Kathryn Stoner-Weiss

After the collapse of communism : comparative lessons of transition

Contributors Introduction: the evolving social science of post Communism Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss 1. The triumph of Nation-States: lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia Philip Roeder 2. The fourth wave of democracy and dictatorship: noncooperative transitions in the post-Communist world Michael McFaul 3. Circumstances versus policy choices: why has the economic performance of the Soviet successive states been so poor? Vladimir Popov 4. Whither the Central State? The regional sources of Russias stalled reforms Kathryn Stoner-Weiss 5. Parties, citizens, and the prospects for democratic consolidation in Russia Timothy Colton 6. Comparative democratization: lessons from Russia and the post-Communist World Valerie Bunce 7. Russians as joiners: realist and liberal conceptions of post-Communist Europe James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul Index.

Governance and Foreign Assistance: the Imperfect Translation of Ideas into Outcomes

Foreign assistance has been part of the international landscape for more than fifty years (Lumsdaine 1993). Most major industrialized countries have cabinet or sub-cabinet level aid agencies. There are development banks for every major region of the world as well as the World Bank and the IMF. Many highly trained individuals in government, universities, and elsewhere have devoted their careers to understanding how richer parts of the world might contribute to the growth of poorer areas.

Russia: Authoritarianism Without Authority

Do autocracies tend to govern better than democracies? Will a plainly authoritarian recasting of Russias political system necessarily lead to a more capable state? Russias president, Vladimir Putin would have us believe so, but recent events—not to mention the long arc of Russian and Soviet history—suggest a different answer. Putins claims about what ails Russia are wrong. The culprit behind Russias ungovernability is not the countrys halting democracy but rather its weak, poorly institutionalized state. The best cure, moreover, is not authoritarianism— hard or soft —but rather an enhanced democracy, more deeply institutionalized than it ever was under Putin or his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.

Federalism and Regionalism

One of the most difficult aspects of the post-Soviet transition is the establishment of Russia as a truly federal state. Since 1990, and the popular election of regional soviets (legislatures), the question of what kind of federation Russia is to be (and indeed, whether it is to be a federal system at all) has been a pressing concern. The launching of radical economic reform in 1992 made the resolution of the division of authority between the central government in Moscow and Russia’s provinces that much more of a concern as all levels of government endeavoured to gain more economic power.