ordinary people have coped with the stresses and opportunities of transforming Communist societies into post-Communist societies and the resulting differences between peoples in the new EU member states and Russia. Subjects covered by Understanding Post-Communist Transformation include: Stresses and opportunities of economic transformation Social capital and the development of civil society Elections and the complexities of party politics The challenges for the EU of raising standards of democratic governance Differences between Russia’s and the West’s interpretation of political life Written by one of the world's most renowned authorities on this subject, this text is ideal for courses on transition, post-communism, democratization and Russian and Eastern European history and politics.

Understanding Post-Communist Transformation

Understanding Post-Communist Transformation PDF Author: Richard Rose
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134016697
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
The fall of the Berlin Wall launched the transformation of government, economy and society across half of Europe and the former Soviet Union. This text deals with the process of change in former Communist bloc countries, ten of which have become new European Union (EU) democracies while Russia and her neighbours remain burdened by their Soviet legacy. Drawing on more than a hundred public opinion surveys from the New Europe Barometer, the text compares how ordinary people have coped with the stresses and opportunities of transforming Communist societies into post-Communist societies and the resulting differences between peoples in the new EU member states and Russia. Subjects covered by Understanding Post-Communist Transformation include: Stresses and opportunities of economic transformation Social capital and the development of civil society Elections and the complexities of party politics The challenges for the EU of raising standards of democratic governance Differences between Russia’s and the West’s interpretation of political life Written by one of the world's most renowned authorities on this subject, this text is ideal for courses on transition, post-communism, democratization and Russian and Eastern European history and politics.

Media Transformations in the Post-communist World

Media Transformations in the Post-communist World PDF Author: Peter Gross
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739174940
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World: Eastern Europe's Tortured Path to Change, edited by Peter Gross and Karol Jakubowicz, is a collection of analyses of Eastern European media by some of the most distinguished scholars in the field. This in-depth exploration shows how despite positive changes after the fall of Communism, the transformations of societal institutions, including the mass media, have turned out to be slow, uncertain, and unsatisfying to many when measured against the admittedly ambiguous and overly Panglossian expectations. This collection offers readers a different view of post-Communist media by examining the mass media's evolution in the region from a more holistic perspective. The contributors to this volume respond to essential questions, including: Is the post-Communist transition and transformation over? When can it be considered over? Each chapter contributes to our understanding of these questions by offering theoretical overviews and country-specific studies. This collection serves as an affirmation that the study of mass media is essential to understanding the nature and workings of democracy in the long-suffering nations of Central and Eastern Europe, with international applications. Media Transformations in the Post-Communist World is an indispensable contribution to the study of Eastern Europe after Communism, and the transformations of mass media in the region.

The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes

The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes PDF Author: Bálint Magyar
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863708
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 834

Get Book

Book Description
Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

The Economics of Post-Communist Transition

The Economics of Post-Communist Transition PDF Author: Olivier Blanchard
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191521779
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 164

Get Book

Book Description
Transition in Central and Eastern Europe has led to a U-shaped response of output: a sharp decline in output followed by recovery. Most of the countries of Central Europe seem now firmly on the upside; most of the countries of Eastern Europe are still close to the bottom of the U: an optimistic view is that they are now negotiating the turn. Olivier Blanchard, a distinguished economist who has worked on transition since its beginning, is one of the first to present a unified analysis of the process of transition. The U-shaped response of output, its causes and its implications, are the subject of this book. The text is split into four chapters. The first reviews the facts; the second focuses on the two basic mechanisms underlying transition: reallocation and restructuring; the third looks more closely at a number of issues, from the interactions between restructuring and privatization to the nature of the labour market in transition; the fourth chapter pulls the material together in an analytical model of transition. This model is then used to discuss policy issues, from the design of privatization to the role of fiscal policy in transition.

Democracy and Its Alternatives

Democracy and Its Alternatives PDF Author: Richard Rose
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801860386
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Get Book

Book Description
The collapse of Communism has created the opportunity for democracy to spread from Prague to the Baltic and Black Seas. But the alternatives—dictatorship or totalitarian rule—are more in keeping with the traditions of Central Europe. And for many post-Communist societies, democracy has come to be associated with inflation, unemployment, crime, and corruption. Is it still true, then, as Winston Churchill suggested a half-century ago, that people will accept democracy with all its faults—because it is better than anything else? To find out, political scientists Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer examine evidence from post-Communist societies in eastern Europe. Drawing on data from public opinion and exit polls, election results, and interviews, the authors present testable hypotheses regarding regime change, consolidation, and prospects for stabilization. The authors point out that the abrupt transition to democracy in post-Communist countries is normal; gradual evolution in the Anglo-American way is the exception to the rule. While most recent books on democratization focus on Latin America and, to some extent, Asia, the present volume offers a unique look at the process currently under way in nine eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Despite the many problems these post-Communist societies are experiencing in making the transition to a more open and democratic polity, the authors conclude that a little democracy is better than no democracy at all.

Theorizing Transition

Theorizing Transition PDF Author: John Pickles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113471565X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 519

Get Book

Book Description
Theorizing Transition provides a comprehensive examination of the economic, political, social and cultural transformations in post-Communist countries and an important critique of transition theory and policy. The authors create the basis of a theoretical understanding of transition in terms of a political economy of capitalist development. The diversity of forms and complexities of transition are examined through a wide range of examples from post-Soviet countries and comparative studies from countries such as Vietnam and China. Theorizing Transition challenges many of the comfortable assumptions unleashed by the euphoria of democratisation and the triumphalism of market capitalism in the early 1990s and shows transition to be much more complex than mainstream theory suggests.

Divergent Paths in Post-Communist Transformation

Divergent Paths in Post-Communist Transformation PDF Author: O. Havrylyshyn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230502857
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book

Book Description
The most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the successes and failures of 27 countries post-communism transformation. Looking at life after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the book examines and contrasts why some countries have virtually completed their transformation to a liberal polity and economy, while others lag behind.

Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe

Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe PDF Author: S. Birch
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403938768
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe assesses the influence of electoral systems on political change in 20 post-communist European states. The main finding is that electoral institutions have systematic effects on the formation of representative structures. 'Party-enabling' aspects of electoral laws such as list proportional representation tend to foster popular inclusion in politics and institutionalized party systems, whereas 'politician-enabling' rules such as single-member districts and ballots that allow voters to select individuals often favour the development of weakly structured systems and high levels of popular exclusion from the representative process.

Catching Up and Falling Behind

Catching Up and Falling Behind PDF Author: David A. Dyker
Publisher: Imperial College Press
ISBN: 1860945996
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book

Book Description
In this collection of essays David A Dyker explores some of the mostdifficult and fascinating aspects of the process of transition fromautocratic real socialism to a capitalism that is sometimesdemocratic, sometimes authoritarian. The stress is on the economicdimension of transformation, but the author sets the economic dramafirmly within a political economy framework and a historicalperspective. Trends in key economic variables are analysed against thebackground of the struggle between different social and politicalgroups for power and command over resources. While the book pays dueattention to topical issues like EU enlargement, the underlyingperspective is a long-term one. Transition is viewed not as a set ofonce-and-for-all institutional changes or a process of short-termstabilisation, but as a historic opportunity to solve the inheritedproblem of poverty and underdevelopment in Central-East Europe and theformer Soviet Union. The book ends with a critical assessment of howeconomics, as a discipline, has coped with the challenge of thathistoric opportunity.

Theorising Transition

Theorising Transition PDF Author: John Pickles
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415162661
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Get Book

Book Description
Contains 20 essays which discuss the differing forms of capitalism emerging in former socialist economies. Examines, inter alia, industrial restructuring, social and political movements and agrarian reform, and social transformations.