Tracing both economic and political developments through the prism of history as well as more recent developments, this book casts new light on the role of communist history in setting the different regional successes in post-communist transition.

These ten essays are concerned with theoretical and empirical analyses of trust and distrust in post-Communist Europe after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Differences between meanings of trust in countries with democratic traditions and in post-totalitarian countries raise questions about the ways in which history, culture and social psychology shape the nature and development of political phenomena. The authors show that while political and economic changes can have rapid effects, cultural and psychological changes may linger behind and influence the quality of political trust and representations of democracy.

Political trust – in government, parliament, or political parties – has taken centre stage in political science for more than half a century, reflecting ongoing concerns with the legitimacy and functioning of representative democracy. To provide scholars, students and policy makers with a tool to navigate through the complexity of causes and consequences of political trust, this Handbook offers an excellent overview of the conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical state of the art, complemented by accounts of regional particularities, and authored by international experts in this field.

Democracy and Enlargement in Post-Communist Europe presents the principal findings of a unique in-depth study of the birth of democracy and the market economy in fifteen post-Communist countries. Haerpfer analyses and compares the information collected by the New Democracies Barometer public opinion surveys to provide an overview of the process of democratization across Central and Eastern Europe. This is an extremely valuable resource and will be useful for all those interested in the European Union, comparative politics and democracy and the Communist legacy. It contains data from Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine.

This title was first published in 2001. This series brings together the most significant journal articles to appear in the field of comparative politics since the 1970s. The aim is to render accessible to teachers, researchers and students, an extensive range of essays as a basis for understanding established terrain and new ground.

Post-communism has determined the social and political reality in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe for the last 25 years. A characteristic phenomenon during this time is a religious revival in the societies that were subject to intense atheization under the conditions of communist totalitarianism. This process can be observed in Ukraine, Belarus and Serbia. Undoubtedly, in all three cases, the Orthodox faith and the institutions that represent it have become an important element of the political culture. This book analyses the influence of Orthodoxy on political behaviours, values and judgments, looking particularly at such topics as the legacy of communism, shared attitudes towards the “West,” the European Union, democracy, and the ways of conceptualising post-communist Ukrainian, Belarussian and Serbian cultural and national identity. The research here explores such events and problems as the “Euromaidan” and the development of a civic society in Ukraine, the process of integration of Serbia into the EU, the perspectives of stability for the regime in Belarus, and the future of efforts for reintegration of post-Soviet space under the hegemony of Moscow.

This book,one of the very first monographs on the Hungarian Constitutional Court available in English, is a unique study of the birth of a new legal system after the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. It shows that the genesis of the new legal order was determined by massive Western involvement and an unprecedented movement of export/import of law. Anchored in a detailed comparative study of German and Hungarian constitutional case law on human dignity, this book argues that law importation was a deliberate strategy carried out by the Hungarian Court in the early years of its operation. It explains how the circumstances of the transition and the background of the importers determined the choice of German case law as a model and how the Court used it to construct its own version of the right to human dignity. It highlights the Hungarian Court's instrumentalisation of imported law in order to lay the foundations of a new conception of fundamental rights. While focusing on the Hungarian experience, this book engages with international debates and provides an original theoretical framework for approaching the movement of law from the importers' perspective.

This work surveys processes of party development in the context of the ten years of democratic change in post-communist eastern Europe. It examines the capacity of the former ruling parties to attract contemporary voters and their role in contributing to the consolidation of the new democratic regimes.

Democratic transitions have occurred in many countries in various regions across the globe, such as Southern Europe, Latin America, Africa, East and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and these nations have undergone simuntaneously political, economic and social transformations. Yet, the patterns and characteristics of transitions have varied significantly, and different modes of transition have resulted in different outcomes. This book offers cross-national comparisons of democratic transition since the turn of the twentieth century and asks what makes democracies succeed or fail. In doing so it explores the influence the mode of transition has on the longevity or durability of the democracy, by theoretically examining and quantitatively testing this relationship. The authors argue that the mode of transition directly impacts the success and failure of democracy, and suggest that cooperative transitions, where opposition groups work together with incumbent elites to peacefully transition the state, result in democracies that last longer and are associated with higher measures of democratic quality. Based on a cross-national dataset of all democratic transitioning states since 1900, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of international politics, comparative politics and democracy, and democratization studies.

Peoples of Eastern Europe -- Ethnicity on the edge of extinction -- Linguistic nationalism -- Nationality struggles : from idea to movement -- Insurgent nationalism : Serbia and Poland -- Cursed are the peacemakers : 1848 in East Central Europe -- The reform that made the monarchy unreformable : the 1867 compromise -- 1878 Berlin Congress : Europe's new ethno-nation states -- The origins of National Socialism : fin de siecle Hungary and Bohemia -- Liberalism's heirs and enemies : socialism vs. nationalism -- Peasant utopias : villages of yesterday and societies of tomorrow -- 1919 : a new Europe and its old problems -- The failure of national self-determination -- Fascism takes root : Iron Guard and Arrow Cross -- East Europe's anti-fascism -- Hitler's war and its East European enemies -- What Dante did not see : the Holocaust in Eastern Europe -- People's democracy : early postwar Eastern Europe -- Cold War and Stalinism -- Destalinization : Hungary's revolution -- National paths to communism : the 1960s -- 1968 and the Soviet bloc : reform communism -- Real existing socialism : life in the Soviet bloc -- The unraveling of communism -- 1989 -- East Europe explodes : the wars of Yugoslav succession -- East Europe joins Europe.