Civil Society, Institutional Change, and the Politics of Reform: The Great Transition

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and the political, economic and institutional change and transformation after 1989. We collected a unique dataset on nature and intensity of dissident activities in 27 former communist countries during the years immediately preceding the collapse of communism. We use the resulting data to explain the subsequent political, economic and institutional developments in the post-communist countries. Both extent of political opposition and severity of government reaction help explain the choice of political regime after 1989, the concentration of power government and the nature and pace of economic reforms.

Political institutions, lobbying and corruption

“…In the first, we use different instruments to assess the potential endogeneity of lobbying or, in other words, whether the exogenous or unexplained part of the variation we observe in the lobbying decision is a good predictor of policy influence. We use a set of instruments to capture the strength of civil society: a dynamic measure of ethnic fractionalization (Campos and Kuzeyev, 2007), a measure of natural resources abundance (World Bank, 2005) and the average number of political protests events in 1989 (from Bruszt et al, 2012). We expect that increases in fractionalization and natural resource abundance reduce the likelihood of firms joining lobbying groups and increase the probability of firms using corruption as a preferred means of influencing government policy.…”

What determines the institutional change in transition economies?

“…Opposition activists who became politicians enjoyed more social trust than former members of the communist parties and it was easier for them to convince society to accept difficult economic reforms 8 . Therefore, the greater the activity of the opposition before the transition, the faster the pace of transition changes (Bruszt et al 2012). Cameron (2007) points out that in countries where opposition was strong, the opposition won the first free election and decided about the directions of economic and foreign policies, including aspirations to join the EU.…”

“…Therefore, we also employed the average level of the Polity2 index in the interwar period 14 -published by the Center for Systemic Peace -that measures whether the political regime in the particular countries was more similar to democracy or autocracy. Finally, the data collected by Bruszt et al (2012) were used to construct the measure of intensity of dissident activities during the years immediately preceding the collapse of communism 15 .…”

The evolution of post‐communist systems

“…First of all, levels of civil society engagement affect the very nature of political institutions chosen. In Bruszt et al (2012), we showed that levels and maturity of dissident activities in the 1980s before the collapse of communism affected the types of political institutions that were chosen in transition countries. Countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia and Baltic countries had a higher level and stronger maturity of dissident activity, which affected initial political institutions.…”

“…The results of privatization turned out to be disappointing in many cases (Estrin et al, 2009). The democratization process turned out to be shorter lasting and less deep in most Former Soviet Union countries than anticipated, and is proving shaky even in New Member States (Bruszt et al, 2012). These surprises of transition led to lots of new research.…”