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.

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.

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.

Theorizing Transition

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

Get Book

Book Description
Examining transformations using a variety of perspectives Theorizing Transition provides both a rich empirical map of the dimensions of post-Communism and raises important theoretical issues about how we interpret these changes.

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.

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.

The Post-communist Condition

The Post-communist Condition PDF Author: Aleksandra Galasi?ska
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027206287
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book

Book Description
This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on discourses in one national context of post-communist transformation. Proposing a macro-micro approach to discourse analysis and transformation, it examines a spectrum of topics including Polish history, with its 'interpreters'; changes in political bodies and the media, policies of the Catholic Church and the Institute of National Remembrance; xenophobia and anti-Semitism, with the emergence of unemployment and homelessness; experiences of new gender relations and migrations. In effect, drawing upon unique sets of data, the book shows how post-communist transformation can be understood through analyses of the changing public and private discourses. It shows Polish post-communism as a fragile and uneasy transformation, with people and institutions struggling to make sense of it and of life within it. The volume will be of interest to a broad range of social scientists: discourse analysts, sociologists, modern historians and political scientists, as well as to the informed lay public.

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.