POLI 419 Chapter Notes - Chapter 0: Dependent And Independent Variables, Energy Intensity, European Bank For Reconstruction And Development
28 May 2016
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Document Summary
Historical legacies and post-communist regime change- grigore pop-eleches. Other variables: initial election outcomes, institutional choices, geographic diffusion, and external conditionality. Dependent variable: different dimensions of democracy/ democratization patterns. Thesis: the present article argues that historical legacies have to constitute the starting point for any systematic analysis of democratization in the post-communist context. Obviously, this argument does not imply that regime trajectories were predetermined by initial structural conditions; indeed, the analysis shows that no single legacy was either sufficient or necessary for post-communist democracy. Nor were the political preferences and choices of post- communist elites and citizens irrelevant. However, i claim that the stark cross-national differences in the region"s overlapping cultural, socioeconomic, and institutional legacies significantly shaped the preferences of political actors and the constraints on their choices. For the purpose of this analysis, legacies are defined as the structural, cultural, and institutional starting points of ex-communist countries at the outset of the transition.
