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Abstract
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.
Acknowledgments
A large number of people have assisted us in the work that culminates with this article. This assistance is acknowledged in our respective doctoral dissertations. Besides that, we are thankful for the critical comments of two anonymous reviewers. The usual disclaimer applies.
Notes
McFaul, ‘Fourth Wave’, 212.
Bunce, ‘Political Economy of Postsocialism’, 758.
Cf. Merkel, ‘Embedded and Defective Democracies’.
E.g., Fish, ‘Determinants’; Fish, ‘Stronger Legislatures’; Fish, ‘Democratization's Requisites’; Fish and Choudhry, ‘Democratization and Economic Liberalization’; Ishiyama and Velten, ‘Presidential Power’; McFaul, ‘Fourth Wave’; Roeder, ‘Varieties of Post-Soviet Authoritarian Regimes’.
See O'Donnell and Schmitter, ‘Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies’.
See, e.g., Fish, ‘Determinants’, 77–8; Fish, ‘Stronger Legislatures’, 11–12.
Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems; Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Outcomes of Post-Communist Regime Change’; Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity’. Notice that Kitschelt's Citation1999 book analyses different patterns of democratic party competition. In the two subsequent papers, however, his focus is squarely on explaining democratization, as is ours in this article.
A few authors, such as Janos, ‘Continuity and Change in Eastern-Europe’, in fact anticipated Kitschelt. But many more were to follow in his footsteps, e.g. those included in Ekiert and Hanson, Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe; Darden and Grzymala-Busse, ‘Great Divide’; Pop-Eleches, ‘Historical Legacies’.
Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity’, 74–5.
Cf. also Pop-Eleches, ‘Historical Legacies’, 917.
This assertion is based on a critical review by Herbert Kitschelt of the doctoral dissertation of one of the authors in which he recommend – verbatim – for observing such an ‘industry standard’.
George and Bennett, Case Study, 245.
Schneider and Wagemann, ‘Reducing Complexity’.
Schneider and Wagemann try to capture this by replacing the adjective ‘deep’ with ‘remote’.
Including Southern European, Latin American, and some – but far from all – post-communist countries.
Bunce, ‘Paper Curtains and Paper Tigers’, 981.
Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity’, 49.
Dahl, On Democracy, 85.
According to Gary Goertz, using the minimum score – corresponding to the fuzzy and operation in fsQCA – with regard to the constitutive features is the preferable way to handle an aggregation process for many social science concepts. This certainly applies to the concept of democracy, which he – tellingly – uses to illustrate the point. See Goertz, Social Science Concepts. For similar arguments, see Bowman, Lehoucq, and Mahoney, ‘Measuring Political Democracy’, 939–70; Sartori, Theory of Democracy Revisited.
Furthermore, an application of a different dataset concerning the same year, viz., the Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2006, supports our ordering. Using the minimum procedure on the Bertelsmann scores connected to the attributes of political participation (free, fair, and frequent elections, effective power to elected leaders, freedom of association and assembly, freedom of expression), the exact same distribution of cases into classes appear – with the sole exception of Macedonia. Based on this inductive line of reasoning, combined with our case knowledge, the ordering seems robust and plausible.
Due to missing data on the explanatory variables we have been forced to exclude Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia-Montenegro, leaving a set of 26 post-communist countries to be classified.
This reading is based, in particular, on the overviews presented by Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity’ and Pop-Eleches, ‘Historical Legacies’.
Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems; Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Outcomes of Post-Communist Regime Change’.
Kurtz and Barnes, ‘Political Foundations’.
As it falls in a natural gap in the empirical distribution of cases.
Kopstein and Reilly, ‘Geographic Diffusion’.
Sabonis-Helf, ‘Rise of the Post-Soviet Petro-states’; Kim, Resource Curse. See also Fish, Democracy Derailed and some of the contributions in Ebel and Menon, Energy and Conflict.
Fish, Democracy Derailed, 84.
IMF, Guide on Resource Revenue Transparency.
Fish, ‘Determinants’.
Bunce, ‘Political Economy of Postsocialism’, 782; McFaul, ‘Fourth Wave’; Fish, ‘Democratization's Requisites’.
Fish and Choudhry, ‘Democratization and Economic Liberalization’.
De Melo, Denizer, and Gelb, ‘Patterns of Transition’.
Fish, ‘Stronger Legislatures’.
Ibid., 18.
Turkmenistan is not included in Fish's survey. However, his index is very much of the same ilk – and on the same scale – as the Presidential Power Index of Frye, ‘A Politics of Institutional Choice’. In Frye's index, Turkmenistan receives a very high score of presidential power meaning that it is fair to place Turkmenistan in the group of countries with weak legislatures. In the statistical path analysis, we use Frye's score for Turkmenistan (0.35).
Cf. Lazarsfeld and Barton, ‘Qualitative Measurement’; Bailey, Typologies and Taxonomies.
George and Bennett, Case Study; Elman, ‘Explanatory Typologies’.
George and Bennett, Case Study, 235.
48 types may strike the reader as quite a complex construct, the danger of which is often warned about in the literature on typologies (e.g., Elman, ‘Explanatory Typologies’). However, as we predict a clustering around the diagonal, the presence of five variables does not present an unwieldy complexity.
The respective positioning of the independent variables is coincidental. It could take many other shapes but this would not change the identity of the 48 types.
This equals the typological technique termed ‘indexing’ by Elman, ‘Explanatory Typologies’.
If we interpret the three values as an ordinal-scale of 1 (full presence), 2 (mixed score), and 3 (full absence), the statistical correlation (Kendall's Tau-b) between the two packages is an impressive 0.86.
Cf. Gerring, Social Science Methodology, 130–46.
Kitschelt, ‘Accounting for Postcommunist Regime Diversity’, 75.
Cf. George and Bennett, Case Study.
As this technique is primarily used to check the robustness of the findings, the description of the different analytical steps and reports of the results are comprised. We do, however, recognize the standards of good practice – except (due to space limitations) the publication of the raw data matrix – suggested by Wagemann and Schneider, Standards of Good Practice.
Ragin, Comparative Method; Rihoux and Ragin, Configurational Comparative Analysis.
Ragin, Comparative Method, 93.
If we allow all logical cases, i.e., empirically unobserved configurations (combinations of attributes), in the Booelan reduction (see Ragin and Sonnett, Between Complexity and Parsimony) this result emerges:LEGACIES (Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia)+MODERN*displacement*LEGISLATURE (Bulgaria, Romania).As we do not, however, wish to make any conclusions based on assumptions about unobserved variation, this result is not subjected to further interpretation.
CsQCA is only used as a secondary analytical tool. Thus, the space limitations do not allow us to interpret the results in detail, nor to discuss the complementary paths leading to non-democracy – apart from mentioning that they definitely do not contradict our arguments presented in the core text. The absence of favourable political legacies is the only necessary condition, while the analysis points to no less than seven different, and rather complex, solution terms:modern*NOOIL* legacies*displacement*LEGISLATURE*REFORM(Albania+Mongolia)+modern* NOOIL* legacies*west*legislature*reform (Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan+Tajikistan)+modern* legacies*west*displacement*legislature*reform (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan+Tajikistan)+NOOIL*legacies*WEST*displacement*legislature*reform (Belarus+Ukraine) +MODERN*NOOIL*legacies*WEST*DISPLACEMENT*LEGISLATURE*REFORM(Macedonia) +modern*NOOIL*legacies*WEST* DISPLACEMENT*LEGISLATURE* reform (Moldova) +MODERN*nooil*legacies* west*DISPLACEMENT*legislature* reform (Russia). An inclusion of all logical cases in the minimization procedure produces paths toward non-democracy has the following consequences:
modern (Albania+Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan+Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan+Belarus+Moldova+Mongolia+Tajikistan)+legislature (or reform – logically substitute) (Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan+Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan+Belarus+Russia+Tajikistan+Ukraine)+ legacies*DISPLACEMENT (Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan+Macedonia+ Moldova+Russia).
Furthermore, the inclusion of the EU-variable into the general explanatory edifice would imply salient endogeneity problems. To the extent that potential EU membership is considered to be a structural variable, the variable measuring vicinity to Western Europe tends to be a fairly good proxy.
Vachudova, Europe Undivided.
All relationships are statistically significant at the 0.1-level.
For an example of a lucid analysis of actor-choices within such structural constraints, see Hale, ‘Regime Cycles’.