Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change

Pop-Eleches, Grigore

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2508.2007.00598.x

Cited by 194 publications

(74 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Such legacies matter in particular as 'deep conditions' that shape post-communist conditions such as budgetary constraints, administrative capacities, and levels of societal mobilisation (Cirtautas and Schimmelfennig 2010). Pop-Eleches (2007b) argues that different historical legacies (including geography, cultural/religious heritage, economic, social conditions, and institutional legacies) affected different aspects of democratisation.…”

Section: Domestic Politics: Adaptation Costs Differential Empowermenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

Sedelmeier¹

2011

Living Rev. Euro. Gov.

150

121

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The Europeanisation of candidate countries and new members is a rather recent research area that has grown strongly since the early 2000s. Research in this area has developed primarily in the context of the EU's eastern enlargement. A small number of theoretically informed book-length studies of the EU's influence on the Central and Eastern European candidate countries have provided a generalisable conceptual framework for this research area, drawing on the debate between rationalist institutionalist and constructivist institutionalist approaches in International Relations and Comparative Politics. This framework makes these studies highly compatible with analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, with which they also share one key empirical finding, namely that the impact of the EU on candidate countries is differential across countries and issue areas. At the same time, the theoretical implications of these findings appear more clear-cut than in the case of the Europeanisation of member states: rationalist institutionalism, with its focus on the external incentives underpinning EU conditionality and the material costs incurred by domestic veto players, appears well-suited to explaining variation in the patterns of Europeanisation in candidate countries. A very recent development within this research agenda is the focus on the Europeanisation of new member states. While the study of the EU's impact during the early years of membership was hitherto primarily a subfield of analyses of the Europeanisation of member states, it has now become an extension of studies of candidate countries by analysing the impact of accession on the dynamics of pre-accession Europeanisation and how durable and distinctive the patterns of candidate Europeanisation are in the post-accession stage.

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Section: Domestic Politics: Adaptation Costs Differential Empowermenmentioning

confidence: 99%

Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

Sedelmeier¹

2011

Living Rev. Euro. Gov.

150

121

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“…(Nisbett and Cohen, 1996;Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000;Talhelm et al, 2014). 2 For example, it has long been appreciated that some religious groups have more individualistic values, whereas others are more collectivist (Durkheim, 1951;Davis and Robinson, 2012 Kopstein and Wittenberg (2011);Peisakhin (2015); Pop-Eleches (2007); Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker (2011);Shefter (1977Shefter ( , 1994; Wittenberg (2006;. a greater taste for redistributive welfare policies, and for a moralistic foreign policy, than Protestants (Castles, 1994).…”

Section: Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural legacies and political preferences: the failure of separatism in the Swiss Jura

Siroky

Mueller

Hechter

2015

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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The study of secession generally stresses the causal influence of cultural identities, political preferences or ecological factors. Whereas these different views are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this paper proposes a two-stage model in which they are complementary. We posit that cultural identities matter for explaining secessionism, but not because of primordial attachments.Rather, religious and linguistic groups matter because their members are imbued with cultural legacies that lead to distinct political preferences over welfare statism. Further, ecological constraints such as geography and topography affect social interaction with like-minded individuals. On the basis of both these political preferences and ecological constraints, individuals then make rational choices about the desirability of secession. Instrumental considerations are therefore crucial in explaining the decision to secede, but not in a conventional pocketbook manner. To examine this theory, we analyze the 2013 referendum on the secession of the Jura Bernois region from the canton of Berne in Switzerland, using municipal level census and referendum data. The results lend support to the theory and suggest one way in which the politics of identity, based on factors like language and religion, can be fused with the politics of interest (preferences for more or less state intervention into the polity and economy) to better understand group behavior.Keywords: Secession, referendum, welfare statism, cultural identities, ecological constraints, rational choice 2 Secession is a phenomenon that affects both the developing countries (e.g., Georgia, China, Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria) as well as developed ones (e.g., Spain, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy; Dion, 1996;Sorens, 2012). In several European democracies, like the United Kingdom and Spain (Muñoz and Guinjoan, 2013;Muñoz and Tormos, 2014), secessionist demands are accompanied by calls for a referendum to decide the question once and for all. In others, such as France, Belgium, and Italy, secession is at least sporadically invoked in political discourse when demanding more territorial group rights or fewer payments to poorer areas (Lindsey, 2012;Coppieters and Huysseune, 2002).Despite these developments in European politics, scholars continue to disagree over the relative importance of different mechanisms for understanding secession. Some argue that cultural factors, such as emotions, affect, and social identity, are key to explaining nationalism and separatism (e.g. Smith, 1986;Connor, 1994;Petersen, 2002), whereas others think that they can best be understood in terms of rational action (e.g. Buchanan and Faith, 1987;Wittman, 1991;Bolton and Roland, 1997;Bookman, 1992;Collier and Hoeffler, 2002;Sorens, 2012). Still others emphasize structural constraints on individual decision-making through geographically constrained social networks (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967;Jenkins, 1986;Rutherford et al., 2014). Thus whereas some scholars see secession as largely a matter of the he...

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“…lack cohesion and party discipline), they are also less able to make credible commitments. When such mechanisms are not available (see Elgie and Moestrup 2008;Pop-Eleches 2007), this can result in early coalition termination and early elections.…”

Section: The West-east Comparison Of Party Governmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Government formation and breakdown in Western and Central Eastern Europe

2013

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In this paper, we use a new dataset describing governments, political parties and institutions to make an explicit comparison between Western and Central Eastern Europe (CEE) in the investigation of three different topical issues found in the coalition literature, namely coalition formation (i.e. which factors affect who forms the winning coalitions), the number of cabinet members (i.e. what affects the number of ministers in a cabinet) and cabinet duration (i.e. which factors affect how long a new government lasts). Our findings indicate that, regardless of all the discussions about how Central Eastern Europe is different from Western Europe ¬¬because of the post-communist heritage or the volatility of voters in the CEE region, structural attributes such as the size and number of political parties are important determinants of coalition formation and cabinet duration patterns in both the West and the East. In fact, precisely because of the unsettled nature of CEE party politics, structural attributes tend to matter even more in the East.

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Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change

Cited by 194 publications

References 43 publications

Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

Europeanisation in new member and candidate states

Cultural legacies and political preferences: the failure of separatism in the Swiss Jura

Government formation and breakdown in Western and Central Eastern Europe

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