In this article, the authors examine the potential for concerted collective action in the societies that emerged from state socialism in East-Central Europe after 1989. Although scholars have found strong individual-level evidence that protest potential is weaker here than in other parts of the world, the authors question whether individual-level data adequately tap all the dimensions of activism that are relevant to contentious politics. They propose a differentiated model of civil society consisting of (a) internal potential for citizen action and (b) relational aspects of social activism and argue that some forms of the latter-and in particularly, what they call "transactional activism"-are more robust than what evidence at the individual level suggests. They also examine some local and transnational-level data from the region and speculate about the capacities for collective action they find there and their potential for contributing to the construction of a transnational Europe.

This article examines electoral intimidation of voters at their workplace in contemporary new democracies. What is the relative importance of workplace intimidation in the broader portfolio of clientelistic strategies used by politicians at times of elections? What explains the subnational variation in the incidence of this electoral strategy? We answer these questions using empirical evidence from two East European countries – Romania and Bulgaria. We assess the prevalence of non-programmatic electoral mobilization in these countries by using list experiments, a survey methodology that elicits unbiased and truthful responses to sensitive political questions. We find that in both countries, workplace intimidation is an important component in the repertoire of non-programmatic mobilization used at election times. Workplace intimidation is especially pervasive in localities dominated by a small number of large employers. The importance of economic intimidation in the portfolio of clientelistic strategies declines as the economic heterogeneity of the locality increases.

This article studies the impact of citizen participation on local government performance in Bulgaria. Both survey and interview data are used to suggest that, all else being equal, municipal efficacy grows with the increasing involvement of social and economic actors in the policy-making process. This improved government efficacy is most likely a result of the professionalisation and organisational strength of the third sector. Although the politicisation of the local state has undermined its capacity, municipalities have been able not only to reconstitute some of their authority but also to improve the output and the quality of their policy making by employing the expertise and support of major local civic organisations. THE DESIRE TO DENY THE SOCIALIST ELITE THE ability to set goals with only marginal input from or control by domestic groups was a focal point for the mobilisation of opposition to state socialism and the impetus for the democratisation project in many Central and Eastern European countries. Since the collapse of state socialism, issues such as accountability, legitimacy, popular representation and responsiveness of governments to citizen demands have become central to discussions about democratisation among scholars, politicians and activists. However, studies of Central and Eastern European civil society have largely neglected to examine the contributions of non-state actors to governance in the region. This article seeks to begin addressing this gap in the literature by examining the impact of citizen participation in local government in Bulgaria on the efficacy of municipal policy making. The article shows that despite the passivity of local government in many municipalities, and their preference for working primarily with political actors, there has been widespread and diverse, if weakly institutionalised, cooperation between local authorities and societal actors. Moreover, it seems that in the Bulgarian

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This article examines the democracy promotion efforts of a new Eastern EU democracy and a regional leader in the post-communist world—Poland. Polish democracy promotion has its origin in the international solidarity tradition of the anticommunist opposition movement in the country. However, Poland has made concerted, if at times inconsistent, efforts to support the democratization of its eastern neighbors, primarily because such support is understood to be a central element of a geopolitical security strategy to deter a resurgent Russia. And while Poland has already made some difference by helping secure some democratization gains in Ukraine, Poland's efforts in autocratic Belarus have been rather unsuccessful.