UC Berkeley GAIA Research Series Title Liberalization and Leninist Legacies: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Transitions Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/58k2v56g Journal Research Series, uciaspubs/research/96 Authors Crawford, Beverly Lijphart, Arend Publication Date 1997 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Liberalization and Leninist Legacies: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Transitions Edited by Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart Description: This volume looks at how the shadow of the past affects the creation of new capitalist democracies in the former Communist world. It not only examines the question of former Communists again holding public office and managing firms, but also looks to the deeper consideration of culture: Do Leninist legacies leave the former Communist world with a political culture that shies away from the public debate and political participation so vital to a robust democracy? The authors examine these issues in comparative perspective, asking whether Leninism was unique and how other new democracies emerging from an authoritarian past are adversely affected by legacies of repression and dictatorship. RESEARCH SERIES / NUMBER 96 LIBERALIZATION AND LENINIST LEGACIES: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, Editors UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY The articles by Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, Connie Squires Meaney, Barbara Geddes, Ellen Comisso, and Stephen E. Hanson were published in a slightly different form in Comparative Political Studies 28, 2 (July 1995). The editors are grateful to Sage Publications for permission to reprint them. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liberalization and Leninist legacies : comparative perspectives on democratic transitions / Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, editors. p. cm. — (Research series ; no. 96) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-87725-196-7 (pbk.) 1. Europe, Eastern—Politics and government—1989– 2. Post- communism—Europe, Eastern. 3. Europe, Eastern—Economic con- ditions—1989– 4. Comparative government. I. Crawford, Beverly. II. Lijphart, Arend. III. Series: Research series (University of Califor- nia, Berkeley. International and Area Studies) ; no. 93. JN96.A58L52 1997 320.947’09’049—dc21 97-15028 CIP ©1997 by the Regents of the University of California Printed in the United States of America Cover design by Lisa M. Bryant CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Old Legacies, New Institutions: Explaining Political and Economic Trajectories in Post-Communist Regimes BEVERLY CRAWFORD AND AREND LIJPHART 1 Politicians, Parties, and Presidents: An Exploration of Post-Authoritarian Institutional Design MATTHEW SOBERG SHUGART 40 Foreign Experts, Capitalists, and Competing Agendas: Privatization in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary CONNIE SQUIRES MEANEY 91 Social Engineering and Historical Legacies: Privatization and the Business Elite in Hungary and the Czech Republic ÁKOS RÓNA-TAS 126 A Comparative Perspective on the Leninist Legacy in Eastern Europe BARBARA GEDDES 142 Legacies of the Past or New Institutions: The Struggle over Restitution in Hungary ELLEN COMISSO 184 The Leninist Legacy, Institutional Change, and Post- Soviet Russia STEPHEN E. HANSON 228 About the Authors 253 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The chapters in this volume are drawn from the work of a study group on “European Political Relations and Institutions” convened by the coeditors, Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, on behalf of the Center for German and European Studies of the University of California. The Center, funded by the German government, pro- vided financial support for the research reported here. We thank Gerald Feldman, director of the Center, for his support. We would also like to thank David Szanton, the Executive Director of Interna- tional and Area Studies at Berkeley, for supporting the publication of this project. We also thank Nick Biziouras, James Caparaso, Gi- useppe Di Palma, Steve Hanson, John Leslie, James Martel, Kaz Poznanski, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier drafts of these essays. We have worked with many editors, but none has been finer than Bojana Ristich. As usual, she expertly guided us through the labyrinth of the production process. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the talented and dedicated IAS Publications staff, particularly Stephen Pitcher, who typeset the manuscript, and Lisa M. Bryant, who designed the cover. ix OLD LEGACIES, NEW INSTITUTIONS: EXPLAINING POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TRAJECTORIES IN POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart INTRODUCTION The recent wave of political and economic liberalization spreading over much of the globe has unleashed a flood of scholarly speculation about the sources of successful democratic consolidation and economic development in societies that have broken from an authoritarian or totalitarian past. In particular, communism’s col- lapse provides fertile ground for social scientists to both test theories of political change developed in other regions and different time periods and construct new approaches to political and social trans- formation. What sort of order is emerging from the collapse of Len- inism in Eastern Europe? What are the dominant constraints and incentives that shape the direction of change? How are property rights created, and why do emerging conceptions of property rights differ among countries and regions? How do political elites who have discarded old concepts of justice make new choices between competing notions of equity and fairness? Why are some political institutions chosen and others discarded? Why have strong political parties emerged in some regions and weak ones in other regions? Why do some post-Communist countries have strong executives and others have weak ones? For comparativists, the study of post-Communist transforma- tion is particularly intriguing since much of the world has been swept into the ideological tide of economic and political liberaliza- tion at roughly the same time with few alternatives to guide their political and economic futures (Schmitter and Karl 1994). Are we able to discern similar responses to the same liberalization stimulus, 1 2 Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart or are responses different, revealing the importance of distinct social, cultural, economic, and political conditions that determine the direc- tion of change? Under what conditions will the transformation of Communist regimes resemble the transformation of authoritarian regimes in Latin America or other liberalizing regions of the world? In addressing these questions, scholars have explored and em- ployed a range of analytic and theoretical perspectives (Ekiert 1991; Bova 1991; Crawford, ed. 1995; Di Palma 1990, 1991; Janos 1991; Jowitt 1991a, 1991b, 1992; Karl and Schmitter 1991, 1992; McFaul 1993; Terry 1993). Two competing approaches have emerged which have major significance; both attempt to explain how choices and incentives are structured in the post-Communist environment in order to specify the dominant conditions underlying regime change. The first can be termed, as Ellen Comisso suggests in her essay here, the “legacies of the past” approach. Legacies approaches explain post-Communist transformation as a function of the social, cultural, and institutional structures created under Leninist regimes and Soviet domination in Eastern Europe that persist in the present period. In this view, the past casts a long shadow on the present, shapes the environment in which the battle to define and defend new institutions takes place, and may ultimately undermine the liberalization process. The work of Ken Jowitt (1992) on Leninist legacies is the most important and provides an excellent starting point for comparative analysis. Jowitt predicted that the collapse of Leninism would cause long-term turbulence and confusion that would undermine attempts to build stable post-Communist regimes in the short run. Potentially, however, this environment would be generative of new types of social order, but the order created would not necessarily be a liberal capitalist one. Indeed the Leninist legacy would favor antiliberal outcomes rather than a smooth transition to liberal capitalist democ- racy. This is because Leninist regimes were long separated from the West; they had little experience with markets, the rule of law, liberal citizenship norms, and the workings of civil society. An alternative approach emphasizes the “imperatives of liber- alization” (Lipton and Sachs 1990; Brada 1993; Aslund 1994). It sug- gests that new institutions can be crafted and new international pressures can be brought to bear that shut out the negative influences of the past. From this perspective, the head of Leninism has been lopped off, leaving space for the development of new forces to struc- Political and Ecoomic Trajectories in Post-Communist Regimes 3 ture incentives according to the more or less universal rules of liberal capitalist democracy. We present both approaches as ideal types in order to empha- size their essential differences. Although no single scholar charac- terizes his or her approach in the stylized way we suggest here, we will show that contrasting the two perspectives can be a useful heu- ristic device for generating hypotheses about diverse trajectories of East European countries after the collapse of communism. The in- ductive approach taken in the empirical papers assembled here pro-