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Author: Martin Horak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802093280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
When faced with the rapid and disorienting transition from communism to democracy, many eastern European leaders sought simple, immediately rewarding answers to complex policy problems. Undoubtedly, this hurried approach had a significant impact on the quality of democratic government in formerly communist countries. Through an analysis of urban politics in Prague between 1990 and 2000, Governing the Post-Communist City sheds new light on the factors that shaped policy in eastern Europe at the time of its democratic transformation. The first book-length study of post-communist urban politics in a city outside of Russia, Governing the Post-Communist City links the difficulties of democratic government in 1990s Prague to decisions made shortly after the fall of communism. Focusing on the issues of road infrastructure and downtown development, Martin Horak argues that local leadership was more concerned with insulating policy-making processes from public influence than with creating new policies suited to post-communist urban development. This set a precedent for the whole institutional environment of post-communist Prague and entrenched itself in the city's politics throughout the 1990s. Original, engaging, and authoritative, this study has much to say about the political climate in Prague after the downfall of communism, and makes insightful conclusions about the factors that contributed to present political circumstances in the region.
Author: Martin Horak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802093280
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
When faced with the rapid and disorienting transition from communism to democracy, many eastern European leaders sought simple, immediately rewarding answers to complex policy problems. Undoubtedly, this hurried approach had a significant impact on the quality of democratic government in formerly communist countries. Through an analysis of urban politics in Prague between 1990 and 2000, Governing the Post-Communist City sheds new light on the factors that shaped policy in eastern Europe at the time of its democratic transformation. The first book-length study of post-communist urban politics in a city outside of Russia, Governing the Post-Communist City links the difficulties of democratic government in 1990s Prague to decisions made shortly after the fall of communism. Focusing on the issues of road infrastructure and downtown development, Martin Horak argues that local leadership was more concerned with insulating policy-making processes from public influence than with creating new policies suited to post-communist urban development. This set a precedent for the whole institutional environment of post-communist Prague and entrenched itself in the city's politics throughout the 1990s. Original, engaging, and authoritative, this study has much to say about the political climate in Prague after the downfall of communism, and makes insightful conclusions about the factors that contributed to present political circumstances in the region.
Author: Kiril Stanilov
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 140206053X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 485
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Book Description
This book focuses on the spatial transformations in the most dynamically evolving urban areas of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It links the restructuring of the built environment with the underlying processes and the forces of socio-economic reforms. The detailed accounts of the spatial transformations in a key moment of urban history in the region enhance our understanding of the linkages between society and space.
Author: Grigore Pop-Eleches
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400887828
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.
Author: John Czaplicka
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
Cities after the Fall of Communism traces the cultural reorientation of East European cities since 1989. Analyzing the architecture, commemorative practices, and urban planning of cities such as Lviv, Vilnius, and Odessa, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how history may be selectively re-imagined in light of present political and cultural realities. These essays show that while East European cities gravitate nostalgically toward Habsburg, Baltic, Imperial Russian, and Germanic pasts, they are also embracing new urban identities grounded in ethnic-national, European, Western, and global contexts. Ultimately, the editors argue that one can see a "New Europe" taking shape in these cities, where a strained discourse between different versions of the past and variously envisioned futures is being set in stone, steel, and glass.
Author: B lint Magyar
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 6155513546
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ
Author: Natalya Ryabinska
Publisher: ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press
ISBN: 3838270118
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187
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Book Description
Natalya Ryabinska calls into question the commonly held opinion that the problems with media reform and press freedom in former Soviet states merely stem from the cultural heritage of their communist (and pre-communist) past. Focusing on Ukraine, she argues that, in the period after the fall of communism, peculiar new obstacles to media independence have arisen. They include the telltale structure of media ownership, with news reporting being concentrated in the hands of politically engaged business tycoons, the fuzzy and contradictory legislation of the media realm, and the informal institutions of political interference in mass media. The book analyzes interrelationships between politics, the economy, and media in Ukraine, especially their shadowy sides guided by private interests and informal institutions. Being embedded in comparative politics and post-communist media studies, it helps to understand the nature and workings of the Ukrainian media system situated in-between democracy and authoritarianism. It offers insights into the inner logic of Ukraine’s political system and institutional arrangement in the post-Soviet period. Based on empirical data of 1994–2013, this study also highlights many of the barriers to democratic reforms that have been persisting in Ukraine since the Revolution of Dignity of 2013–2014.
Author: Timothy J. Colton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674587496
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 968
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Book Description
Linchpin of the Soviet system and exemplar of its ideology, Moscow was nonetheless instrumental in the Soviet Union's demise. It was in this metropolis of nine million people that Boris Yeltsin, during two frustrating years as the city's party boss, began his move away from Communist orthodoxy. Colton charts the general course of events that led to this move, tracing the political and social developments that have given the city its modern character. He shows how the monolith of Soviet power broke down in the process of metropolitan governance, where the constraints of censorship and party oversight could not keep up with proliferating points of view, haphazard integration, and recurrent deviation from approved rules and goals. Everything that goes into making a city - from town planning, housing, and retail services to environmental and architectural concernsfigures in Colton's account of what makes Moscow unique. He shows us how these aspects of the city's organization, and the actions of leaders and elite groups within them, coordinated or conflicted with the overall power structure and policy imperatives of the Soviet Union. Against this background, Colton explores the growth of the anti-Communist revolution in Moscow politics, as well as fledgling attempts to establish democratic institutions and a market economy.
Author: John S. Dryzek
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521001380
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
This book examines the way democracy is thought about and lived by people in the post-communist world.
Author: Pavel Šaradín
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031436741
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
The book aims to complement the existing research on democratic innovations mainly by making unique comparative analyses of the democratic innovations at the local level in selected European post-communist countries, i.e. the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia. Democratic innovations can help overcome political apathy, decreased confidence in democracy and improve efficiency of governance. We traditionally consider cities and municipalities to be cradles of democracy and connect them with deliberations on the further development of democratic theory and political practice. We therefore argue that the local level is a suitable arena and laboratory for both changes of institutional settings within the traditional model of representative democracy, and the structural changes, which concern changing relations between local representatives and citizens.
Author: Roxana Marin
Publisher: Verlag Barbara Budrich
ISBN: 3966659735
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 344
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Book Description
How does the elite continue to affect the evolution of local communities in the developing region of former Sovietized Europe? This book is concerned with the issue of local leadership in the countries of East-Central Europe. It is an attempt to examine, with a comparative method, the profile and the role of the local political elites (members of the Municipal Councils) in six towns in six transitional democracies of the region.
