Those of us who study comparative political science - briefly, the nature of domestic politics across the globe - tend to identify with a region. We are Latin Americanists, Africanists, Sinologists, and in my case Eastern Europeanists. We maintain solidarity as comparativists - I’d say we are less divided than other subfields of political science - and eagerly read and comment on each other’s work. But we also disclaim deep knowledge of regions outside of our specialty. Our greatest hope, however, is that findings about our region somehow elucidate politics elsewhere.
Some regions are advantaged in this quest. Many of our central theories come from the European experience and more recently it is work on the US that serves as a role model. Other regions have been isolated from this exchange. A colleague who specializes in Chinese politics recently told me about the isolation felt by scholars of her region and how they worry about whether their work contributes to “mainstream” debates.
My own region, Eastern Europe, was also once peripheral to standard theories of comparative politics. Soviet-inspired communism was distinct enough from other regimes that the study of Eastern Europe neither absorbed many theories from elsewhere nor provided models for others.1 It mostly stood on its own. I think that is no longer the case, if it ever was.
In the interest of advancing knowledge, I’d like to point out a few areas where work on Eastern Europe has inspired and can inspire our colleagues who study other regions. And this is not just my parochialism or interest in boosting my own field. I’d love to see similar exercises from experts on other regions to see what I can learn from them.2
I apologize in advance to colleagues whose work I left out here. There is lots of work that I admire but which doesn’t fall under the purview of this post. My focus here is on ideas that are both novel and influential on scholarship on other regions, and so it skips much excellent work that either fits more neatly into existing debates or hasn’t “traveled” as broadly. And there is nothing wrong with that. Explaining particular places and times are essential parts of social science as is making incremental contributions to “normal science”. Just about all of my own work fits this mold. In short, if I didn’t include your work, it’s not because I don’t like it. Of course, feel free to make the case that you (or others) belong here, I’m happy to add more contributions from our region! The more, the merrier.
To start, a few areas where our influence is broad
Democratization
Eastern Europe was long left out of theorizing about democratization because it languished under communism. And when 1989 came, it appeared to be simply another set of cases that could be called the Third Wave, interesting mainly in the way that it confirmed or disconfirmed extant theories like modernization or transitology.
I’d suggest, however, that the region introduced a number of wrinkles or innovations into our understanding of democratization. Best known might be Kuran’s (1991) tipping point theory which shows how due to preference falsification regime change is difficult to predict (see also Lohmann 1994). Though inspired by the sudden fall of communism, these models have been applied to many other situations where people have good reason to hide their true beliefs (Kuran 1997).3
The rapid collapse of communism in the region meanwhile showed the limits of the standard agentic theories of the time, sometimes referred to as transitology. These theories preached compromise and told oppositions to work with softliners in the regime and to sideline radicals in their own ranks. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, mass uprisings successfully seized the day with little need to compromise or grant concessions (Bunce 2000, 2003).4
More recently the color revolutions in several Eastern European states gave rise to a clever theory by Bunce and Wolchik (2011) which describes how oppositions should best contest quasi-free elections. They call it democratization by elections and it involves unifying the opposition, using elections as a focal point, and focusing on the positive. While this advice is probably not universal, it might be the best set of strategies that we have for overthrowing dictators.
The region is now ground zero for debates on democratic backsliding, but I am not certain that we have developed novel theories of backsliding that apply more generally. I’d be happy to be corrected on this. (And I haven’t yet delved into a new review article on the subject by my fellow Eastern Europeanist Monika Nalepa and others.)
Regimes
In the now ancient days of Stalinism, Eastern Europe gave rise to classic theories of totalitarianism (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956). The standard model became less applicable over time even as it continued to inspire policy makers and some thinkers (Linz and Stepan 1996).
From a more theoretical point of view, the transitions from communism led to an interesting debate on their nature and meaning. A number of early observers saw them as restorations rather than true revolutions. They seemed to be merely a return to normality or to Europe, a matter of imitation rather than novelty. Krapfl (2013), however, provocatively argued that they pioneered a new form of non-violent revolution in support of human dignity. Fukuyama (1992) meanwhile famously interpreted the fall of communism as the end of history and of any alternatives to the liberal democratic order.
More recently, the concept of the hybrid regime - a no-man’s land between democracy and dictatorship - was at least partially an attempt to deal with the failures of democratization in Eastern Europe, though other regions contributed as well (Levitsky and Way 2010). Hale (2014) meanwhile might be the most acute theorist of the cyclical dynamics of these sorts of regimes. If his work has not been influential in other regions, it should be.
Political economy
The communist experience in Eastern Europe certainly had a large effect on economic thinking, but I will mostly leave those debates over central planning and the calculation debate to one side, as influential as they were in developments as diverse as the “big push” or neoliberalism.5 Today that experience plays a somewhat smaller role in discussions of economic development. One concept that came out of the central planning experience and continues to be useful, however, is Kornai’s (1992) soft-budget constraint, the idea that governments may bail out insolvent companies or regional governments.6
The transition to the market provoked a large amount of productive theorizing about the proper structuring and sequencing of reforms. Roland (2000) provides a summary of many of these models.7 The debate over shock therapy versus gradualism/ institutionalism was born in the region, though it may not be as relevant to the rest of the world which did not experience central planning. Despite persistent criticisms of the neoliberal approach, work on postcommunist reforms has mostly confirmed the expected positive effects of liberalization and privatization on efficiency, though Russia remains a controversial case (Gehlbach and Malesky 2014, Easterly 2019; for a negative point of view see Gohdsee and Orenstein 2021).
The political feasibility of reforms was another area where scholars of Eastern Europe provided new ideas. The region provided relatively strong evidence against the predominant J-curve approach to reform which suggested that reform and democracy were incompatible and that reform could only be accomplished with strong executive power. Hellman’s (1998) partial-reform equilibrium showed how democracy and reform could be mutually supportive, though the question arises why this had not been the case in Latin America (for explanations see Bunce 2001, Greskovits 1998).
By contrast, the study of the post-reform economy has been less influential, though some studies have posited a distinctive variety of capitalism in the region, sometimes referred to as dependent market economies (Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009, Bohle and Greskovits 2019). Most of these approaches build on work from Western Europe.
Civil society
The concept of civil society has deep roots, but its near destruction in communist regimes meant that it became a matter of central concern for dissidents from the region and the scholars studying those regimes. Their reflections - most famously, essays by Vaclav Havel - and activities - for example, Solidarity and Charta 77 - were important not just for the fall of communism but for keeping attention on the subject and laying the basis for theorizing by the likes of Robert Putnam who put civil society at the center of his theories about the health of established democracies (though Putnam himself makes no mention of work from and about Eastern Europe).
Even after the fall of communism, Eastern Europe remains a region with one of the weakest and perhaps uncivil civil societies and thus continues to inspire thinking on its causes and consequences (Howard 2003). Greskovits (1998), for example, suggests that these legacies among others produced a society that was unusually patient with painful economic reforms. Most of this work, however, is region specific.
Nationalism
Eastern Europe is arguably the inspiration for the modern distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism as laid out by Hans Kohn in his classic The Idea of Nationalism (1944), where he associated the two types with the West and the East.
The democratic transitions in the region were also closely connected with national liberation, which inspired influential theorizing on the sometimes positive relationship between nationalism and democracy (Linz and Stepan 1996, Bunce 1999, Beissinger 2002, Darden and Grzymala-Busse 2006). The Yugoslav Wars meanwhile gave impetus to theories that linked democratization to ethnic conflict (Mansfeld and Snyder 1995). This has led to important advice on how to avoid such civil wars, for example, by conducting local elections before national ones.
And a few areas where our contributions have been less influential
Political institutions
The transition from communism meant a rapid rewriting of constitutions across the region and a consequent burst of research and advising on comparative constitutional design (Elster et al. 1998). Weimer called this an “extraordinary natural experiment”, but looking back on it, Gehlbach and Malesky (2014) instead refer to it as “more like a poorly-constructed science-fair project”. Important work did study the consequences of institutions, but it mostly confirmed existing theories about the perils of presidentialism and strong executives (Frye 2012).8 Bunce’s (1999) theory of how communist-era institutions were subversive by producing solidaristic publics has a stronger claim to originality, but it may be relevant mostly within the region. Regionally-based scholarship, however, arguably pushed forward efforts to quantitatively measure institutions like presidential power and perhaps inspired recent efforts to comparatively map constitutions (Elkins et al. 2009).
States and state making
Eastern Europe has been relatively peripheral to the study of state formation. It is hard to cite major works developing theories based on its trajectory. Several postcommunist countries were relatively unique in the way that they faced the triple transition of creating new states, new political regimes, and new economies at the same time, a particularly difficult combination (Offe 1994). But again, this dilemma appears to be distinctive to the region. Bunce (2001) notes that the region shows that democratization need not postdate state-building and the two can work in tandem.
Some like Holmes (1997) have claimed that postcommunist Russia teaches us about the importance of the state for defending liberal rights, but my sense is that the region mainly confirmed existing theories that emphasized the importance of a functioning state for both democracy and economic reform (Fortin 2012). Bunce (1999) interestingly proposed that federalism under the communist regime created states-in-the-making which led these federations to break apart exactly along federal lines, though again these cases may be sui generis.
Voting, elections, and public opinion
Many scholars have investigated the determinants and consequences of elections in the region, but it is harder to think of new ideas that have emerged from these studies. Mostly there have been tests of standard models. Most novel might be Stokes’s (1996) typology of voters’ reactions to reforms where economic downturn may lead voters to greater support for incumbents either because they blame the old regime or because they accept the idea of “no pain, no gain”. My own modest contribution here was to direct attention to the fact that incumbents in the region almost always lose elections, at least in the democratic part of the region and to the negative consequences of this hyperaccountability (Roberts 2008).
Like elections, studies of public opinion have exploded since the transition, but they mostly follow in tracks laid elsewhere. The most systematic work on attitudes in the region, Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s (2017) Communism’s Shadow, in fact argues for the distinctiveness of the region, at least until the generations raised under communism pass, and so its ability to travel is limited.
Parties and party systems
As with voting and elections, work on parties has proceeded apace but without many novel results. The weakness of parties and complicated ideological spectrums are the main findings, but again this is not all that unusual outside of Western Europe. Probably most influential is Kitschelt’s (1995) contrast of the cleavage structure of Western Europe with postcommunist Europe in terms of alignments along the economic and socio-cultural dimensions. Kitschelt’s (1999, 2000) models of alternative linkage strategies between parties and citizens similarly emerge from the Eastern European experience but are relevant more broadly.
Populism
The success of Victor Orban in Hungary and the Law and Justice Party in Poland were key early examples of what is now a global wave of populism. Their blend of nationalism, religion, and criticism of Western liberalism and the EU has been a model for other populists. While I admire my colleagues’ work on these regimes, I’m not sure that we have introduced genuinely novel ideas. There are enough analyses, however, that I am likely missing something.
And one more uncertain case
International relations
Paul Poast has recently argued that Russia is at the center of some of our major theories of international relations including the security dilemma, bipolarity, and even realism itself. Many of the key results supporting these theories disappear if Russia is excluded as a case. I will wait for his book to appear before I comment on the argument (it is entitled Man, Russia, and War), but I would note that many of these theories were not based on deep knowledge of Russia. Meanwhile, the accession of many Eastern European countries into the EU has inspired a large literature on the multiple ways that the EU influenced those countries (beginning with Vachudova 2005), but as far as international organizations are concerned, the EU is one of a kind, so it is harder to judge our region’s influence.
In sum
I would argue that the Eastern European experience has contributed new and broadly relevant theories of democratization and regime type, political economy, civil society, and nationalism to comparative politics as a whole. It has had a bit less influence in the areas of states and statemaking, political institutions, elections and public opinion, and parties and party systems, which isn’t to say that we haven’t made a lot of progress in those areas. How we should assess that influence is a matter of debate, but I’d say that for a region that contains 6% of the world’s population (it was 10% in 1950), we may be punching above our weight. In my next post, I’ll put numbers on this influence. But as I mentioned before, mainly I would love to hear about what I can learn from other regions.
At one point it was considered a breakthrough to introduce the idea of interest groups to scholarship on the region.
Gerry Munck frequently does this for Latin America on Twitter.
Kuran, like a number of scholars discussed here, is not an expert on the region even though his model is inspired by it.
Pop-Eleches (2007), by contrast, provided some nuanced confirmation for modernization theory. After all, these countries were arguably the most “modernized” countries that hadn’t yet democratized and so were merely next in line.
One could list Hayek as the major thinker whose work was inspired by the communist experience, but others like Kalecki, Lange, Lerner, and von Mises also made major contributions.
Here is Roland’s appreciation of Kornai’s work and its influence on economics.
Roland interestingly opines on whether the economics of transition is a “field”. He notes that it is not a field as defined by a method or a real-world domain, but it is a field where “the geographical, historical, or particular institutional context plays an important role”. That would suggest that it does not belong in this post.
One novel idea was stop-gap constitutionalism - temporarily empowering an executive and delaying the adoption of a constitution in a time of high uncertainty - but it was mostly disconfirmed (Holmes 1993, Hellman 1998).