Mikael Sandberg

Social capital and democratisation : roots of trust in post-communist Poland and Ukraine

Contributing an impressive historical basis for path dependency analysis and the role of social capital in newly established democracies, this book offers a fascinating and ground-breaking analysis of the role of social capital in the democratic context of Eastern Europe.Focusing on Poland and Ukraine, this book fills the literature gaps for integrated empirical and theoretical research with respect to post-Communist democratization, social capital vs. democratization theory, and the case study area of Central and Eastern Europe.Suitable for students from graduate level upwards in Central and Eastern European studies, political theory and history.

The Cultural Evolution of Democracy: Saltational Changes in A Political Regime Landscape

Transitions to democracy are most often considered the outcome of historical modernization processes. Socio-economic changes, such as increases in per capita GNP, education levels, urbanization and communication, have traditionally been found to be correlates or ‘requisites’ of democratic reform. However, transition times and the number of reform steps have not been studied comprehensively. Here we show that historically, transitions to democracy have mainly occurred through rapid leaps rather than slow and incremental transition steps, with a median time from autocracy to democracy of 2.4 years, and overnight in the reverse direction. Our results show that autocracy and democracy have acted as peaks in an evolutionary landscape of possible modes of institutional arrangements. Only scarcely have there been slow incremental transitions. We discuss our results in relation to the application of phylogenetic comparative methods in cultural evolution and point out that the evolving unit in this system is the institutional arrangement, not the individual country which is instead better regarded as the ‘host’ for the political system.

Green post-communism? : environmental aid, Polish innovation, and evolutionary political economics

This book asks whether foreign aid can help post-communist societies to steer their technological innovation systems in more environmentally sound directions. Mikael Sandberg examines the legacy of Soviet-type innovation systems, then looks at opportunities for greener innovations in post-communist Poland, considering: * institutional transformation and environmental investment incentives* the persistence and spread of the first environmental aid projects* the adoption of national environment policies and the role of aid in their implementation* evidence of changing innovation systems in Central and Eastern Europe

Political Institutions and Their Historical Dynamics

Traditionally, political scientists define political institutions deductively. This approach may prevent from discovery of existing institutions beyond the definitions. Here, a principal component analysis was used for an inductive extraction of dimensions in Polity IV data on the political institutions of all nations in the world the last two centuries. Three dimensions of institutions were revealed: core institutions of democracy, oligarchy, and despotism. We show that, historically and on a world scale, the dominance of the core institutions of despotism has first been replaced by a dominance of the core institutions of oligarchy, which in turn is now being followed by an increasing dominance by the core institutions of democracy. Nations do not take steps from despotic, to oligarchic and then to democratic institutions, however. Rather, nations hosting the core democracy institutions have succeeded in historically avoiding both the core institutions of despotism and those of oligarchy. On the other hand, some nations have not been influenced by any of these dimensions, while new institutional combinations are increasingly influencing others. We show that the extracted institutional dimensions do not correspond to the Polity scores for autocracy, “anocracy” and democracy, suggesting that changes in regime types occur at one level, while institutional dynamics work on another. Political regime types in that sense seem “canalized”, i.e., underlying institutional architectures can and do vary, but to a considerable extent independently of regime types and their transitions. The inductive approach adds to the deductive regime type studies in that it produces results in line with modern studies of cultural evolution and memetic institutionalism in which institutions are the units of observation, not the nations that acts as host for them.

Political Institutions and Regimes since 1600: A New Historical Data Set

A new data set provides vital information about the world’s political institutions, from 1789 on a monthly and yearly basis and from 1600 on a yearly basis. The yearly data set from 1600 has more than 90,000 country–year observations, and the monthly data set from 1789 more than 600,000 observations—by far the most comprehensive to date, offering several advantages over other available ones. The data set aggregates specific attributes to create nominal and ordinal rankings of political regimes on a scale of 1 to 1,000. In addition to supporting a rigorous classification of democratic and nondemocratic regimes, it allows researchers to trace institutional variations and to explore alternative ways of aggregating political institutions. As a research instrument, the MaxRange data set permits historically minded scholars to address a number of issues related to the dynamics of political institutions in an unprecedented manner.

Environmental Aid to Poland and Win-Win Strategies

‘Win-win strategies’ is a term used for describing strategies which result in mutually beneficial outcomes for negotiating parties. In game theoretical terms, win-win outcomes are thus those that may be produced by two players in non-zero sum games — both players win by combining their choices into a joint outcome that leaves both better off. They secure gains they could not have reached on their own. Situations where only the interests of two players matter may, however, be rare as most situations will have more values at stake and involve more actors and interests. The assumption that national actors are unified and have only one interest is only tenable in very special encounters.