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 Jowitt's 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.

No abstract

Post-Soviet Russia, the early Third Republic in France, and the Weimar Republic in Germany can be understood as cases of “postimperial democracy”—a situation in which a new democratic regime emerges in the core of a former empire that has suddenly collapsed and where democratic elections continue for at least a decade. However, the regimes consolidated in these cases—republican democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state authoritarianism in Russia—vary dramatically. These divergent results reflect the impact of new ideologies, which generated collective action among converts by artificially elongating their time horizons in an environment of extremely high uncertainty. In France, ideological clarity allowed radical republicans to outflank more pragmatic parties; in Germany, ideological clarity allowed the Nazis to mobilize more successfully than centrist parties; and in post-Soviet Russia, the absence of any compelling new political ideology—democratic or antidemocratic—has rendered political parties too weak to challenge even a very weak state.

No abstract

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.