Grigore Pop-Eleches

Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change

This article shows that post-communist regime trajectories have been largely circumscribed by historical legacy differences, but the question about which particular legacy matters most is much harder to answer, since statistical results are sensitive to model specification and to the choice of democracy indicator. While some of these discrepancies reflect the inherent limitations of traditional statistical methods, others reflect the different dimensions of democracy captured by different indicators. Therefore, the article contributes to a more nuanced explanation of post-communist democratization by showing that different legacies drive different aspects of democratization. Finally, the results demonstrate that several prominent alternative explanations—initial election outcomes, institutional choices, geographic diffusion, and external conditionality—played a relatively modest role in explaining democratization patterns beyond the constraints imposed by historical legacies.

Throwing Out the Bums: Protest Voting and Unorthodox Parties after Communism

The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (uop s) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals? Why did this reversal in Eastern Europe happen during a period of economic recovery, remarkable Western integration progress, and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town? This article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence. While protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism, the beneficiaries of these protest votes have changed in recent elections. Whereas in the first two generations of postcommunist elections, disgruntled voters could opt for untried mainstream alternatives, in third-generation elections (defined as elections taking place after at least two different ideological camps have governed in the postcommunist period) voters had fewer untried mainstream alternatives, and therefore opted in greater number for unorthodox parties. This explanation receives strong empirical support from statistical tests using aggregate data from seventy-six parliamentary elections in fourteen East European countries from 1990 to 2006, survey evidence from twelve postcommunist elections from 1996 to 2004, and a survey experiment in Bulgaria in 2008.

Disenchanted or Discerning: Voter Turnout in Post-Communist Countries

Voter turnout in post-communist countries has exhibited wildly fluctuating patterns against a backdrop of economic and political volatility. In this article, we consider three explanations for this variation: a “depressing disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are less likely to vote in elections when political and economic conditions are worse; a “motivating disenchantment” hypothesis that predicts voters are more likely to vote in elections when conditions are worse; and a “stakes” based hypothesis that predicts voters are more likely to vote in more important elections. Using an original aggregate-level cross-national time-series data set of 137 presidential and parliamentary elections in 19 post-communist countries, we find much stronger empirical support for the stakes-based approach to explaining variation in voter turnout than we do for either of the disenchantment-based approaches. Our findings offer a theoretically integrated picture of voter participation in the post-communist world, and, more broadly, contribute new insights to the general literature on turnout.

Why No Backsliding? The European Union’s Impact on Democracy and Governance Before and After Accession

This article documents and explains the puzzling lack of backsliding in political reforms among the new postcommunist EU members, even though these countries are no longer subject to the powerful incentives of the EU membership promise. Using a combination of cross-national statistics, expert interviews, and public opinion data, the authors show that the new EU members have experienced at most a slowdown in reforms rather than a genuine backlash. The authors attribute this finding to the fact that the loss of leverage after the countries joined the European Union was balanced by a combination of alternative leverage and linkage mechanisms, including greater dependence on EU aid and trade and greater exposure to the West for both elites and ordinary citizens. For the latter, expanded work and travel opportunities seem to be associated with higher expectations of government performance and greater political involvement, which may be crucial for future governance reform in the region.

Between Historical Legacies and the Promise of Western Integration: Democratic Conditionality after Communism

Post-communist democracy promotion has been most important in “borderline” countries, which had less favorable structural conditions than the East-Central European frontrunners, but where a domestic democratic constituency nevertheless existed and could benefit from Western support. External democracy promotion efforts have ranged from “soft” diplomatic pressure to economic and military sanctions and have acted through a variety of channels: (1) promotion of democratic attitudes among citizens yearning for Western integration, (2) political incentives for elites (in government and in the opposition), (3) domestic power balance shifts in favor of democratic politicians, and (4) promotion of better democratic governance through incentives for public administration reform. The most effective approach to democracy promotion thus far, however, has been the combination of political conditionality with significant political/economic incentives, best exemplified by the European integration process. Furthermore, the success of any strategy hinges on its fit with the geopolitical and domestic environment of the country in question. In particular, external actors must be more sensitive to the national sovereignty implications of such interventions, which can be easily exploited by domestic antidemocratic actors to undermine democracy promotion efforts.

Associated with the Past? Communist Legacies and Civic Participation in Post-communist Countries

In this article, we test the effect of communist-era legacies on the large and temporally resilient deficit in civic participation in post-communist countries. To do so, we analyze data from 157 surveys conducted between 1990 and 2009 in twenty-four post-communist countries and forty-two non-post-communist countries. The specific hypotheses we test are drawn from a comprehensive theoretical framework of the effects of communist legacies on political behavior in post-communist countries that we have previously developed. Our analysis suggests that three mechanisms were particularly salient in explaining this deficit: first, the demographic profile (including lower religiosity levels) of post-communist countries is less conducive to civic participation than elsewhere. Second, the magnitude of the deficit increases with the number of years an individual spent under communism but the effects were particularly strong for people socialized in the post-totalitarian years and for those who experienced communism in their early formative years (between ages six and seventeen). Finally, we also find that civic participation suffered in countries that experienced weaker economic performance in the post-communist period, though differences in post-communist democratic trajectories had a negligible impact on participation. Taken together, we leave behind a potentially optimistic picture about civic society in post-communist countries, as the evidence we present suggests eventual convergence toward norms in other non post-communist countries.

Targeted Government Spending and Political Preferences

This article addresses the question of whether incumbents can buy political support through targeted public spending. Using a regression discontinuity approach which takes advantage of the design of a recent Romanian government program that distributed coupons worth 200 Euros to poor families towards the purchase of a computer, we find that program beneficiaries were significantly more likely to support the parties of the incumbent governing coalition. These effects occurred both through higher political mobilization and through party-switching. The article also analyzes the drivers of such political gains and we find that program beneficiaries did not trust either the central government or the governing parties any more than the control group. Instead, it appears that local governments reaped the benefits of increased trust, and the political support for incumbent parties occurred mostly in towns where the local government was controlled by one of the parties of the national ruling coalition.

Romania's Politics of Dejection

In November and December 2000, Romania conducted largely free and fair elections for both parliament and the presidency, resulting in the second peaceful turnover of power in its short postcommunist history. But what might in theory have been considered a milestone of democratic consolidation was in practice regarded by many foreign and domestic observers as a serious setback for Romanian democracy. For whatever the merits of the election process, its outcome was highly discouraging for Romania’s democrats. The Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR), a broad anticommunist coalition of Liberals and Christian Democrats that had come to power in the 1996 elections, was crushed at the polls. The chief beneficiary of the collapse of the center was the leftist Party of Social Democracy of Romania (PDSR). The PDSR won a decisive plurality in parliament, and its leader Ion Iliescu, an ex-communist who had served as Romania’s first postcommunist president from 1990 to 1996, regained the presidency, succeeding the CDR’s Emil Constantinescu. While the victory of Iliescu and the PSDR can be regarded as part of a much broader regional pattern of former communists returning to power on a platform of softening the rigors of market reform, another aspect of Romania’s 2000 elections was largely unprecedented. This was the strong showing of the extreme nationalist Greater Romania Party (PRM), whose charismatic leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor soared in popularity to finish a strong second to Iliescu in the first round. Thus, in the presidential runoff on December 10, Romanian voters were confronted with a choice between an ex-communist and an extreme nationalist. Grigore Pop-Eleches, a Romanian political scientist, is a doctoral candidate at the University of California–Berkeley, where he is currently working on a dissertation on the comparative politics of International Monetary Fund programs in Eastern Europe and Latin America during the last two decades. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on the politics of postcommunist countries.

From Transplants to Hybrids: Exploring Institutional Pathways to Growth

Within the study of economic growth and development, there is a consensus of sorts that “institutions matter.” However, decades after political scientists, sociologists, and dissident economists first suggested that institutions played a crucial role in promoting the explosive post-war economic growth of first Japan and then the East Asian “tigers,” the question of which particular institutions matter for growth, and exactly how they matter, is very much alive. We address this question in this special issue. The contributors to this volume, who approach the problem from distinct disciplines, all react against a pronounced tendency among some social scientists and development practitioners to search for universal “best-practice” institutions. Peter Evans, a sociologist, terms this type of thinking “institutional monocropping” and suggests that processes of “deliberative development” may offer a promising alternative to the imposition of institutional blueprints. Stephan Haggard, a political scientist, details the elusiveness of institutional formulas for balancing laissez-faire economics and state intervention or for solving the credible commitment problems highlighted by rational choice institutionalism, and suggests that, in the case of East Asia, multiple institutional conjunctures have proved felicitous for promoting growth. Gerard Roland, an economist who in his studies of the transition from socialism has been a leading critic of imposed institutional models, here provides a framework for understanding the failure of institutional transplantation and urges economists not to neglect the role of social norms and values. David M. Woodruff, a political scientist, undertakes a comparative study of corporate governance laws

Monitoring, Money and Migrants: Countering Post-Accession Backsliding in Bulgaria and Romania

Abstract Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essay examines political reforms in Bulgaria and Romania since EU accession and, in particular, the ‘backsliding’ hypothesis—that these countries have abandoned or reversed the reforms they introduced in order to qualify for membership of the European Union. It finds no systematic evidence either that these countries have been backsliding or that their trajectories differ significantly from their first-wave Central and East European neighbours, though governance reforms have slowed after accession. The second part of the essay focuses on the mechanisms responsible for the lack of significant backsliding, emphasising the role of continued conditionality through the safeguard clauses, EU funding and increasing linkage between new and old EU members, including opportunities for East Europeans to work and travel in Western Europe.