The Legitimation Problems of New Democracies: Postcommunist Dilemmas in Czechoslovakia and Hungary

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
E G Frankland ◽  
R H Cox
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Transition Period ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Crisis Theory ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Democratic Systems

After 1989 the countries of Eastern Europe embarked upon new directions away from central economies and one-party systems towards market economies and democratic systems. The courses of these political and economic transformations largely depended upon the ability of the emerging regimes to create legitimacy. In particular, those regimes which suffered from greater political divisiveness and significant economic problems were more likely to be confronted with a crisis of legitimacy. In this paper, the legitimation crisis theory is examined for post-communist Czechoslovakia and Hungary. It is found that the developments in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during this early transition period support the hypothesis, and, in addition, they hold implications for the survival of other transitional regimes as well as those in the West which have increasingly been confronted with questions of legitimacy.

Translating Social Cleavages into Party Systems: The Significance of New Democracies

2002 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakub Zielinski
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Party System ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Political Conflict ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
Theoretic Model ◽  
Social Cleavages ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Social Cleavage

This article focuses on new democracies in Eastern Europe and addresses two questions about the translation of social cleavages into political oppositions. The first question concerns the translation of preexisting cleavages: does the evolution of new party systems influence the politicization of social conflicts? The second question concerns the translation of new social cleavages, that is, cleavages that emerge once a party system freezes: can a new social cleavage be politicized? To answer these questions, the article integrates a formalization of social cleavage theory with a game-theoretic model of a new party system. The first result is that translation of preexisting cleavages depends on which parties survive the early rounds of electoral competition. In fact, depending on which parties survive, the axis of political conflict can shift by 90 degrees. This implies that party systems in new democracies should be seen as important founding moments, during which political actors determine the long-term axes of political conflict. The second result is that once a party system freezes, the politicization of a new social cleavage is difficult. Indeed, it is possible that a new social cleavage will remain politically dormant. In the context of Eastern Europe, this result suggests that political salience of class conflict is likely to be low because competitive elections and political parties predate the entrenchment of propertyowning classes.

Identifying the Bases of Party Competition in Eastern Europe

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Evans ◽  
Stephen Whitefield
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Party Competition ◽  
New Democracies ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Bases ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Relationship

This article examines the emerging structure of party competition in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It argues that the relationship between the social bases, issue dimensions and stability of party competition in countries in the region will vary depending on their differing experience of marketization, ethnic homogeneity and established statehood. In some countries, the predicted framework of party competition will derive from socio-economic divisions and will resemble that found in the West; in other countries, ethnicity and nation-building will provide the principal structuring factors; in yet other cases, where severe constraints exist on the emergence of any clear bases or dimensions, competition will centre on valence issues from which high voter volatility may be expected. Except where Western-type competition obtains, considerable doubts exist about the future stability of political systems in the region.

Mafias on the Move

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Varese
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Organized Crime ◽  
The United States ◽  
The West ◽  
Market Expansion ◽  
The North ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
At Will

Organized crime is spreading like a global virus as mobs take advantage of open borders to establish local franchises at will. That at least is the fear, inspired by stories of Russian mobsters in New York, Chinese triads in London, and Italian mafias throughout the West. As this book explains, the truth is more complicated. The author has spent years researching mafia groups in Italy, Russia, the United States, and China, and argues that mafiosi often find themselves abroad against their will, rather than through a strategic plan to colonize new territories. Once there, they do not always succeed in establishing themselves. The book spells out the conditions that lead to their long-term success, namely sudden market expansion that is neither exploited by local rivals nor blocked by authorities. Ultimately the inability of the state to govern economic transformations gives mafias their opportunity. In a series of matched comparisons, the book charts the attempts of the Calabrese 'Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. The book explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. A pioneering chapter on China examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland. This book is both a compelling read and a sober assessment of the risks posed by globalization and immigration for the spread of mafias.

Europe's Growth Champion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Piatkowski
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Central And Eastern Europe ◽  
High Income ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
The West ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
Catch Up ◽  
Inclusive Society ◽  
First Time ◽  
Global Growth

The book is about one of the biggest economic success stories that one has hardly ever heard about. It is about a perennially backward, poor, and peripheral country, which over the last twenty-five years has unexpectedly become Europe’s and a global growth champion and joined the ranks of high-income countries during the life of just one generation. It is about the lessons learned from its remarkable experience for other countries in the world, the conditions that keep countries poor, and challenges that countries need face to grow and become high-income. It is also about a new growth model that this country—Poland—and its peers in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere need to adopt to continue to grow and catch up with the West for the first time ever. The book emphasizes the importance of the fundamental sources of growth—institutions, culture, ideas, and leaders—in economic development. It argues that a shift from an extractive society, where the few rule for the benefit of the few, to an inclusive society, where many rule for the benefit of many, was the key to Poland’s success. It asserts that a newly emerged inclusive society will support further convergence of Poland and Central and Eastern Europe with the West and help sustain the region’s Golden Age, but moving to the core of the European economy will require further reforms and changes in Poland’s developmental DNA.

The Puzzle of Populism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul D. Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Party Systems

This chapter sets out the puzzle at the center of the book: what explains the success of populist campaigners in India, Asia, and beyond? It summarizes the existing literature on populist success both in Latin America and Western Europe and argues that these explanations do a poor job of explaining Indian and Asian cases in particular. Populists win elections when the institutionalized ties between non-populist parties and voters decay. However, because different kinds of party systems experience distinct stresses and strains, we need different models of populist success based on the prevailing party­–voter linkage system in place in any given country. The chapter then sets out the rationale for concentrating on explaining populist success in patronage-based party systems, which are common not only to Asia, but also to Latin America and Eastern Europe.

The Diaspora of the Novel

1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-146
Author(s):  
Artemis Leontis
Keyword(s):  
Uneven Development ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type

Reflection on the history of the novel usually begins with consideration of the social, political, and economic transformations within society that favored the “rise” of a new type of narrative. This remains true even with the numerous and important studies appearing during the past ten years, which relate the novel to an everbroadening spectrum of ideological issues—gender, class, race, and, most recently, nationalism. Yet a history of the genre might reflect not just on the novel’s national, but also its transnational, trajectory, its spread across the globe, away from its original points of emergence. Such a history would take into account the expansion of western markets—the growing exportation of goods and ideas, as well as of social, political, and cultural forms from the West—that promoted the novel’s importation by nonwestern societies. Furthermore, it could lead one to examine the very interesting inverse relationship between two kinds of migration, both of which are tied to the First World’s uneven “development” of the Third. In a world system that draws out natural resources in exchange for technologically mediated goods, the emigration of laborers and intellectuals from peripheral societies to the centers of power of the West and the immigration of a western literary genre into these same societies must be viewed as related phenomena.

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