Stephen E. Hanson

The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change

Analysts of democratization and marketization in post-Communist societies have tended to treat the countries of the former Soviet bloc as an undifferentiated whole, hindering successful theorizing about the sources of institutional change in particular cases. In this light, Ken Jowitts insightful argument about the deleterious effects of the Leninist legacy in Eastern Europe must be refined in two ways. First, the degree of proximity of different post-Communist societies to established capitalist markets should be taken into account. Second, the Leninist legacy itself must be broken down into ideological, political, socioeconomic, and cultural components.

The Uncertain Future of Russia's Weak State Authoritarianism

The policies of President Vladimir Putin have undermined Russias fledging democratic institutions but have also failed to generate any sort of coherent authoritarianism to take their place. Thus, fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR, the country still lacks any consensus about its basic principles of state legitimacy. To explain this, we must understand the ways in which the Soviet Unions institutional legacies have short-circuited all three historically effective types of legitimate rule—traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic— resulting in a highly corrupt state that still cannot fully control its borders, monopolize the legal means of violence, or clearly articulate its role in the contemporary world. If energy prices drop suddenly, leadership transition problems prove unmanageable, and/or economic inequalities provoke more widespread and sustained public protest, the growing mood of resentful nationalism could transform Russia from an unsteady and distrusted “strategic partner” of the West into something far more hostile.

The Founding of the French Third Republic

How France became a consolidated democracy after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 has received little attention from students of comparative democratization. Contrary to earlier structural theories, the French case shows that in periods of high social uncertainty, political elites with clear ideological visions of the future have a strategic advantage over their more “pragmatic” opponents. Clear and consistent ideologies can solve the collective action dilemma facing initial party activists by artificially elongating the time horizons of those who embrace them. Successful party ideologies have the character of self-fulfilling prophecies: By portraying the future polity as one serving the interests of those loyal to specific ideological principles, they help to bring political organizations centered on these principles into being. In the early Third Republic, ideologically consistent republicans and legitimists built effective networks of party activists, whereas ideologically inconsistent Orléanists and Bonapartists failed to do so, allowing the victorious republicans to design new state institutions—with pro-democratic consequences.

Social theory and the post-Soviet crisis: Sovietology and the problem of regime identity

Abstract The collapse of the Soviet Union has made a thoroughgoing reassessment of the theoretical orientations of Sovietology and post-Sovietology indispensable. Without an analysis of what went wrong in standard approaches within the former field of Soviet studies, we are unlikely to build any scholarly consensus about how to analyse the turbulent post-Soviet milieu. This essay argues that one crucial theoretical issue remained unresolved in all major branches of Sovietology: the question of how to define regime identity in conceptual and comparative terms. Specifically, neither the totalitarian model nor modernization theory clearly set out any theoretical criteria that could be used to demarcate the beginning and ending of the “Soviet regime” as a distinct entity. As a result, long before the Soviet Union actually collapsed in 1991, most scholars had already concluded that the “Soviet regime” established in 1917 had ceased to exist, conceptually. Indeed, the same theoretical problem in defining regime identity bedevils current analyses of the “Yeltsin regime,” making the resolution of this issue all the more important.

Ideology, uncertainty and the rise of anti‐system parties in post‐communist Russia

Despite widespread Western expectations that post‐communist politicians in Russia would become increasingly ‘pragmatic’ as a result of the failure of Marxism‐Leninism, the leaders of Russias two best‐organized parties continue to rely on extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories in order to mobilize support. This phenomenon is poorly explained by the three major theories of post‐communist party formation, none of which sees party ideology as exerting an independent influence on party organization. However, in order to account for the success of ideological party building, party formation in an unstable new democracy must be analysed as a kind of collective‐action problem. Ideology potentially overcomes this collective‐action problem by artificially lowering the rate at which converts discount the potential future gains from co‐operation with other converts. In a highly uncertain environment where high discount rates generally prevail, and free‐rider problems undermine most attempts at political institut...

Can Europe Work? Germany and the Reconstruction of Postcommunist Societies

IntroductionPART ONE: THE PAST & FUTURE OF NATIONALISM & NATIONAL IDENTITYNationalism in Western and Eastern Europe ComparedThe Role of Nationalism in East European Latecomers to DemocracyThe Polish Roman Catholic Church Unbound: Change of Face or Change of Context?PART TWO: GERMANY: NEW CORE OR OLD PROBLEM?United Germany as the Renewed Center in Europe: Continuity and Change in the German QuestionGerman Economic Penetration in East Central Europe in Historical PerspectivesGermanys Policy Toward the Disintegration of YugoslaviaPART THREE: REFORM IN POSTCOMMUNIST SOCIETIES: TRANSITION OR REGRESSION?Recession in Postcommunist Eastern Europe: Common Causes and OutcomesThe Utopia of Market Society in the Post-Soviet ContextContributorsIndex

Rationality, Structure, and Agency in Post-Soviet Russian Democratization

Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and autocracy more generally. While the decade and a half since the Soviet collapse has been a time of massive upheaval and hardship for the hundreds of millions of people living in the region, it has also been something of a golden era for the study of comparative politics—as anyone who reads the works reviewed here will readily attest. Stephen E. Hanson is Boeing International Professor at the University of Washington and the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies. He is the author of Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions , winner of the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. He is also a co-editor of Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule , a co-author of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy , and the author of numerous journal articles examining post-communist politics in comparative perspective.

Soviet Studies, National Security and the Production of “Useful” Knowledge

Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of Americas Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480p.

Margaret Levi: Institutions, Individuals, Organizations, and Trust in Democratic Regimes

34.95. Know Your Enemy is a sociology of knowledge of the rise of post–World War II Russian and Soviet Studies, written by intellectual historian David C. Engerman. While it is not a work of political science, it offers an important historical analysis of a foundational episode in the history of the political science discipline. It is an account of the evolution of a specific field—Soviet Studies—but it is more than this, because this particular field was at the heart of the development of post–World War II area studies in general, and the intellectual and political engagements linked to the evolution of area studies were crucial to the development of modern political and social science. This symposium thus brings together scholars of Soviet Studies, contemporary post-Soviet Russian politics, comparative politics and international relations more generally, and the history of the discipline, to reflect on this book. While participants were asked to critically evaluate the books analysis, they were also asked to comment more generally on the rise (and fall?) of area studies, and the history of political science more broadly. The issues raised by the book relate to the history and evolution of the current discipline, but also bear upon its future. For in response to post–Cold War crises (many connected to the discourse of the “war on terror”), there have been new calls for security-related area research made by such institutions as the Department of Defense (the Minerva Program, administered by the National Science Foundation), the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Department of Education (in connection with Title VI funding of area studies). What does the history of Soviet Studies tell us about these recent developments, and about how individual political scientists and indeed the institutions of professional political science should respond to them?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Time and revolution : Marxism and the design of Soviet institutions

For a generation of political scientists witnessing dramatic declines in social and political participation and rising distrust in government at all levels, APSA President Margaret Levis research program addresses fundamental issues concerning the bases for and effects of legitimacy, compliance, and consent in democratic regimes. Levis scholarship has made pioneering contributions to understanding enduring questions about the conditions for and consequences of trust and distrust, compliance and resistance, and individual versus collective action. Animating this research agenda are Levis commitment to greater authentic democratic participation, enhancing trust between the governed and those who govern, and the quest for social justice.