ACCOUNTING FOR OUTCOMES OF POST-COMMUNIST REGIME CHANGE.

CAUSAL DEPTH OR SHALLOWNESS IN RIVAL EXPLANATIONS

Herbert Kitschelt
Department of Political Science
Duke University
Durham, N.C. 27708-0204
E-mail H3738@acpub.duke.edu

Paper prepared for delivery at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political
Science Association, Atlanta, September 1-5.
 ABSTRACT

I argue in the present paper that most proposed explanations of post-communist

regime diversity tend to be either too "deep" because they lack "causal
mechanisms" that would link antecedents and outcomes or too "shallow" because they
border on tautology, presenting as cause of regime outcomes what can be reasonably
conceived as a component of the outcome itself. My alternative explanation
attempts to escape from the fallacies of excessive explanatory depth or
shallowness. After specifying the dependent variable, post-communist political
regimes, I characterize the metaphors of deep or shallow explanations in more
appropriate and tractable ways. I then discuss prominent, widely noted examples of
explanatory accounts of post-communist regime formation that in my view fall
victim to the fallacies of explanatory shallowness or depth. In the subsequent
sections, I offer my own account of post-communist regime diversity as a set of
theoretical proposition about the origins and consequences of different modes of
communist governance. In the final section I probe into the empirical usefulness
of this explanation from path-dependence.
 Communist polities of the late 1980s evolved into a highly diverse group of
political regimes ten years later. Their features range from full-fledged competitive
democracies with well-protected civic and political rights all the way to
authoritarian, personalist, if not despotic, governments. Measured in terms of the
civic and political rights indices developed by Freedom House, there is no region or
set of polities on earth with a larger standard deviation of civil and political rights
1
scores than the formerly communist polities. The simple fact that before 1989 all these
polities had socialist relations of production with a planning agency allocating most
scarce resources (at least on paper) and a single party government fused with the state
apparatus hence cannot account for the tremendous diversity of political regimes that
emerged in the formerly communist region in the 1990s and appear to be "locking in" at
2
the end of that decade.
For students of comparative politics, the diversity of post-communist political
regimes and the relatively large number of cases (25-28 countries, depending on which
entities are counted) is methodologically fortunate. Because these polities emerge in
countries with greatly varying physical, economic, social and cultural properties,
endowments, and background conditions, a comparative logic of causal inference permits
us to eliminate a number of seemingly plausible explanatory accounts of regime
diversity. Of course, the comparative study of post-communist regimes may not be
suitable to develop and test more general, "global" theories of political regime change
or democratization simply because some potentially influential parameters may not
sufficiently vary within the post-communist subset. For example, almost all post-
communist countries are middle income countries with a per capita GDP of about $ 3,000
to $ 6,000 (in mid-1990s purchasing power parity). As a consequence of limited variance
in economic affluence, the sample may understate the influence of economic wealth on
the choice and persistence of new political regimes that might come to the fore only if
we included very poor and very rich countries.
The dependent variable in this paper is the diversity of post-communist political
regimes. Operationally, I capture it with a conventional measure, the extent to which
post-communist polities have instituted civic and political rights, as evaluated
annually by the Freedom House monitoring network. Full representative democracies
involve both civic rights protecting political interest articulation and the rule of

1
All other regions have stronger central tendencies. In Latin America and East
Asia, for example, that central tendency has gravitated toward democracy or mixed
regimes, in the Middle East and in Africa it has stayed with authoritarian rule.
2
I dare not characterize the persistence of these regimes as "equilibria" or
as "consolidation."

1
law as well as political rights to citizens' effective participation in the choice of
political rulers. They set themselves apart from formal democracies with more or less
clean elections, but without comprehensive safeguards for civic and political rights.
If also political rights are precarious and elections are "managed" by a hegemonic
party or ruling clique, we move on to a third configuration of semi-authoritarianism.
The endpoint of the scale at the opposite pole to full democracy is an authoritarianism
that tolerates neither civic nor political rights. In empirical reality, of course,
these four types are idealizations on a continuum on which polities can be mapped
empirically.
My analysis does not invoke the notion of "consolidation" of post-communist
regimes. The language of consolidation typically glosses over the important difference
between the quality of a polity and the temporal persistence of its basic organizing
principles. By quality of a polity I mean the nature of the institutional rules and
procedures that shape the process of interest articulation and aggregation, on the
political input side, and the implementation and evaluation of policy on the output
side (including the political culture of regime support). Often students of democratic
consolidation appear to imply that the procedural quality of democracy affects the
temporal persistence of a regime (e.g., Linz and Stepan 1996; Gunther et al. 1996).
However, O'Donnell (1996) has cogently argued that democracies with widely varying
procedural qualities, and regardless of whether they are substantive or formal
democracies only, may survive for long periods. In this sense, procedurally
"unconsolidated," often purely formal democracies may hang on because of the political
inaccessibility of alternatives, given a deadlock among conflicting political forces
aspiring to undo the existing regime by diverging alternative governance structures.
In my paper, I try to explain only why some post-communist regimes appear to "lock
in" different levels of civic and political freedoms, resulting in either substantive
or formal democracy, or even semi- or fully authoritarian political regimes. I set
aside here a subject I find most rewarding for studies of post-communist politics,
namely to account for the diverse quality of democratic procedures encountered among
those East and Central European polities that are substantive or at least formal
democracies (cf. Kitschelt et al. 1999; Kitschelt and Smyth 1999).
I argue in the present paper that most proposed explanations of post-communist
regime diversity tend to be either too "deep" because they lack "causal mechanisms"
that would link antecedents and outcomes or too "shallow" because they border on
tautology, presenting as cause of regime outcomes what could be reasonably be presented
as a component of the outcome itself. My own alternative explanation attempts to escape
from the fallacies of excessive explanatory depth or shallowness. After specifying the

2
dependent variable (section 1), I characterize the metaphors of deep or shallow
explanations in more appropriate and tractable ways (section 2). I then discuss
prominent, widely noted examples of explanatory accounts of post-communist regime
formation that in my view fall victim to the fallacies of explanatory shallowness or
depth (section 3). In the subsequent sections, I offer my own account of post-communist
regime diversity first as a set of theoretical proposition (section 4), and then with
empirical evidence (section 5).

1. Post-Communist Regime Diversity

Table 1 lists twenty-five post-communist countries and their average scores of

civil and political rights in 1996 and 1998 according to the judgment of Freedom House
experts, derived from a close monitoring of political events in each country. The most
democratic score is 1.0, indicating thorough fairness of electoral party competition
together with citizens' full civil rights to express their opinions and obtain
resources that enable political entrepreneurs to build organizations of collective
interest association. Civic and political rights scores in the range from 2.5 to 3.5
indicate serious infringements of democratic procedures, whether by governments or non-
governmental political actors (such as military insurrections). Scores in excess of
that range, going up to the maximum score of 7.0, reflect more or less fully
authoritarian political regime conditions with very substantial impediments preventing
citizens' interest articulation and aggregation.
TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Table 1 does not provide scores for all post-communist regimes. Missing are
Bosnia-Hercegowina, Serbia, and Mongolia, the three cases for which it is difficult to
obtain reliable and valid data on a number of variables that may explain regime
outcomes. I have also excluded China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam, because they have
not renounced the established communist regime form and ideology. Nevertheless, the
explanation I offer for regime diversity in the set of 25 countries may be applicable
to the excluded cases eventually.
Comparing the data for 1996 and 1998 permits us to gauge the "stickiness" and
persistence of new regime conditions in the post-communist world. We could have added
Freedom House data further back from 1992 or 1994, but this would not have added much
empirically to the story revealed by the more recent data.

3
 TABLE 1: COMBINED INDEX OF CIVIC AND POLITICAL FREEDOMS, 1996 AND 1998
(average freedom scores for each year)

1996 1998 improvement (+)

deterioration (-)
________________________________________________________________________________

GROUP I: FULL SUBSTANTIVE

DEMOCRACIES

Czech Republic 1.5 1.5

Estonia 2.0 1.5 +
Hungary 1.5 1.5
Latvia 2.0 1.5 +
Lithuania 1.5 1.5
Poland 1.5 1.5
Slovenia 1.5 1.5

GROUP II: NEAR FULL SUBSTANTIVE

DEMOCRACIES

Bulgaria 2.0 2.5 -

Romania 3.5 2.0 ++
Slovakia 2.5 2.0 +

GROUP III: FORMAL DEMOCRACIES

Georgia 4.5 3.5 +

Macedonia 3.5 3.0 +
Moldova 4.0 3.0 +
Russia 3.5 3.5
Ukraine 3.5 3.5

GROUP IV: BETWEEN FORMAL DEMOCRACY

AND AUTHORITARIANISM

Albania 3.5 4.5 -

Armenia 4.0 4.0
Croatia 4.0 4.0

GROUP V: SEMI-AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

Azerbaijan 6.0 5.0 +

Kyrgyzstan 4.0 5.0 -
Kazakhstan 5.5 5.5

GROUP VI: AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES

Belarus 5.0 6.0 -

Tajikistan 7.0 6.0 +
Turkmenistan 7.0 7.0
Uzbekistan 7.0 6.5 +
________________________________________________________________________________
SOURCE: Freedom House, Annual Publications of the Civic and Political Freedom Surveys.

4
 Among the 25 countries, group 1 constitutes democracies offering a full range of
civic and political rights with minor infringements. The Baltic countries Estonia and
Latvia in earlier years did not belong to this group because of their initially
discriminatory citizenship and electoral laws, but they joined the fold in recent
years. The group now encompasses almost all countries associated with the vague concept
of "Central Europe." It should be underlined that only seven of 25 post-communist
countries thus unambiguously qualify as full democracies.
The smaller group 2 with three Central and Southeast European member states
encompasses regimes with generally clean elections, but sometimes serious infringements
of citizens' civil rights of association and interest articulation. Nevertheless, all
three countries have moved toward full substantive competitive democracy in recent
years.
The third group of five countries displays more severe infringements of civil
rights and, on occasion, even of political rights to electoral participation. Countries
belonging to this group may be labeled "formal" democracies in terms of their statutory
system of rules, combined with the elite's substantive efforts to undermine the
fairness of political competition. Russia and the Ukraine have belonged to this group
since the early 1990s. An additional three republics of the former Soviet Union and of
Yugoslavia now join them. All three recently improved their civic and political rights
records sufficiently to qualify for this group.
The fourth and by some measure the fifth group are semi-authoritarian regimes in
which a hegemonic party or two armed camps (Albania) protect their lock on the polity
to a considerable extent by non-democratic means, such as the intimidation or practical
disenfranchisement of opposition forces. Group 4 members may in fact be rather close to
the remaining four fully authoritarian countries in group 5. In all of them, elements
of the former communist elite established a new authoritarian apparatus that has shed
the old ideology without much altering the established communist practices of political
governance, including the use of secret services to identify and incarcerate opposition
figures.
The democracies --groups 1 and 2-- account for 40 percent of the post-communist
regimes (10 out of 25), whereas formal democracies/semi-authoritarian regimes (groups 3
and 4) and more or less fully authoritarian polities (groups 5 and 6) represent roughly
30 percent each. Were we able to add the seven communist and post-communist polities
excluded from our sample, the balance would tilt further against the democracies. As
Adam Przeworski (1991: 92-93) anticipated early in the post-communist regime
transitions process, democracy is far from being the "natural" outcome of post-
communist regime transition. Nationalist and religious forces may unfold more energy
 3
unleashing anti-communist protest than liberal democrats.
A comparison of the Freedom House scores for 1996 and 1998 suggests considerable
stability in the regime characteristics of post-communist democracies, an observation
that would be confirmed by adding scores for preceding years. Since 1991/92, there have
been no fundamental movements of polities from one regime type to another, if we
measure profound regime transformations as an average shift of a regime's regime civil
and political liberties scores by at least 3 points from one year to the next. The
relative inertia of the profile of regime patterns in the post-communist region
throughout the second half of the 1990s suggests that we are facing a gravitation
toward relatively stable polities. Treating this profile of regime diversity as our
dependent variable, therefore, holds out the promise of delivering more than an
understanding of a fleeting snapshot in the ongoing dynamic of post-communist system
change.
With some simplification, whatever change does occur in post-communist regimes in
the mid- to late-1990s suggests a polarization of regime types into a growing number of
full democracies, at one pole, and increasing authoritarianism, at the other pole.
Thus, countries that were near-democracies or only formal democracies at earlier points
in time now appear to inch toward fully substantive democratic status (Estonia, Latvia,
Romania and Slovakia, probably also Bulgaria and possibly Macedonia and Moldova),
whereas other formal democracies and semi-authoritarian regimes gravitate toward the
fully authoritarian pole of the scale (Kyrgysztan, Belarus, and possibly Albania). Not
one country has moved into the middle groups 3 and 4. This tendency toward polarization
in the post-communist polity set sharply contrasts with tendencies in other regions of
the world where "illiberal democracies" or "electoral democracies" in the middle of the
civil and political liberties spectrum (average Freedom House scores 3.0-4.5) become
relatively more numerous (cf. Diamond 1999: 49-60). In the post-communist country set,
primarily Russia and the Ukraine as well as Armenia and Georgia fit the pattern of
"hollow democracy" (Diamond) observed in so many other countries in Africa, Latin
America, or South and Southeast Asia.

3
Of course, Przeworski employed this argument to cast doubt on the potential
for democratic regime formation in some of precisely those countries that have
turned into rather resilient, full-fledged substantive democracies over the past
ten years.

6
 2. The Pitfalls of Explanatory Shallowness or Depth

Explanation has to do with causation, but causality is a difficult epistemological

concept. What "counts" as a cause is not a logical, but an onto-logical question.
Different theories and paradigmatic frameworks in the substantive social and natural
sciences allow different entities and processes to count as causes. Logical definitions
of explanation have never been able to distinguish between correlation and causation. A
case in point is Hempel/Oppenheim's standard "covering law" explanation, which cannot
separate lawful (causal) and accidental (correlational) generalizations (Salmon 1989:
15). The same problem is patent in Stinchcombe's (1968/87: 29) conception of a causal
law as a "statement that certain values of two or more variables are connected in a
certain way," even though the author later reminds us that correlation is not the same
4
as causation (p. 32).
The onto-logical intuition behind causation is that some x helps to create some y
in the sense of "bringing it into existence." Substantive scientific theories, not
reconstructive epistemology, must elaborate conceptual primitives and entities that
constitute an acceptable ontology of causation in a particular domain. To demonstrate
that questions of causation involve ontological and pragmatic considerations unique to
each science is the purpose of Richard Miller's Fact and Method (1987):
"[A]n explanation is an adequate description of the underlying causes
bringing about a phenomenon. Adequacy, here, is determined by rules that
are specific to particular fields at particular times. The specificity of
the rules is not just a feature of adequacy for given special purposes, but
characterizes all adequacy that is relevant to scientific explanation. The
rules are judged by their efficacy for the respective fields at the
respective times -- which makes adequacy far more contingent, pragmatic and
field-specific than positivists allowed, but no less rationally
determinable." (Miller 1987: p. 6, my italics)
I now would like to clarify my own understanding of what counts as causal
explanation in the social sciences in terms of the mutually related notions of causal
mechanisms and causal depth. In short, a good causal explanation requires some causal
depth, but also a causal mechanism. Too much depth may deprive explanations of causal

4
A similarly deficient statistical-epistemological definition of causation
appears in King, Keohane, and Verba (1994:81-82):
"The causal effect is the difference between the systematic component of
observations made when the explanatory variable takes one value and
the systematic component of comparable observations when the
explanatory variable takes on another value."

7
mechanism, but some proposed mechanisms may lack any causal depth.

Causal Mechanism

To accept something as a cause of a social phenomenon, we must identify the

mechanism(s) that brought it about. By mechanism we understand the processes that
convert certain inputs into outputs (Hedstrom and Swedberg 1998: 7). This
characterization does not get us very far without entering the field of ontology. What
are the entities that are capable of producing outcomes? First, what qualifies as cause
must temporally precede its consequences. Because functional explanations violate this
fundamental ontological premise by treating consequences as explanation for the
appearance of temporally prior causes, many social scientists find such explanations
uninformative (Elster 1982). Second, building on Max Weber, some process constitutes a
causal mechanism because it is "intelligible" in the sense that it involves the
rational deliberation of human beings in the production of some outcome. The
specification of causal mechanisms in the social sciences by temporality and action has
several implications.
First, it implies methodological individualism in the weak sense that causal
mechanisms rely on human action, even though each action may be constrained by
collective and aggregate phenomena external to the individual actors (resource
distributions, the temporal structure of events, the physical distribution of actors,
and the collectively understood rules and anticipated consequences of action that are
often codified in formal institutions). Employing causal mechanisms in explanation, we
move from a highly aggregate level of social entities (sets of human beings, structures
and institutions) to the level of the conduct of individual actors in order to account
for higher level outcomes. This weak methodological individualism is not inimical to
the consideration of structural and collective phenomena. It only requires that we
treat individuals' actions as critical ingredients in any account of structural
transformation, such as that of political regimes.
Second, a mechanism working through human action is intelligible only if it is based
on the actors' more or less explicit, deliberate preference schedules. As Boudon (1998)
argues, the finality of a social science explanation is grounded in the
understandability of human action. This requires that actors can invoke some highest
objectives that inform their conduct (Weber's Wertrationalität). Pushed to its ultimate
consequence, intelligible action is rational when actors choose among different
objectives, explicitly ranked in their preference schedules, in the light of scarce
means at their disposal in such ways as to maximize their overall value satisfaction

8
(Weber's Zweckrationalität). Purely affective or "traditional," habitual conduct is
unintelligible and does not count as a social mechanism in explanatory accounts. The
5
same applies to physical causes of behavior.
Third, mechanisms require that we specify the social knowledge actors bring to bear
on intelligible action. Given that actors often encounter risk or uncertainty, they
must make empirically unproved assumptions about the consequences of alternative
strategies in the pursuit of their objectives, often even without being able to assign
objective probabilities to them. Identifying these interpretations of the situation are
often as important in understanding human action as the actors' preferences and the
"objective" constraints of the situation, observed by the social scientist with the
benefit of hindsight.
This ontological conception of mechanism (temporal sequence, weak methodological
individualism with intelligibility and rationality) differs from a purely
epistemological conception of mechanism recently invoked by Elster (1998). Elster
wishes to reserve the conception of mechanism for causal linkages that sometimes
operate, but not always. They explain, but do not predict, according to the logic "If
A, then sometimes B" (Elster 1998: 49). There may always be intervening causes that
suppress the causal link between A and B or functionally equivalent causes that create
B without A. Moreover, the relationship between A and B may be of an inherently
probabilistic rather than a deterministic kind. There are no laws in the social
sciences in the strict sense of deterministic processes without intervening variables,
functional equivalents or stochastic fuzziness.
I propose to separate the problem of non-deterministic relations between causes
and consequences, broadly conceived (stochastic laws, intervening causes, etc.), from
the ontological conception of causal mechanism in the social sciences. The latter calls
for social explanations that shift the level of causal process analysis from that of
aggregates and structures to individual action under constraints. It is entirely open
whether these causal mechanisms are stochastic or deterministic or whether intervening
causes (mechanisms?) suppress their effects.

Explanatory (Causal) Depth

5
Of course, physically induced behavior may have social consequences, but it
contributes nothing to a social science explanation of these consequences.
Sometimes, physically induced behavior, such as the social lethargy of a starving
population, itself is caused by social mechanisms based on deliberate action, such
as the destruction of food supplies in warfare.

9
 According to Hedstrom and Swedberg (1998: 24-25), the virtues of causal mechanisms
are their reliance on action, their precision, their abstraction from concrete contexts
and the reductionist strategy of opening up black boxes. This is in line with the
striving of all science "for narrowing the gap or lag between input and output, cause
and effect." (p. 25) I would like to object to this view. At least in the social
sciences, the danger is that reducing the lag and the distance too much leads to
tautological statements rather than causal explanations. The explanans is really part
of the explanandum. How much explanation is there if we know that bank robberies take
place because that is where they keep the money?
Because we are dealing here with the realm of ontology, there is no simple, general
epistemological criterion that would allow us to determine when social scientists
propose uninformative tautologies masquerading as causal explanations. The difficulty
of distinguishing between analytical and synthetic judgments is a notorious problem
examined in detail in contemporary analytical philosophy. In the social sciences, in a
pragmatic way scholars scrutinize which of several rival substantive explanations of an
outcome are insightful and synthetic and which appear to constitute nothing but
tautologies or are dangerously close to tautologies. No abstract logical rule, but
substantive debates about alternative accounts draw the line between insightful
explanation and uninformative tautology.
The ontological baseline that causal mechanisms should be "very close" to the
explanandum in spatio-temporal terms, whatever proximity might mean in operational
terms, has therefore, in my view, little merit. How close mechanisms must be to their
outcomes depends on the substantive phenomenon to be explained. The human mind is a
robust deposit of ideas and information. People may activate their long-term memory and
scan its content in order to interpret the strategic options in novel situations
fraught with high uncertainty. Moreover, technical and institutional memory enhancers
(scripture, literacy, media of communication, education, professionals in charge of
preserving memories) can extend the capacity of individual human actors and groups to
retrieve and process information over rather lengthy time periods. At the micro level,
deliberate strategic action may thus be informed by cognitive frames and norms
(ultimate objectives) that were created at some temporal distance measured in decades
6
or even generations, from the outcomes of social action to be explained.
While there is no virtue in a general ontological rule that mechanisms minimize the
spatio-temporal lag between cause and effect, the criterion that causal mechanisms in
social life work through human action nevertheless limits the causal depth of

6
For a critique of a narrowly constructed criterion of spatio-temporal
proximity, see Goldstone (1998: 838).

10
explanatory accounts. Hypotheses involving "long distance" causality spanning centuries
and postulating transformation rules between social structures lack an adequate micro-
logic and are therefore unacceptable as explanatory accounts. Explanation requires a
movement from macro-variables to micro-variables and back to macro-variables.
"Mechanisms" involve law-like statements about the conduct of individuals within macro-
settings characterized by a variety of structural, institutional, and even cultural
constraints and opportunities. This commitment to an actor-oriented explanation implies
neither (1) a narrow conception of human action in the sense of instrumental
7
rationality nor (2) an emphasis on very close spatio-temporal proximity in causal
mechanisms, two restrictions often placed on the quality of causal mechanisms (Kiser
and Hechter 1991; 1998).
The general discussion of causal depth has pragmatic consequences for comparative
and statistical analysis. If spatio-temporal proximity is not the overriding concern,
social scientists must model statistical tests of causal mechanisms with great
sensitivity to the varying temporal depth and causal ordering implied by what at first
sight appear to be rival explanatory accounts of the same phenomenon. Causal mechanisms
that are temporally proximate ("close") to the effect they claim to explain as a rule
of thumb tend to account for more variance in a dependent variable than causal
mechanisms that are more distant in spatio-temporal terms. In the case of proximate
causation, there is simply less opportunity for intervening variables to dilute the
effect of a mechanism on the outcome than in the cases of deeper and less proximate
causation. By contrast, where deeper causal mechanisms are at stake, "critical
junctures" (Collier and Collier 1992) or "punctuated equilibria" (Krasner 1988),
created by sudden external shocks or opportunities, always perforate the path-dependent
determination of more distant outcomes achieved over longer periods of time.
Hence, when a single-equation statistical model enters several rival explanations
characterized by varying causal depth on the right hand side of the equation, it is
likely that temporally prior, "deeper" causes "wash out" in the hunt to find a
statistically efficient explanation of some outcome. Moreover, single equation models
ignore the causal interrelations among right-hand side variables, at least up to the
critical threshold at which statistical considerations of multicollinearity force the
deletion of some variables. In order to appreciate the power of deeper explanations and

7
Recent critics of the narrow framework nevertheless sympathetic to the
rational choice framework include Boudon (1998), Elster (1989) and Opp (1999).
Following Weber (1920/68), however, it may still be heuristically useful in the
construction of theories to begin with a narrow conception of deliberate,
calculating human action in pursuit of fungible objectives (money, power) and only
expand it by additional assumptions about preferences and cognitions when it
proves inadequate.

11
reveal the structure of relations among causal mechanisms characterized by varying
temporal depth, social science therefore should concentrate on multi-equation causal
models that do not easily suppress the contribution of "deeper" mechanisms in favor of
"shallower" mechanisms on some outcome. What social science should explore are chains
of causation, organized around variables at different levels of causal depth.
Single equation statistical models and the H-O scheme of explanation criticized by
Miller (1987) and Salmon (1989) both yield an ontologically unreflective commitment to
Occam's Razor as criterion to evaluate the quality of an explanation. According to that
principle, social scientists should accept the most efficient predictor of some outcome
as its explanation. By emphasizing correlational efficiency over ontological principles
of temporality and human action in causal mechanisms, Occam's Razor promotes
explanatory shallowness, with the ultimate danger of tautological reasoning.
By contrast, I argue that statistical criteria of goodness of fit (maximizing the
explained variance or the slope coefficient of some antecedent in a multivariate
equation) are only one way to evaluate rival explanations, but must not be employed to
privilege temporally proximate causes associated with an outcome. In order to avoid
causal shallowness, we must reconstruct a chain of causal mechanisms that can show one
of two things. First, some proximate cause may be endogenous to a deeper cause to a
considerable extent. Second, an interaction effect between a shallow cause ("trigger")
and a deeper cause (structural determinant) improves the explanatory account. In both
instances, the deeper cause has primacy even though the shallower cause, taken in
isolation, may have greater statistical efficiency in predicting the ultimate
explanandum.
If Ct1 causes Ct2 with probability .70 and Ct2 causes some outcome Ot3 with
probability .80, then it is quite likely (although not mathematically necessary) that
(1) Ct1 and Ot3 have a weaker direct bivariate correlation than Ct2 and Ot3 and that (2)
in a multivariate single-equation model pitting Ct1 directly against Ct2 as rivals to
8
explain Ot3 the temporally deeper cause statistically "washes out." Based on the
multivariate model estimations, we would then infer that Ct1 does not cause Ot3. By
contrast, based on a logic of causal mechanisms that examines causal depth and
endogeneity, we would want to reconstruct the chain of relations between Ct1, Ct2, and
Ot3. In pragmatic terms, we might find an explanation that highlights Ct1 and treats Ct2
merely as an intervening or interactive variable more "insightful," precisely because

8
Note that this multivariate model is statistically questionable because of
the considerable multicollinearity of the independent variables on the right-hand
side of the equation, a problem in comparative-historical analysis I will return
to in one of my substantive examples of accounting for post-communist system
transformation in section 3.

12
it identifies a deeper and often hidden genealogy of a phenomenon. The deeper
explanation may be less vulnerable to the tautology charge. Moreover, it tends to be
9
more surprising and counter-intuitive and thus offers more insight.
With the increasing emphasis placed on analytical rigor and causal mechanisms in the
social sciences in general and comparative politics in particular, extremely shallow
explanations have become more popular that offer little theoretical insight because the
explanatory variables are too close to what they are supposed to explain. Impressive
empirical correlations between independent and independent variables conceal that fact.
To know that in almost every instance where post-communist polities adopted a
constitution granting strong executive and legislative powers to the president an
individual politician who believed he had an exceptional chance of winning the first
presidential election also had a great deal of leverage over constitution making and
successfully bargained for a strong presidency may be quite trivial. It would be more
informative to determine whether there is some mechanism that enables individual
politicians in some polities, but not others, to acquire both the requisite reputation
and the bargaining leverage to obtain this outcome. This prior question would lengthen
the causal chain and thus complicate the explanatory task, particularly to work out a
tractable micro-logic of strategic intentional action that yields opportunity
structures favoring presidentialsm. Moreover, the statistical correlation between
causes that are more distant and constitutional bargaining outcomes would most likely
be less impressive than between proximate causes and constitutional provisions.
However, efforts to demonstrate endogeneity and interaction effects could provide a
link through proximate causes.
The search for causal mechanism and causal depth are mutually supportive, but also
mutually constraining criteria in the construction of satisfactory explanations. The
requirement that causal mechanisms run through intentional action limit the spatio-
temporal depth of explanations, while causal depth criteria militate against minimizing
lags between cause and effect, accompanied by the dangers of tautological reasoning.
How far we wish to push back the envelope of causal analysis in terms of spatio-
temporal depth and history is a pragmatic and ontological question, not a matter of
epistemology, logic, or statistics. Reasonable minds can disagree on what counts as a
good explanation of a particular phenomenon and I will employ the next section of this
paper to persuade readers that many explanations currently offered to account for post-
communist regime variance are either too shallow (temporally proximate, bordering on

9
Here I just added two further pragmatic, if not aesthetic criteria for the
quality of explanations (surprise, counterintuitive postulates) I do not wish to
discuss systematically in this paper.

13
tautology by blurring the line between explanans and explanandum) or too deep (without
a chain of causal mechanisms).

Some Ancillary Observations on Styles of Causal Explanation

To avoid misunderstandings, let me reject a stereotypical rendering of principles of

theory construction often encountered in epistemological and meta-theoretical debates
in comparative politics. According to this stereotype, the particular model of social
actor and choice, the explanatory depth of the theory, and the reliance on causal
mechanisms are necessarily linked with each other. Those who rely on an instrumental
rational choice conception of human action, centering on actors' pursuit of "interests"
in fungible private goods (wealth and power), also emphasize causal mechanisms and rely
on "shallow" explanations according to the strictures of Occam's Razor. Conversely,
supporters of "deep" explanations are depicted as theorists who emphasize culture and
discourse, and therefore rely on a less instrumental conception of human action
concerned with collective identities and idealistic preferences (solidarity, salvation,
beauty) and who generally shun the elaboration of causal mechanisms.
However, there is no apriori association between conceptions of human action, causal
depth, and the reliance on causal mechanisms in the social science. The elective
affinities constructed between rational interest driven, shallow, but mechanism-endowed
explanations, on the one hand, and cultural, normative and deep explanations without
mechanisms, on the other, are misleading. Some of the most shallow accounts of social
and political action are cultural, particularly in the currently popular stream of
studies about discourse formation and framing. They offer mechanisms without causal
10
depth. I see a similar danger in much of what is now advertised as a "historical
institutionalist" explanation of political processes. Such undertakings often do not
11
move beyond the thick description of historical processes. Conversely, many accounts

10
An example is discoursive frame analysis in studies of social movements.
See, for example, Snow et al. (1986) and the sizeable literature derived from this
paradigm.
11
Meta-theoretical works on the new historical institutionalism reveal and
often even recognize this danger. See Immergut (1998), Somers (1998) and Thelen
(1999). In as much as historical institutionalism focuses on the unpredictability
of collective outcomes and thus on what cannot be causally explained in terms of
actors' pre-existing cognitive and cultural frames, their interests, and the
constraints they encounter, the approach simply gives up on explanation. For good
reason, Immergut (1998: 27) worries that historical institutionalist accounts lack
falsifiability and therefore cannot promote alternative theories to those inspired
by principles of structuralist or rational choice institutionalism. Immergut
notices that, as a consequence, "in eschewing systematization, the historical
institutionalists undercut the cumulative impact of their work."

14
relying on rational calculation are neither averse to spatio-temporally extended chains
of causal mechanisms nor to cultural analysis. Long causal chains, for example, play a
role in Douglass North's (1981) rational choice analysis of why England dominated the
early stages of the industrial revolution, while other European powers, such as Spain
or France, fell behind. More recently, a whole host of rational choice theorists has
realized the importance of actors' cognitive frameworks and cultural orientations in
accounting for their strategic choices in light of instrumental self-interest (cf.
Denzau and North 1994; Greif 1994; Bates, Figueiredo and Weingast 1998).
In this sense, the benchmark that good explanations should involve causal
mechanisms, but also causal depth, rules out neither rational choice nor cultural
(cognitive, normative) mechanisms. These ontological requisites of causal analysis do
not prejudice the nature of the substantive theories that account for empirical social
outcomes. The ontological criteria I support also do not imply an affinity to what is
now called "historical" neo-institutionalism (cf. Thelen and Steinmo 1992). Its
distinctive claims are that institutions shape actors' preferences (March and Olsen
1989) and that historical processes have contingent outcomes (Immergut 1998). With
regard to preference formation, I have not found a single avowedly historical
institutionalist account that would explain actors' preferences rather than their
strategies, constrained by institutions and cognitive frameworks. Concerning the
historical contingency of social phenomena, every comparativist recognizes the
stochastic nature of social processes. But focusing on the random component of such
processes gives up the quest for causal explanations that imply some reliance on causal
mechanisms pertaining to a multitude of cases. Only general causal propositions,
applying to an indefinite number of cases, are empirically testable. A historical
institutionalism that focuses on idiosyncratic individual events and unrepeatable
processes is empirically irrefutable.

3. Shallow or Deep Accounts in the Study of Political Regime Change

Negotiating one's way between the Scylla of excessive explanatory depth without
causal mechanisms and the Charybdis of extremely shallow causal mechanisms is not easy.
The appropriateness of explanations is endemically contentious because logical and
epistemological standards alone provide no decision rule to accept or reject an
empirical correlation as the causal explanation of a phenomenon. In this section,
examples of what I consider either excessively deep or extremely shallow explanations
of post-communist regime diversity may persuade the reader that a different explanatory
approach is called for. I sketch this approach in the subsequent section.

15
 Excessively Deep Explanations

The current paradigmatic case of an excessively deep comparative-historical

explanation in political science is Robert Putnam's (1993) account of democratic
processes and performance in Northern and Southern Italy, claiming that twelfth and
thirteenth century polity formation in the two parts of Italy shaped both the
institutional practices as well as the economic outcomes in the different Italian
regions in the second half of the twentieth century. What Putnam lacks is a convincing
account of the transmission and linkage between thirteenth century Italian conditions
and the twentieth century. There are no mechanisms that would translate the "long-
distance" causality across eight hundred years into a more proximate chain of closer
causal forces acting upon each other. Margaret Levi (1996: 46) therefore identifies in
Putnam's work a "metaphorical use of path dependence without the rigorous analytics a
compelling application of the concept requires." When one tries to supply such causal
mechanisms across historical time, one soon discovers that civicness and governance
wildly fluctuated in Italy and that, if anything, the eighteenth century governmental
institutions should serve as the reference point for twentieth century development
rather than the contrast between thirteenth and fourteenth century city states in
Northern Italy and the Kingdom of Sicily (Sabetti 1996: esp. 27-37).
In a similar vein, in the analysis of post-communist political change, observers
often invoke different religious doctrines and zones of administrative-political
control under tutelage of either Prussia, Habsburg-Austria, Russia or the Ottoman
Empire as determinants of late twentieth century politics, but generally do not specify
the mechanisms that lead from these antecedents to the political consequence. This
explanatory gap occurs even in the better historical comparative analyses, such as
Schöpflin's (1993) broad comparative sweep, even though his study provides, in
principle, the facts and tools to work out the causal mechanisms that link the
institutional transformations of diverse polities across different historical "stages"
12
and "rounds of struggle" in Eastern Europe. For example, Schöpflin (1993: 19-22)
discusses the different levels of professionalization in the state bureaucracies of
post-World War I East and Central European polities, yet his later description of
communist regime differentiation in the 1960s and 1970s does not systematically draw on
such earlier regime variations and their influence on actors' strategic capabilities

12
The same problem applies to classificatory approaches of East European
cases, such as Offe's (1994: 241-49) typology of transitions and their background
conditions. Other examples of incomplete "deep" accounts of post-communist regime
variation are Agh (1998: chapter 1) and Crawford (1996: chapter 1).

16
and constraints. For example, in contrast to Hungary and Poland with a bureaucracy
penetrated by the gentry, Schöpflin (1993: 20) attributes to interwar Czechoslovakia "a
relatively well-functioning administration and considerable autonomy of the law." Yet
he does not explore a linkage of those earlier administrative practices with the later
prominence of "illiberal technocrats" (Schöpflin 1993: 214) in communist Czechoslovakia
at a time when the state party apparatus of Hungarian and Polish communism was already
crumbling and a generation of reformist apparatchiks took control of the ruling
parties.
Long distance causality accounting for post-communist rule sometimes takes the form
of geo-strategic considerations within the international system. Proximity to the West
and a resentment of Russian domination under the shadow of the Brezhnev doctrine
translate into adoption of a market-liberal representative democracy. However, as I
will show in subsequent sections, it is not easy to determine the causal mechanism that
underlies the indisputable correlation between geography and political regime form. As
in the case of religion and imperialist administration of Eastern Europe, what is
missing are the causal mechanisms that link religion, geography, and imperialist
administration to communist and post-communist rule.

Extremely Shallow Explanations

Shallow explanations provide mechanisms and high statistical explanatory yields,

but little insight into the causal genealogy of a phenomenon. A good example for the
Pyrrhic victories won by shallow explanations of post-communist regime change is Philip
Roeder's (1994; 1997; 1998) analysis of diversity in the regime types of successor
states of the Soviet Union. In his work, the dependent variable can assume four values,
whether the communist successor regime takes on the shape of an autocracy, oligarchy,
exclusionary republic (with disenfranchised minorities) or fully pluralist democracy.
The units of observation are not countries, but polities at particular points in time.
Thus, the same country furnishes several cases, provided there are several successor
regimes since the initial transition from communist rule. Trying to account for usually
small inter-temporal variations of regime form, of course, provides an additional
advantage for shallow explanatory mechanisms, particularly if statistical criteria of
goodness of fit, such as to minimize the number of unexplained cases, decide among
rival explanations.
Roeder's (1998: 19) main hypothesis is that "[i]n the Soviet successor states the
stability of authoritarianism was constrained by the power configuration among
political elites -- first on the eve of the 1990 legislative elections and then in the

17
new supreme soviets." Where a unified post-Soviet bureaucracy dominated parliament
after the initial republic wide election, autocratic regimes emerged, as most of the
time in the Central Asian successor states, except (initially?) Kyrgyzstan. Where a
bureaucratic coalition dominated parliament, the new regime took on the character of an
oligarchy, illustrated by Belarus and episodes in Georgia and Tajikistan. By contrast,
where emerging parties dominated parliaments, the results were exclusionary republics
or (semi-)democracies, such as in the Baltic countries and initially Georgia. These
three pure trajectories leave some mixed cases with emerging semi-democracies such as
Armenia, Moldova, Russia and the Ukraine in the late 1990s.
I have too little detailed knowledge about many of the Central Asian republics and
other post-Soviet fission products to doubt that Roeder's explanation of regime
outcomes provides the "final step" and the proximate mechanism in the causal chain of
regime choice. I also have little doubt that, in terms of statistical efficiency, the
proposed explanation of regime entrenchment based on bargaining configurations in the
1990s wins over more distant and deeper explanations of post-Soviet regime diversity
generating more empirical anomalies. Nevertheless, how insightful is the bargaining
perspective offered in Roeder's papers? Is not the real social science puzzle why in
some post-Soviet polities proto-parties could spring up almost instantly and set regime
change on track toward at least exclusionary democracy, while in others the
"bureaucracy" (the communist nomenklatura establishment?) remained almost unchallenged?
I wish to persuade readers that the most interesting object of explanation in
post-communist regime formation is what Roeder accepts as his independent, exogenous
variable, namely the constitution of political forces that enter the bargaining arena
in each Soviet republic, as the Soviet Union under Gorbachev begins to crumble. In
other words, the explanation must focus on the differential emergence of "civil
society" in the late 1980s, indicated by proto-parties, not the proximate consequences
of that civil society on the post-communist regime form.
There are several other links in the explanation of post-communist regimes not
addressed in Roeder's account, but with some likely deep causal involvement in the
ultimate regime outcomes. First, is it not critical to understand why in some
republics, such as the three Baltic countries, the communist ruling party itself
embraced the struggle for reform and independence, while its key representatives fought
such changes elsewhere? And second, is it not critical to explain why some post-Soviet
republics were able to move toward a rule of law through de-politicization and reform
of their bureaucracy and judiciary rather quickly, while others have made virtually no
headway in the 1990s?
Roeder proposes what is in statistical terms a highly successful explanation of

18
post-Soviet regime formation with almost no outliers. This account also meets the
standard of providing a causal mechanism that closes the gap between independent and
dependent variables. But the price is a loss of explanatory insight. What appears as
Roeder's independent variable is really too close to, if not really a part of the
dependent variable. We really must focus on explaining the bargaining situation over
new political regime parameters, rather than treat those as our ultimate independent
variable.
A similar problem besets Higley, Pakulski and Wesolowski's (1998) work on elite
change and democratic regimes in Eastern Europe, expanding on an earlier book by Higley
and Gunther (1992). Stable democracy evolves only where national political elites have
strongly unified views about basic regime parameters, while simultaneously be
differentiated into conflicting parties, interest groups, and movements with their own
objectives. Elite differentiation without fundamental unity yields fragmented,
polarized democracies, while elite consensus without differentiation produces a
totalitarian regime. Where unity is weak and differentiation is narrow,
authoritarianism is likely to prevail. As in Roeder's case, it is not obvious to me how
elite configurations can serve as the explanatory variable to account for regime
states. If anything, they are so close to the outcome as to generate all but
tautological hypotheses. From my perspective, the elite configurations are part of the
dependent variable that needs to be accounted for in different terms. The paper by
Higley et al. (1998) in fact provides a great deal of comparative-historical background
information that sheds light on reasons why elite configurations vary so much among
post-communist countries. Yet, their paper does not employ these descriptive accounts
for the construction of analytical models that would explain different elite
configurations.
A third example for shallow explanations of political regime diversity provides
Stephen Fish's (1998a) analysis of the question why some post-communist countries
experience an erosion of democratization. In Fish's case even more so than in Roeder's
analysis, shallow explanations are advantaged because the author defines as the object
of explanation the each change of post-communist regimes beyond the initial opening in
the early 1990s. This puts the emphasis on short-term fluctuations, something deeper
explanations are endemically ill-equipped to cope with. After debunking economic,
institutional, and cultural accounts for backsliding, Fish arrives at the earth-
shattering insight that in each instance, "the chief executive was unambiguously the
agent of degradation." (Fish 1998a: 10). The paper ultimately draws the conclusion that
"[a] voluntarist or intentionalist explanation serves as the best possible framework
for understanding de-democratization." (p. 20)

19
 In short, Fish suggests that de-democratization takes place because leaders wanted
to convert polities into authoritarian fiefs. As in the previous examples, this account
begs the question and cries out for a deeper explanation. Fish himself provides
elements of a deeper account, but fails to place them in a well-structured causal
model. Why, for example, were chief executives in some polities able to gain the
charisma of national father figure and hero of independence, but not in others? Why did
the institutional environment yield powers concentrated in the office of the presidency
that facilitated authoritarian relapses and allowed incumbents to employ plebiscites to
overrule his adversaries in the legislature? While I have no doubt that the chief
executive's wish to bring about authoritarianism coincided with authoritarian
backsliding in post-communist democracies, I do not accept it as a causal explanation.
Instead, I propose that the critical object of explanation is the circumstances under
which leaders are able to control the resources and face a pliable political
environment to realize strategies of maximizing their personal power (and wealth?).
A final example that shows the treacherous nature of shallow explanations also
comes from Fish (1998b) and concerns the extent of economic market reform in post-
communist democracies, as measured by World Bank and European Bank of Reconstruction
and Development indicators. Fish first reviews structural and cultural determinants
that may influence a regime's propensity to reform, such as per capita GDP, a country's
prevailing religion, or its political institutions, identified by the powers of the
presidency. He then codes the extent to which the first post-communist government shuns
aside the old communist elite as predictor of subsequent political-economic reformist
zeal and finds that in a single equation multivariate analysis the initial election
outcomes "win" hands down as predictors of reform strategies when pitted against the
countries' economic affluence, institutions, and culture.
Fish's analysis raises not only troubling "ontological" questions of what counts
as a good explanation, but also exhibits inadequacies of the statistical estimation
procedure. Fish enters both religion and initial election outcomes as independent
variables in a multivariate regression with economic reform effort as the dependent
variable. Unfortunately, the multicollinearity between the "deep" religion variable and
the "shallow" post-communist government variable is greater than .70 so that both
variables should have never been entered simultaneously on the right-hand side of the
13
equation. If anything, his model should be decomposed into several equations that

13
A similar problem of multicollinearity besets Fish (1998c) where Fish
employs economic reform and religion as predictors of democratic political reform,
measured by the Freedom House Index. In addition to this statistical problem, the
whole model suffers from a problem of endogeneity and lack of plausible causal
ordering, something the author admits (p. 231-2).

20
relate temporally older, and therefore causally prior, variables to later processes.
There is nothing to be gained from pitting deeper and more distant (i.e. temporally
prior) structural or cultural variables against proximate causes in the same equation.
No wonder, then, that the latter "win" in terms of statistical criteria of fitness and
14
explanatory power.

Deep and Shallow: Rivalry or Complementarity?

To reiterate in order to avoid misunderstanding, I do not doubt that the strong

correlations between what Roeder, Fish and others offer as explanations for post-
communist regime types and regime performance actually do exist, but I question their
status in an explanatory account of regime diversity, even if they turn out to prevail
over rival causal candidates in single-equation statistical tournaments. The problem
with shallow explanations is similar to what Arthur Schopenhauer is reported to have
said about G.F.W. Hegel's dialectical reasoning: "All the dazzling victories of
15
dialectical disputation leave behind the bad taste of fraud."
Shallow explanations that rely on proximate causal mechanisms become useful only
if they are complemented by deeper analyses of regime diversity. At the same time, that
search for depth should not lose out of sight the need to provide causal mechanisms
that make plausible how structural, institutional and cultural parameters can translate
into strategic, calculated action which, in turn, create new macro-level results. To
appropriate and modify one more statement from classical German philosophy, this time
from Kant, shallow explanations without depth are empty, deep explanations without
mechanisms are blind.
In the particular instance of democratic regime entrenchment, the emphasis on
short causal chains in the scholarly literature of the past twenty years is not
entirely due to the imperatives of statistical testing of rival explanations and a
misplaced understanding of causal mechanisms as minimizing spatio-temporal distance
between cause and effect. The penchant for shallow explanations may also result from
the specific framing of the dependent variable, as we have already seen in Roeder's and

14
I would criticize similar problems of single-equation statistical model
specifications in the growing literature about the economic, cultural, and
institutional causes of economic reform and economic growth in post-communist
countries or more generally in the global comparative literature.
15
I quote this from memory and I believe to have read the Schopenhauer quote
in a text by Th. W. Adorno, but I have been unable to retrieve a precise reference
for this paper. I translate the German "Überrumpelung" as "fraud," although it may
not quite reflect the full connotations of moral outrage conveyed by the original
German term.

21
Fish's work. The more we focus on short-term historical fluctuations, such as the
timing of regime breakdowns or the change rate of regimes, rather than on lasting
regime parameters that have entrenched themselves, the more likely it is that our
explanations cannot go beyond shallow short-term determinants that are close to the
historical narrative.
This framing of the dependent variables is, of course, powerfully influenced by the
historical experience of the "Third Wave" of democratization (Huntington 1994) with its
sudden sweep across Latin America, Southeast Asia and finally the communist hemisphere
in the 1980s and early 1990s. At least in order to explain the timing of authoritarian
regime breakdown in different polities, deep structuralist and comparative historical
theories appear to be of little use (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986). Some have extended
the argument and claim that also the new rules of political governance result from the
creative constitutional engineering explained by the idiosyncrasies of the historical
opening more than by causal mechanisms imposing path-dependence on the outcomes (cf. Di
Palma 1990).
Whether "deeper" causal accounts of structural foundations that frame strategic
action play a role, however, may depend to a large extent on the precise choice of the
object of explanation. Singular events, such as the breakdown of a particular political
regime, are always underdetermined by structural conditions and causal mechanisms that
spell out how actors employ such conditions. Timing, sequence, and the vagaries of
social interaction shape unique processes and events no causally deep theory can
capture. If the object of explanation is classes of events or persistent arrangements
in polities, however, it is more likely that structural constraints, mediated by causal
mechanisms that involve intentional human action, account for the outcomes. For
example, medium income countries with growing middle classes of well-educated
professionals and business people generally exhibit a high propensity to lock in
democratic regimes, whenever authoritarian regimes break down (Przeworski and Limongi
1997).
To employ the analogy of natural sciences probing into highly complex and
probabilistic interactions, meteorologists can predict and explain very well why in the
Northern Hemisphere, in general, daytime temperatures are lower in January than in
June. But this does not rule out that on a particular pair of January and June days the
relationship may be reversed. Similarly, geotectonics understands the causal mechanisms
that produce earthquakes and can indicate the geographic regions that are at risk, but
geologists have just about given up on making time-space point predictions of
16
earthquakes. In this same spirit, the relevance of deeper causal explanations comes to

16
Japan was the last country shutting down an ambitious earthquake prediction

22
the fore in the analysis of political regime change only if we go beyond the event
history of regime transitions in this or that case, but focus on the pattern of
lasting, entrenched new regime outcomes that emerge in the post-communist hemisphere.

4. Avoiding Shallowness, While Limiting Depth. An Alternative

Account of Post-communist Regime Diversity

I first provide the barebones of an explanation of variance among communist and

post-communist regimes detailed to a greater extent elsewhere (Kitschelt et al. 1999:
chapters 1 and 2), but then amend that account by an additional variable that makes it
more fine-grained and takes into account the vexing problems of collective identity,
manifested by new state formation as well as ethnic heterogeneity and conflict
17
throughout much of the formerly communist world. I then discuss empirical indicators
and their interrelationship that help us operationalize the model and evaluate its
explanatory power for post-communist regime diversity compared to that of its rivals.

A. Path Dependence in Post-Communist Regime Transformation:

The Two Master Variables

The two strategic variables I employ to account for post-communist regime

diversity provide answers to the following questions: What permits communists
entrenched in the old regimes to convert "old" political and economic power into "new"
political and economic power relations? In terms of economics, this requires mechanisms
that produce institutions that enable the old elites to subvert market-competitive
governance structures and keep economic resources available to induce political
18
loyalties. In terms of politics, it requires organizational capabilities and a
distribution of public support for regime change that favors anti-democrats over
democrats. Economics and politics work in tandem, but the two causal mechanisms jointly

program in 1997.
17
For the more limited set of comparisons in Kitschelt et al. (1999), it was
unnecessary to engage ethnopolitics or sufficient to touch upon it in passing
(ibid: pp. 67-69). This is obviously not an option when considering the entire set
of post-communist countries.
18
Note that I do not say "privatization." Formal privatization can coincide
with all kinds of governance structures and, by itself, is not a good indicator of
market liberalization. See Hellman (1998).

23
contributing to regime outcomes can be specified separately.

i. bureaucratic state development, the rule of law, and economic reform

In economic respects, the critical question is the leverage the old regime
incumbents keep at their disposal to salvage or restructure rent-seeking arrangements,
in the technical sense of securing flows of revenue to beneficiaries that would not
accrue to them under conditions of open market competition. Whether or not rent-seeking
arrangements prevail depends to a considerable extent on the structure of the state
bureaucracy. In historical perspective, the establishment of a bureaucracy that
separates administrators from their means of production (Weber) and undercuts rent-
seeking by bureaucratic insiders is a critical accomplishment in the development of
state structure and the rule of law. Professional bureaucracy with certified civil
servants compensated by salaries and promoted based on achieving a formally correct
enactment of rational-legal, written rules undercut rent-seeking group advantages and
further the rule of law. The rule of law, in turn, facilitates market exchange because
it makes public treatment of private property rights more predictable and facilitates
contract enforcement among market participants, thus encouraging long-term private
saving and investment.
The first mechanism leading to different post-communist regime outcomes, therefore,
has to do with the presence or absence of ingredients of professional versus patronage
19
bureaucracy in communist polities. Where a modicum of bureaucratic professionalization
existed, it was more difficult for communist apparatchiks to convert political into
economic assets and to exploit state resources for the construction of new rent-seeking
networks with a vested interest in undercutting public scrutiny and open political and
economic competition. The substantive appropriation of the communist political economy
by the old nomenklatura often went hand-in-hand with the formal "privatization" of that
economy. In fact, the privatization of state assets often reinforced the interests that
fought against a market liberalization of the economy (Hellman 1998).
Communist cadre bureaucracy nowhere approximated the ideal type of a
professionalized civil service, but bureaucratic organization varied across communist
polities and within the Soviet Union. At one extreme, in rational-bureaucratic
communist regimes, bureaucracies preserved a considerable level of professionalism and

19
. There is preciously little comparative literature on state bureaucracy in
what is today the post-communist region. Perceptive analyses of the intra-regional
variance in bureaucratic development can be found in Schöpflin (1993: 19-22),
Boiset and Child (1996: esp. 606-8), and for variance within the Soviet Union
especially Willerton (1992).

24
contributed to the division between "red" and "expert." The most clearcut cases for a
comparatively professionalized bureaucracy were the Czech and Slovak Republic and the
German Democratic Republic. If we trace this arrangement back historically in the
spirit of path-dependent causal analysis, communist parties could build here on pre-
communist professionalized state apparatuses that operated within highly developed
interwar capitalist market economies. These state structures derived from authoritarian
absolutist polities in the 18th century (Prussia, Habsburg Austria). Because of the
remnants of bureaucratic professionalism, in East Germany and Czechoslovakia,
opportunities for the post-communist "privatization" of the state by old party
operatives or new tycoons were most limited and public capabilities to advance market
liberalization were greatest.
In a second group of countries, a patrimonial, non-professional bureaucracy
prevailed into the interwar period, but actors in the emerging capitalist market
20
economies and semi-competitive political regimes pressed for administrative reforms.
Within this group, we encounter the Baltic countries, Hungary, Poland and the Northern
Republics of Yugoslavia. In these countries, communist elites had considerable
21
opportunities for "informal" privatization in the 1980s. The inclination of ruling
parties in these countries to press for economic and political reform (see below) both
enhanced and constrained this appropriation of economic resources by the nomenklatura.
It reduced centralized oversight, but also allowed for the emergence of external checks
that made the illicit appropriation of resources more transparent.
In the remainder of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, at the advent of communism,
there were only rudimentary state bureaucracies and they exhibited all the trappings of
administrative patrimonialism. Both before and after the communist takeover, rulers
employed bureaucracies to build regime support and coopt those who could threaten the
incumbents. At the extreme, such communist polities constructed what Chehabi and Linz
(1998), borrowing from Max Weber, refer to as "neo-sultanistic" systems of personal
rule without procedural predictability, but extensive kleptocracy, nepotism, patronage
and corruption configured around bonds of family and personal following. When
communists took over in such systems, they extended the practices of patrimonial rule
by infusing elements of ideology, but no rational-legal professionalism or rule of law.
In the crisis of communist rule, "patrimonial" communist polities offer members of the

20
About the critical linkage between political competition and the
professionalization of the civil service see more generally Geddes (1994). The
argument can be extended and modified to apply to the region dominated by
communism as well.
21
For illustrative evidence of this process, see Stark and Bruszt's (1998)
analysis of the Hungarian case.

25
nomenklatura the greatest opportunities to convert their de facto control of economic
resources into a new system of formal property rights without changing the governance
structure of patrimonial control. It is no accident that polities emerging from
patrimonial communism exhibit the sharpest inequality of property and income, although
they have instituted the least market liberalization. Communist polities in Southeast
Europe (Serbia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania) and most republics of the
22
Former Soviet Union expressed patterns of patrimonial, if not sultanistic communism.
Elaborating on path-dependency and legacies, in these regions Tsarist bureaucracy and
Ottoman patrimonialism created the template with which communist rulers had to work
23
after their victory.
Patterns of bureaucratic professionalization are linked not only to the
liberalization of the economy in post-communist polities, but also to the quality of
democratic rule. Civic and political freedoms infuse a transparency into the public
sector that eventually exposes the appropriation of resources by rent-seeking groups
and therefore enhances the chances that rational-legal bureaucracy makes headway.
Conversely, elites that organize rent-seeking arrangements to stabilize political power
may find it necessary to subvert the democratic process in order to minimize the risks
of exposure. They may do so by reducing democracy to formal electoral democracy without
the civic freedoms that enable citizens and voluntary associations to scrutinize the
public political economy. Or they may go all the way and establish authoritarian
regimes without electoral competition. Whether or not these efforts are successful,
however, depends on the second chain of conditions and mechanisms that have to do with
the organization of the civil society before and under communism. Skills, resources,
and expectations of both actors defending or attacking the existing regime varied
across communist polities. Such diversity translated into different configurations of
bargaining power between communists and non-communists during the transition and in the
choice of a new set of formal government institutions.

22
Thus Vorozheikina (1994: 109) writes about Soviet (Russian) communism:
"Although the administrative command system seemed to embody the total rejection
of clientelism, in reality it was completely enmeshed in a complex web of patron-
client relationships. These relationships gave life to the rigid mechanisms of the
bureaucracy, providing it with the necessary lubrication."
23
For Southeastern Europe, this argument is fleshed out in Diamandouros and
Larrabee (1999, especially pp. 8-18). As illustration, consider Nikolov's (1998:
217) characterization of the Bulgarian communist nomenklatura elite in the 1980s:
"More specifically, there were some 1,000 to 2,000 families spread across the
country that were bound together through common political backgrounds and in any
given town or region through kinship, and who formed the higher levels of the
nomenklatura." See also Crowther's (1997: 287) characterization of Moldovan
political governance on the eve of the Soviet Union's collapse.

26
ii. patterns of civic interest mobilization and intermediation

The balance of power between communists and non-communists in the late 1980s
depended on the practices and skills of both camps before the advent of communist rule.
While not being "proximate" in spatio-temporal terms, fifty years of communist rule is
a comparatively short period. People's political capabilities and experiences in
solving problems of collective action during pre-communist times were embedded in the
individual and collective memories of subsequent generations. Moreover, in a number of
countries, repeated episodes of open conflict between communist rulers and an otherwise
dormant civil society refreshed and updated such capabilities in the Cold War era.
In the countries I have characterized as bureaucratic-authoritarian communism, both
the communist parties as well as their antagonists were resourceful organizers in pre-
communist times. Compared to the rest of the communist region, Czechoslovakia and what
became East Germany, the two bureaucratic-authoritarian cases, had strong militant
socialist and communist working class parties (and unions) in the interwar period. They
confronted a highly developed "bourgeois" sector of liberal, religious, or agrarian
civic and political associations before the Nazi takeover in Germany and the German
occupation in Czechoslovakia. After fascism, Czechoslovak and East German communists
could impose their rule on the bourgeois camp through intensive repression of their
opponents, based on their rebounding internal organizational resources and reliance on
strong working class support, even once Stalinism began to subside in other communist
polities.
These communist ruling parties stayed intransigent until the bitter end in 1989
and then imploded in the face of a brief, but intense onslaught of mobilization by a
rejuvenated non-communist civil society that had the capabilities to rebound quickly at
the first sign of weakness in the existing ruling party. Because communists quickly
lost their economic and political power bases in that process, while non-communist
civic and political associations could revive quickly, formerly bureaucratic-
authoritarian communist polities offered excellent prospects for the inauguration of
democracy.
In the second group of countries I characterize as "national accommodative"
communism, communist parties had weak moorings in social groups before taking power,
while their bourgeois counterparts thrived, however constrained by semi-authoritarian
polities in the interwar period. In these polities after 1945 communist rule stood on
shaky feet and faced repeated uprisings in the thaw following Stalin's death. Sooner or
later, communist rulers felt compelled to seek an at least tacit accommodation with the
actual and virtual political opposition, framed around the basic common interest in

27
preserving a modicum of national autonomy from the Soviet Russian hegemon. National
accommodative communism facilitated political and/or economic liberalization, even
though in a halting and uneven fashion. Ultimately, these reforms paved the way for a
transition to democracy by negotiation between the ruling party and an array of
noncommunist proto-parties and associations in the late 1980s. The opportunities for a
post-communist transition to democracy were promising because liberalization under the
communist regime permitted the gradual appearance of a civil society, thus promoting a
pluralization of political voices both inside the old communist apparatus (through
party reform) as well as outside the communist party's grasp. In contrast to formerly
bureaucratic-authoritarian communism, national accommodative communism did not leave
behind a weak, intransigent anti-democratic former ruling party, but a social
democratized, strong successor party willing to accede to the consensus around
democratic governance structures supported by its former antagonists.
National accommodative communism and negotiated transitions characterize Slovenia,
Hungary and Poland, yet also to a considerable extent the Baltic republics of the
Former Soviet Union. Ample evidence illustrates the incomplete control of the CPSU over
the Baltic communist parties and their efforts to engineer some sort of accommodation
with the local population, intermittently punctuated by repressive interventions from
Moscow (cf. Arter 1996: chapters 4 and 5; Krickus 1997; Plakans 1997; Raun 1997).
In a third group of polities characterized by patrimonial communism, finally,
authoritarian or despotic, sultanistic regimes preceded the advent of communism. They
exhibited only minimally developed civil societies with weak economic interest
associations or proto-parties. Within this group, one might further distinguish between
Southeastern Europe and the fission products of what represented the "core" of the
Former Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the FSU's quasi-colonial periphery with
extreme patrimonialism, on the other. In the latter, political mobilization before the
breakdown of communism was virtually unknown and the trappings of stateness arrived
24
only in the late Tsarist regimes.
In the core group of FSU and Southeast European patrimonial communist regimes,
communist parties were typically weakly entrenched in society when they assumed power,
but they faced even weaker rival political and civic organizations. Therefore, it was
not just repression of opposition figures that kept challenges to the ruling party at
the margins. Throughout the Cold War and detente decades after Stalin's death, these
patrimonial communisms lacked opposition voices that could have forced communist rulers
to seek an accommodation. In the late 1980s, only small nodes of dissidents existed on

24
For the comparative study of these regimes, see especially volumes 3 and 4
of Dawisha and Parrott (1997).

28
the eve of the system breakdown. In these polities, the engines of communist system
transformation were insiders, groups and cabals in the communist elites themselves who
wished to salvage as much as possible of the existing order through preemptive reform
strikes, not completely unlike the logic driving the "reactionary reforms" of Bismarck
Germany and Meiji Japan in the 1860s. These preemptive communist reformers, however,
usually underestimated the depth of the economic and organizational crisis entrapping
communist regimes. Hence, communist modernizers often could not control the spirits of
reform they invoked and were compelled to accept more and different political and
economic change than they had initially bargained for. Even where formerly patrimonial
communist polities democratized in the 1990s, however, the weakness of an oppositional
civil society and the all but unchecked hegemony of the former ruling party left behind
a powerful core of unreconstructed communists who have persistently argued against
market liberalization and yearn for the replacement of democratic governance
structures.
In the group of colonial peripheral republics of the Soviet Union, the most extreme
manifestations of patrimonial communism, there were virtually no significant dissident
currents congealing around liberal-democratic on the even of the Soviet breakdown.
Whatever stirrings of opposition surfaced, they were more concerned with religious and
national identity than liberal economic or political reform. In these polities, the
incumbent communist elites did little more than refashioning their ideological veneer
and adorning it with a new nationalist ideology. After a brief relaxation of
totalitarian rule, this allowed cliques of rulers to refashion and reinvigorate the
authoritarian state apparatus. Many of these successor regimes have a decidedly neo-
sultanistic character (cf. Taras 1997) with personalist-patrimonial bureaucracies and
the absence of organized interest intermediation outside the party machines controlled
by the rulers themselves.

iii. the model and related legacy-based explanations

As we move from bureaucratic-authoritarian via national-accommodative to

patrimonial communism, the probability that post-communist polities become democratic
declines. Both causal mechanisms of system transformation I have specified --
opportunities for rent-seeking state structures and the balance between supporters and
opponents of the communist regime-- yield parallel expectations. Table 2 summarizes my
argument for the three basic communist regime types, but ignores the further
subdivision between "core" and "colonial periphery" within patrimonial communist
polities. The logic of my argument from path-dependence is substantively quite close to

29
the comparative reasoning we encounter in Shefter's (1994) analysis of clientelism or
in Laitin's (1998) study of contrasting patterns of language conflict and cultural
assimilation in four post-soviet independent states.
TABLE 2 ABOUT HERE
Shefter wishes to explain why some countries developed programmatic party systems
in the late nineteenth century, while others created patronage-based polities with non-
professional bureaucracies. His argument essentially homes in on the same variables
featured in my account of post-communist regime change: the timing of professional-
bureaucratic state formation and the development of civic organizations before the
advent of the democratic opening. Where bureaucratic-professional states existed before
democratization, they were less available for patronage politics, thus disadvantaging
the "insiders" of authoritarian regimes in their quest to convert old political
privileges into new political-economic hegemonic control when suffrage was extended. At
the same time, where mass organizations of "outsiders" in civil society began to
mobilize through interest groups and proto-parties before formal inclusion in the
political process, there party systems more likely began to revolve around programmatic
competition and avoided reliance on patronage and clientelism based selective
incentives to electoral constituencies.
Laitin (1998) studies diverse patterns of linguistic assimilation exhibited by
Russian speaking minorities in several successor polities of the FSU (Estonia, Latvia,
Ukraine, and Kazakhstan). At the macro-level, he constructs three "ideal types" of
communist rule in the former Soviet republics. He then explains the propensity of
Russian speakers to assimilate to the language and culture of the titular majority
governing the now independent post-communist FSU successor states based on a logic of
path-dependence. Laitin's three types closely resemble the distinction between
national-accommodative communism, patrimonial communism in the core FSU and in the
colonial periphery. He then works out causal micro-mechanisms to show how the regime
legacies translate into different strategies of assimilation pursued by the members of
the Russian language minority. Depending on the regime form, Russian speakers develop
different expectations about the material and status payoffs from adopting the language
of the titular ethnic group governing the newly independent country (cf. Laitin 1998:
25
chapter 3). His characterization of the difference between the situation in the Baltic
countries, Ukraine as a component of the core Soviet Union, and the Central Asian
colonial periphery often employs similar variables as those I have used in my

25
At the most abstract level, Laitin (1998) works out the key elements of the
micro-macro linkage consistent with my explanatory sketch on pages 196-8 and 243-
48 in his critical discussion of Gellner's (1983) macro-functionalism.

30
construction of types.

B. State Independence, Ethnic Pluralism, and Post-communist Regime

No analysis of post-communist regime change can ignore the impact of the formation
of newly independent states and the often closely related renegotiation of multiethnic
relations in a polity. These developments affect at least half of the 25+ post-
26
communist polities. Ceteris paribus, they may affect the entrenchment of political
regimes via modifications of the two mechanisms, the power of rent-seeking alliances
and the balance of communist and anti-communist forces.

26
In my initial work on post-communist party competition, I disregarded these
factors (cf. Kitschelt 1992 and as critique Evans and Whitefield 1993).

31
 TABLE 2: ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF THREE TYPES OF COMMUNIST RULE

BUREAUCRATIC- NATIONAL- PATRIMONIAL

AUTHORITARIAN ACCOMMODATIVE COMMUNISM
COMMUNISM COMMUNISM
_________________________________________________________________________________

I. ANTECEDENTS OF
COMMUNIST RULE

PRE-COMMUNIST industrial partially agricultural

POLITICAL capitalism industrialized pre-capitalist
ECONOMY agriculture < 40% market economy economy
of employment agriculture > 40% agriculture > 60%
and < 60% of of employment
employment

MOBILIZATION 1. highly mobilized 1. highly mobilized 1.unmobilized urban

OF POLITICAL urban middle strata urban middle strata urban middle strata
FORCES 2. highly mobilized 2.unmobilized working 2.unmobilized wor-
working class class king class
3.agrarian pressure 3. strong agrarian 3. strong agrarian
groups mobilization mobilization

PRE-COMMUNIST competitive semi-authoritarian traditional

POLITICAL representative rule with "managed" authoritarian
REGIME democracy party competition or absolutist rule
+ rational-bureau- + rational-bureau- + patrimonial state
cratic state cratic state
_________________________________________________________________________________

II. MODES OF COMMUNIST RULE

strong pre-communist weak pre-communist weak pre-communist

CP + rational-bureau- CP + rational-bureau- CP + patrimonial
cratic state yields... cratic state yields.. state yields...

FORMAL BUREAUCRA- strong formal intermediate weak formal

TIZATION OF THE professional formal professional professional
STATE APPARATUS bureaucratization bureaucratization bureaucratization
low corruption low-medium corruption high corruption

METHODS TO repression: intense repression: secondary repression: intense

INDUCE POPULAR
COMPLIANCE WITH cooptation: secondary cooptation: intense cooptation: intense
PARTY AUTHORITY
_________________________________________________________________________________

III. MODES OF TRANSITION

FROM COMMUNISM

INCUMBENTS united, intransigent predominantly ready divided, personalist

defensive communist to offer concessions cliques
sub-culture and social democratic
party in decline reform

CHALLENGERS strong liberal democrats strong liberal demo- weak lib. democrats
weak nationalist groups crats and nationalists strong nationalists

TRANSITION implosion of regime protracted negotiations preemptive reform

PROCESS short, sharp protest wave between challenger and by incumbent elite
incumbent elites faction
_______________________________________________________________________________

32
 New states create a host of new political offices to which contending political
forces will try to avail themselves. Newly independent state may therefore have weaker
professional bureaucracies, a development that may undermine the rule of law, market
liberalizing economic reform, and even the entrenchment of democracy. Net of other
effects, new state formation should thus coincide with lower scores of civic and
political freedoms.
After the end of communism, also the politicization of ethnic pluralism may
undercut political democracy because it tends to call for an allocation of scarce
resources based on ascriptive, particularist criteria and the creation of permanent
lines of division that undercut open political competition. Ethnic mobilization often
leads to the discrimination against members of an outgroup and thus puts universalistic
political and civic freedoms at risk. Moreover, particularistic ethnic privileges may
also manifest themselves in rent-seeking, clientelist arrangements (cf. Horowitz 1985:
chapter 7). Ethnic markers and networks make it easier to police direct relations of
political exchange between electoral constituencies that surrender the vote and
politicians who reward voting compliance with material favors. In addition, such
27
arrangements tend to undercut the rule of law and democratic freedom. All of these
mechanisms make ethnic politics particularly useful tools in the hands of politicians
who favor non-competitive, authoritarian political regimes.
Ethnic politics may add to the power of anti-democratic forces precisely where
that power is already strong because of a patrimonial communist background that
undercuts the mobilization of liberal democrats in the late 1980s. Former communist
rulers in ethnically divided polities may invoke the allegiance of ethnic groups,
whether they are Russians or new titular majorities, in order to dissuade people from
supporting open competitive democracies and rather to back authoritarian rule.
Conversely, where strong non-communist ethnic-nationalist movements exist, also their
leaders may employ ethnic sentiments to establish non-democratic regimes that privilege
a particular ethnic group. In such cases, the representatives of the former communist
ruling parties may actually seek alliances with liberal democrats and try to tone down
28
ethnic conflict.
While it is theoretically plausible that new state formation and ethnic pluralism

27
For a discussion of the tension between the formal-legal universalism of
democratic electoral competition and the informal particularism underlying
clientelist politics, see Roniger (1994: 9-10).
28
Non-communist nationalists, with often anti-democratic dispositions are
relevant in Armenia, Croatia, Georgia, Macedonia and Moldova. Anti-democratic
alignments configured around elements of the former communist ruling parties, by
contrast, prevail in the former Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union and in
Russia itself. In Croatia, Slovakia and the Ukraine, it often is hard to say
whether the anti-democratic promoters of ethnic divisions are successors or
opponents of the former communist regime.
affect the diversity of post-communist polities, it is an open question how large the
net effect of the mechanisms are that work through ethnic divides, when compared to the
structural legacies of communist rule, as identified by bureaucratic
professionalization and the balance of power between communist party and the (virtual)
opposition. State building and ethnic conflict may be refracted by the structural
legacies of communist rule, such that those new polities within the realm of national-
accommodative communist legacies can control the anti-democratic dynamics of ethnic
conflict better than countries where a patrimonial and colonial legacy predisposes
political elites toward non-democratic regimes.

Operationalizing the Legacies of Communist Rule

In the empirical analysis that follows, the collinearity of bureaucratic state

legacies and balance of power between communists and their challengers compels me to
create a single legacies variable. After the demise of the German Democratic Republic,
the only surviving polity with a clearly bureaucratic-authoritarian legacy is the Czech
Republic (score = 3). Polities with a background of national-accommodative communism
are more numerous: Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states (score = 2).
Patrimonial communist regimes yielding less favorable conditions for democracy
prevailed in Southeastern Europe and the core areas of the former Soviet Union,
Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Georgia, Macedonia, Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine (score
= 1). The remaining fission products of the Former Soviet Union belonged to a colonial
periphery with next to no articulation of civil society before the advent of communism
and fully patrimonial administrative relations that jointly produce the dimmest
opportunities for democratic regime entrenchment.
As with all typologies and coding schemes, there are cases particularly hard to
classify, in this instance Croatia and Slovakia. Had the Serb-Yugoslav leadership not
purged the reformist leadership of the Croatian communist party in the early 1970s, the
republic might have taken the route common to national-accommodative communism. But
this intervention preempted this path and created a situation in the late 1980s where
an immobile communist party collapsed on the face of a nationalist onslaught. I score
this case as a diminutive form of national-accommodative communism (score = 1.5).
Under Czech tutelage, after 1948 Slovakia adopted the institutions of Czech
bureaucratic authoritarianism, but its interwar background of limited working class and
"bourgeois" political mobilization as well as its popular fascist puppet regime from
1939 to 1945 really put the country into a different category of legacies hat may even
include considerable patrimonial elements. Because of the mixed heritage of the

32
Slovakian case, I assign it a score of 2.0.
Compared to the operationalization of communist legacies, it is easy to measure the
ancillary variables of new state formation after 1989 and ethnic divisions. The former
can be represented by a dummy variable that assumes a value of 1 in polities that where
not independent before 1993. The potential for ethnic conflict can be captured by a
simple index of ethnic heterogeneity in which the score is the percentage of the
overall population accounted for by the titular ethnic group.

5. Empirical Analysis of Post-Communist Political Regime Entrenchment

Let us begin with a "proximate" causal determinant of democratic consolidation by

1996 or 1998. Fish (1998b: 46-53) employs the outcome of a post-communist country's
initial election at or near the time of the demise of its Soviet-type regime as
predictor of economic reform propensities. The logic of his "political-conjunctural"
explanation is straightforward. The more completely the old communist elites are pushed
out of power, the greater are the probabilities of pressing forward with economic
reforms. A parallel logic can be applied to the quality of post-communist political
regime in the late 1990s. Countries are more likely to have substantive or at least
formal democratic procedures, if communist incumbents were displaced from government
during the crisis of communist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the
results of the first election were not subverted by non-democratic means. One clean
election with reform-promoting results begets further steps toward establishing
democratic governance.
Fish justifies his scoring of the extent to which communists were displaced in the
founding election in detail. His composite score for each country measures the extent
of the success of noncommunists in the initial election and the extent to which these
election results prevailed over challenges to democracy. The numerical data for this
variable, as well as all other variables are in appendix table A1. While I do not
29
always find his coding of the cases entirely convincing, I accept Fish's country
scores so as to avoid the charge of opportunistic data manipulation to stack the deck
against rival hypotheses.

29
The hesitation to embrace Fish's scores especially concerns Albania,
Armenia, Croatia, Georgia, and Russia.

33
 Indeed, Fish's founding election variable does an excellent job in explaining the
perseverance of post-communist democracy, as measured by the Freedom House indices in
1996 and 1998. The more profound the displacement of communists in founding elections
and the stickier those election results are in the aftermath, the less we encounter
violations of civic and political rights in 1996 (r = -.84; N = 25) and 1998 (r = -.83;
N = 25). The proximate explanation "mops up" almost the entire variance in post-
communist political regime entrenchment, and we could let things rest right then and
there. According to Occam's Razor, we have a parsimonious and efficient explanation of
what we are looking for. The founding elections after 1989 almost deterministically
explain the nature of durable post-communist regimes.
There are two reasons, however, not to close the case with this explanation. First,
treating founding elections as cause yields an extremely shallow explanation. We would
like to know whether, in a path-dependent fashion, initial elections are themselves
endogenous to deeper causal mechanisms that shape them. Moreover, it turns out that
some other theoretically interesting variables (1) highly correlate with civic and
political freedoms and (2) help us to develop a causal ordering that reveals the
essentially endogenous nature of Fish's founding election variable.
Let us begin with communist legacies. They are related to the Freedom House scores
of civic and political rights violations in an equally strong pattern as initial
elections (r = -.84/1996; r = -.81/1998), although they are causally more distant from
the explanandum. Moreover, communist legacies explain over three fifth of the variance
in countries' initial election scores themselves (r = .78). This makes it plausible to
argue that communist legacies provide the mechanism that surfaces in initial elections,
in spite of the open, unpredictable, conjunctural character of such elections.
Both regime legacies and initial election results are strongly related to
businesspeople's perception of corruption in the post-communist polities as of 1995 (r
30
= -.86 and r = -.76). Corruption, in turn, is also strongly related to the Freedom
31
House indices of rights violations (r = -.85 both in 1996 and 1998). The high
correlation between regime legacies of communism and corruption scores in the 1990s

30
The scores of this variable come from the panel of business consultants and
investors polled by the Wallstreet Journal's European sister publication, the
Central European Economic Review (December 1995-January 1996: p. 8-12). These
scores correlate highly with other scores that tap the predictability of public
administration and contract enforcement, such as Euromoney's 1994 country risk
scores (r = +.85; N = 24), reported in Euromoney, Vol. 5, No. 9 (November-December
1994), p. 14.
31
For a broader sample of 85 countries, Rose and Shin (1999: 12) report a
similarly close affinity between perceived corruption and civic and political
rights.

34
suggests that corruption is not simply endogenous to the political cataclysms of the
late 1980s, but that such practices may have been deeply entrenched in the communist
32
regimes at an earlier time. Both communist regime type and practices of corruption, in
turn, causally affect initial election results and the long-term outlook for the
entrenchment of democracy.
If we return in time to communist regime legacies as our causal operator, why not
go all the way, in the style of Putnam and other deep historical comparativists, to
religion and European geography as the ultimate causes of post-communist regime types
in the late twentieth century? Simple correlational statistics would warrant such a
step. If we score countries with a preponderance of Western Christianity highest (score
= 3), followed by polities with Eastern Christianity (score = 2) and trailed by Islamic
dominance (score = 1), then a polity's prevailing religious beliefs are strongly
related to Freedom House scores (r = -.83/1996 and -.85/1998). Furthermore, communist
regime legacies, corruption, and initial election results are all endogenous to
religion, indicated by bivariate correlations according to which religion accounts for
more than two thirds of the variance in each of them (see table 3).
TABLE 3 ABOUT HERE
A similar result surfaces, if we score a post-communist country's geographical
remoteness from the West in terms of the distance of its capital from the closest

32
It should also be noted that new state formation has a positive, but
comparative weak relationship with corruption (+.37).

35
 TABLE 3: CORRELATIONS AMONG THE STRATEGIC VARIABLES
(N = 25)

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

1. RELIGION: -.84 +.88 -.26 +.38 -.82 +.75 +.82 -.85 -.82
PREDOMINANT
DENOMINATION

2. DISTANCE FROM - -.87 -.25 -.41 +.83 -.55 -.76 +.82 +.78
CLOSEST EU
CAPITAL

3. COMMUNIST - - -.36 +.44 -.86 +.66 +.78 -.84 -.81

LEGACY

4. NEW STATE - - - -.60 +.37 -.10 -.27 +.43 +.37

FORMATION

5. ETHNO-CULTURAL - - - - -.46 +.33 +.33 -.42 -.39

HOMOGENEITY

6. CORRUPTION - - - - - -.58 -.76 +.85 +.85

(1995)

7. GDP PER CAPITA - - - - - - +.45 -.62 -.61

1985

8. FOUNDING ELEC- - - - - - - - -.84 -.83

TIONS: DISPLACE-
MENT OF
COMMUNISTS

9. FREEDOM HOUSE - - - - - - - - +.93

CIVIC AND
POLITICAL
RIGHTS 1996

10. FREEDOM HOUSE - - - - - - - - -

CIVIC AND
POLITICAL
RIGHTS 1998
_________________________________________________________________________________________

36
 33
capital inside the European Union, without counting Greece. Greater distance strongly
correlates with Freedom House scores of civic and political rights violations (r =
+.82/1996 and +.78/1998), and also distance accounts for between 58 and 74 percent of
the variance in all the other determinants of democratic entrenchment I just have
considered (cf. table 3).
The problem with both religion and geographical distance as determinants of post-
communist regime entrenchment, however, is the lack of suitable causal mechanisms other
than those provided by the legacies variables already discussed. Geography and religion
most likely indicate the spread of a pattern of state formation and economic
organization that ultimately resulted first in distinctive interwar political and
economic regimes and then in diverse modes of communist rule after 1945.
I cannot think of (and therefore cannot test) an alternative micrologic that would
take off from religion in order to account for post-communist democratization. It is
not the case that in countries with a predominance of Catholic or protestant religion
the churches uniformly served as centers of anti-communist or pro-democratic
resistance. Poland is more the outlier than the typical case in that regard. In
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, or the Baltic countries religious organizations
played at best a very subordinate role in the struggle against communist rule.
With regard to geographical distance, causal mechanisms that avoid historical path
dependency would focus on economic relations and expectations. Proximity to the West
reduces transaction costs of commerce and draws post-communist economies closer to
Western markets. In order to facilitate such developments, postcommunist elites may
adjust their political systems so as to please Western democratic governments. The
testable elements of this micrologic, however, show that this causal mechanism rests on
shaky foundations. According to this argument, the intervening variables between
geographical distance and political regime form should be the volume of trade, here
measured as exports per million inhabitants in 1996, and the cumulative stock of
foreign direct investment (FDI) per million inhabitants at the end of the same year.
Countries close to the West should enjoy more trade and foreign direct investment
which, in turn, should be strongly related to civic and political freedoms.

Empirical results show, however, that the hypothesized relations are rather
mediocre. Closer geographical distance between post-communist and EU polities accounts

33
Post-communist capitals closer than 300 km to their closest EU counterpart
receive a score of 5. The score goes down by a point for each additional 300 km of
distance, with country capitals further than 1,200 km from a Western capital
scoring 1. Different micrologics can be attached to the exclusion of Greece. A
cultural micrologic claims that modern Greece, as former part of the Ottoman
Empire, is not really a constituent element of Western civilization (cf.
Huntington 1994: 162-63). An economic micrologic stipulates that the Greek economy
has little pull to orient post-communist polities. In any case, the elimination of
Greece affects only the distance scores of Bulgaria and Macedonia.
only for 35 percent of variance in trade and 29 percent of variance in FDI. Communist
legacies actually trump geographical distance as predictors of cross-national variance
in trade and FDI, accounting for over 50 percent of that variance. For supporters of
the proximity theory, it must come also as a big disappointment that trade and FDI
display weak relations to post-communist regime patterns, as measured by Freedom House
civic and political rights. The explained variance does not exceed 33 percent, leaving
many outliers unaccounted for. If the geographical distance variable builds on a strong
micrologic that would link it to contemporary political regime type, that logic would
therefore have to work almost entirely through expectations of post-communist
politicians. Political elites in countries geographically close to the EU expect to
benefit through trade and FDI in the future. At this time, the absence of suitable
survey evidence makes this proposition intestable. Moreover, in light of the strong
findings based on path-dependent regime choice, it may be unnecessary to support a
highly speculative explanation of post-communist regime variance.
A legacies-based explanation also offers a much more powerful account of post-
communist regime diversity than a straight application of modernization theory. As
table 3 illustrates, 1985 levels of per capita GDP in the various communist states and
Soviet or Yugoslav republics are only moderately related to corruption, non-communist
founding elections, and ultimately Freedom House civic and political rights scores.
They never account for more than 38 percent of the variance. Ironically, per capita GDP
figures are more strongly related to the independent variables highlighted by the
institutional theoretical account, starting with religion (r = .75) and working through
communist regime legacies (r = .66), than with the current regime outcomes in the late
1990s.
New state formation and ethnic heterogeneity, finally, do show weak and
statistically insignificant correlations with civic and political freedoms that have
the correct sign (see table 3). Ethnic heterogeneity is negatively correlated with
political and civic freedoms (r = -.42/1996 and -.39/1998). But these results are
overdetermined by the communist legacies variable, patterns of corruption, and their
34
more distant associates (religion, geographical distance). Based on this evidence, it
remains uncertain how large the independent contribution of new state formation and
ethnic relations is to the nature of post-communist political regimes.
Overall, I find it theoretically and empirically most adequate for the explanation
of postcommunist regime diversity to construct a causal chain that works backwards from

34
In multivariate regressions with the Freedom House indices as dependent
variables (not shown), state formation and ethnic pluralism wash out as predictors
of post-communist regime form.

37
the results of postcommunist founding elections and the entrenchment of civic and
political rights in the 1990s to the diverse nature of communist regimes and legacies
of pre-communist rule that affect the bargaining relations among defenders and
challengers of the status quo, when the window of opportunity opened in the late 1980s.
By contrast, very "deep" explanations based on religion or geography, by themselves,
have preciously little plausibility for a causal explanation of regime diversity.
Either they lack causal mechanisms, or if they rely on causal mechanisms, they involve
the intervening variables of pre-communist and communist patterns of political and
economic interest mobilization and governance that is at the heart of the "middle
range" explanation I have proposed.
The empirical facts also suggest that new independent state formation and ethnic
heterogeneity may have a unique impact on political regime trajectories, especially by
erecting obstacles to democratization. At the same time, the evidence is sufficiently
weak to suggest that ethno-cultural conflict undercuts the entrenchment of democratic
regimes precisely and primarily in those instances, where other political and economic
legacies unrelated to the polity's ethnocultural composition already make
authoritarianism more likely than democracy.

6. Conclusion

My paper has employed primitive bivariate statistical estimation techniques to

explore the relationship among rival explanations for post-communist regime
entrenchment. The limited validity and reliability of the quantitative empirical
indicators, statistical modelling constraints, but also theoretical considerations,
warrant this strategy. The statistical rationale for the absence of more sophisticated
multivariate estimations has to do with the nature of the statistical associations
among the potentially critical causal variables, as displayed in table 3 and Appendix
1. Because correlations among the independent variables usually reach or exceed .70, it
is all but meaningless to enter them jointly on the right hand side of equations that
employ the Freedom House civic and political rights scores of post-communist countries
on the left hand side. Moreover, given the coarseness of many measures in cross-
national macro-historical analysis, and hence the substantial size of likely
measurement errors, the results of sophisticated statistical models might create a
false impression of precision in discriminating among rival theories that is not
warranted by the quality of the data.
Theoretically, I have argued in the first part of this paper that it makes no
sense to create multivariate statistical tournaments among potential determinants of

38
some outcome, if these rival explanations are at different temporal points in what may
be a chain of causal mechanisms ultimately affecting the outcome variable. It is
appropriate to employ multivariate statistical tournaments to find a "winner" only if
all the rival theoretical variables have the same temporal status in the causal chain
vis-à-vis some outcome. A direct statistical comparison between temporally "deep" and
"shallow" explanations, by contrast, is meaningless.
How to sort out deeper and shallower explanations is a matter of constructing
empirical causal chains and theoretical analysis, not of statistical algorithms. A deep
explanatory proposition may be theoretical useless, if no plausible corresponding
micrologic can be specified and empirically tested. Conversely, a shallow explanation
with micrologic may only state the obvious, but not satisfy our search for a causal
explanation. Both excessive depth and shallowness are trumped by moderately deep
explanations with micro-logics that reconstruct a chain of determination among
temporally sequential social processes and structures. As I have argued before, a
commitment to deep explanations does not automatically bias the investigation toward
culturalist or rational-institutionalist theories. In the particular instance of post-
communist regime entrenchment, rationalist and culturalist elements work together in
the explanatory account.
Future research may explore whether the explanatory account I have offered for the
set of 25 postcommunist polities can be usefully extended to cover the remaining
communist and post-communist regimes such as Serbia, China, Cuba, North Korea or
Vietnam, as well as trajectories of new political regime entrenchment in countries
without a communist heritage in Latin America or Asia.
All of the remaining communist countries appear to have bureaucratic legacies and
patterns of political mobilization that squarely put them into the category of
patrimonial communism, if not its sultanistic extreme. The entrenchment of formal, let
alone substantive democracy appears to be quite difficult under these circumstances.
The picture may be more promising for the entrenchment of democracy in many of the
Southeast Asian and Latin American countries that have become democratic during the
"third wave" of democratic regime change in the 20th century. While they typically lack
professionalized civil service arrangements so that politicians can exploit state
resources for particularist alliance building, many exhibit legacies and patterns of
civic mobilization that make them resemble the pathways of "national-accommodative," if
not "bureaucratic-authoritarian" communist polities.
In many Southeast Asian and Latin American polities, the causal mechanisms that
affect political regime formation send mixed signals. On the one hand, the weakness of
professional bureaucracies is unfavorable to the rule of law, but highly conducive to

39
clientelist politics, both features that undercut substantive democratic relations of
representation. On the other, after repeated episodes of democracy many of these
countries have diffused skills and experiences of political interest association that
raise the costs for potential authoritarian challengers of democracy. As a consequence,
many Asian and Latin American countries with such mixed conditions may gravitate toward
intermediate levels of civic and political rights, as demonstrated by Diamond (1999).
By contrast, in the post-communist world, the development or the absence of a
professional civil service and of legacies of political mobilization mutually reinforce
each other. For this reason, it is more plausible to find a polarization of regime
forms in that region, with a set of firmly entrenched full substantive democracies, at
one pole, and a set of unambiguously authoritarian regimes, at the other.

REFERENCES

Agh, Attila
1998 The Politics of Central Europe. London: Sage.
Arter, David
1996 Parties and Democracy in the Post-Soviet Republics. The Case of Estonia.
Aldershot: Dartmouth.

Bates, Robert H., Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Jr., and Barry R. Weingast

1998 "The Politics of Interpretation. Rationality, Culture, and Transition,"
Politics and Society, Vol. 26, No. 4: 603-42.
Boisot, Max and John Child
1996 "From Fiefs to Clans and Network Capitalism: Explaining China's Emerging
Economic Order," Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3: 600-28.

Boudon, Raymond
1998 "Social Mechanisms without Black Boxes," pp. 172-203 in Peter Hedström
and Richard Swedberg, (eds.), Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach
to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bremmer, Ian, and Ray Taras, eds.
1997 New States. New Politics. Building the Post-Soviet Nations. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Chehabi, H. E., and Juan J. Linz

1998 "A Theory of Sultanism 1: A Type of Nondemocratic Rule," pp. 3-26 in H.E.
Chehabi and Juan J. Linz, eds., Sultanistic Regimes. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.

Collier, Ruth Berins and David Collier

1992 Shaping the Political Arena. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Crawford, Keith
1996 East Central European Politics Today. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.

Crowther, William
1997 "The Politics of Democratization in Postcommunist Moldava," pp. 282-329
in Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., Democratic Changes and
Authoritarian Reactions in Russia, Ukraine and Moldova. Cambridge:

40
 Cambridge University Press.

Dawisha, Karen, and Bruce Parrott

1997 Authoritarianism and Democratization in Postcommunist Societies.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4 volumes.

Denzau, Arthur, and Douglass C. North

1994 "Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions," Kyklos, Vol. 47,
No. 1: 3-31.

Diamandouros, P. Nikiforos, and F. Stephen Larrabee

1999 Democratization in Southeastern Europe. Theoretical Considerations and
Evolving Trends. Working Papers of the Juan March Institute, 1999/129.
Diamond, Larry
1999 Developing Democracy Toward Consolidation. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press.

DiPalma, Guiseppe
1990 To Craft Democracies. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press.
Elster, Jon
1982 "Marxism, Functionalism, and Game Theory: The Case for Methodological
Individualism," Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 4: 453-82
1989 The Cement of Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1998 "A Plea for Mechanisms," pp. 45-73 in Peter Hedström
and Richard Swedberg, (eds.), Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach
to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Geoffrey, and Stephen Whitefield
1993 "Identifying the Bases of Party Competition in Eastern Europe,"
British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 23,4: 521-48.
Fish, M. Steven
1998a "Reversal and Erosion of Democratization in the Postcommunist World. Paper
presented at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Boston.
1998b "The Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-Communist World," East
European Politics and Societies, Vol. 12, No. 1: 31-78.
1998c "Democratization's Requisites: The Postcommunist Experience," Post-
Communist Affairs, Vol. 14, No.3: 212-47.
Geddes, Barbara
1994 Politician's Dilemma. Building State Capacity in Latin America. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Gellner, Ernest
1983 Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Goldstone, Jack A.
1998 "Initial Conditions, General Laws, Path Dependence and Explanation in
Historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 3:
829-45.

Greif, Avner
1994 "Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society. A Historical and
Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies,"
Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 102, No. 3: 912-50.
Gunther, Richard, P. Nikiforos Diamandouros and Hans-Jürgen Puhle
1996 "O'Donnell's 'Illusions': A Rejoinder," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7,
No. 4: 151-59.

Hedström, Peter and Richard Swedberg

1998 "Social Mechanisms. An Introductory Essay," pp. 1-31 in Peter Hedström

41
 and Richard Swedberg, (eds.), Social Mechanisms. An Analytical Approach
to Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hellman, Joel
1996 "Constitutional and Economic Reform in Postcommunist Transition," East
European Constitutional Review, Vol. 5, No. 1: 46-57.
1998 "Winners Take All. The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist
Transitions," World Politics, Vol. 50, No. 2: 203-34.

Higley, John, and Richard Gunther, eds.

1992 Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe.
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Higley, John, Jan Pakulski and Wlodzimierz Wesolowski,

1998 "Introduction: Elite Change and Democratic Regimes in Eastern Europe,"
pp. 1-33 in idem, eds., Postcommunist Elites and Democracy in Eastern
Europe. London: MacMillan.
Horowitz, Donald
1985 Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Huntington, Samuel P.
1996 The Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Immergut, Ellen M.
1998 "The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism," Politics and Society,
Vol. 26, No. 1: 5-24.

King, Gary, Robert O. Keohane, and Sidney Verba

1994 Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press.

Kiser, Edgar, and Michael Hechter

1991 "The Role of General Theory in Comparative-Historical Sociology," American
Journal of Sociology, Vol. 97, No. 1: 1-30.
1998 "The Debate on Historical Sociology: Rational Choice Theory and Its
Critics," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 3: 786-816.

Kitschelt, Herbert
1992 “The Formation of Party Systems in East Central Europe,” Politics and
Society, Vol. 20, No. 1: 7-50.
Kitschelt, Herbert, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radek Markowski, and Gabor Toka
1999 Post-communist Party Systems. Competition, Representation, and Interparty
Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kitschelt, Herbert and Regina Smyth
1999 Programmatic Party Cohesion in Emerging Post-Communist Democracies: Russia
in Comparative Context. Manuscript.

Krasner, Stephen D.
1988 "Sovereignty. An Institutional Perspective,” Comparative Political Studies,
Vol. 21, No. 1: 66-94.

Krickus, Richard J.
1997 "Democratization in Lithuania," pp. 290-333 in: Karen Dawisha and Bruce
Parrott, eds., The Consolidation of Democracy in East-Central Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kümmel, Gerhard
1998 "Democratization in Eastern Europe. The Interaction of Internal and
External Factors. An Attempt at Systematization," East European Quarterly,
Vol. 31, No.2: 243-67.

Laitin, David D.

42
 1998 Identity in Formation. The Russian Speaking Populations in the Near-
Abroad. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Levi, Margaret
1996 "Social and Unsocial Capital. A Review Essay of Robert Putnam's Making
Democracy Work," Politics and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1: 45-55.
Linz, Juan, and Alfred Stepan
1996 Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation. Southern Europe,
South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.
March, James Gardner and Johan P. Olsen
1989 Rediscovering Institutions. New York: Free Press.
Miller, Richard
1987 Fact and Method. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Nikolov, Stephan E.
1998 "Bulgaria: A Quasi-Elite," pp. 213-25 in John Higley, Jan Pakulski, and
Wlodzimierz Wesolowski, eds., Postcommunist Elites and Democracy in
Eastern Europe. London: MacMillan.
North, Douglass C.
1981 Structure and Change in Economic History. New York: Norton.
O'Donnell, Guillermo
1996 "Illusions about Consolidation," Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 2:
34-51.

O'Donnell, Guillermo, and Philippe C. Schmitter

1986 Transitions from Authoritarian Rule. Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain
Democracies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Offe, Claus
1994 Der Tunnel am Ende des Lichts. Frankfurt, Main: Campus Verlag.
Opp, Karl-Dieter
1999 "Contending Conceptions of the Theory of Rational Action," Journal of
Theoretical Politics, Vol. 11, No. 2: 171-202.
Plakans, Andrejs
1997 "Democratization and Political Particiaption in Postcommunist Societies:
The Case of Latvia," pp. 245-89 in Karen Dawisha and Bruce
Parrott, eds., The Consolidation of Democracy in East-Central Europe.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Przeworski, Adam
1991 Democracy and the Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Przeworski, Adam, Michael Alvarez, Jose A. Cheibub, Fernando Limongi
1996 "What Makes Democracies Endure?" Journal of Democracy, Vol. 7, No. 1:
39-55.

Przeworski, Adam and Fernando Limongi

1997 "Modernization. Theory and Facts," World Politics, Vol. 49, No. 2: 155-83.

Putnam, Robert, with Robert Leonardi and Raffaella Y. Nanetti

1993 Making Democracy Work. Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.

Raun, Toivo U.
1997 "Democratization and Political Development in Estonia, 1987-96," in:
Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The Consolidation of Democracy in
East-Central Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

43
Roeder, Philip G.
1994 "Varieties of Post-Soviet Authoritarian Regimes," Post-Soviet Affairs,
Vol. 10, No. 1: 61-101.
1997 Why Is Russia More Democratic than Most of Its Neighbors? Paper prepared
for Delivery at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Washington, D.C., August 28-31.
1998 The Triumph of Authoritarianism in Post-Soviet Regimes. Prepared for
Delivery at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Assocaition, Boston, September 3-6.

Roniger, Luis
1994 "The Comparative Study of Clientelism and the Changing Nature of Civil
Society in the Contemporary World," pp. 1-18 in Luis Roniger and Ayse
Günes-Ayata, eds., Democracy, Clientelism, and Civil Society. Boulder:
Lynne Rienner.

Rose, Richard, and Doh Chull Shin, Democratization Backwards. The Problem of the Third
1999 Wave Democracies. Center for the STudy of Public Policy. University of
Strathclyde, Volume 314.

Sabetti, Filippo
1996 "Path Dependency and Civic Culture: Some Lessons from Italy About
Interpreting Social Experiments," Politics and Society, Vol. 24, No. 1:
19-44.

Salmon, Wesley C.
1989 "Four Decades of Scientific Explanation," pp. 3-219 in Philip Kitcher and
Wesley C. Salmon, eds., Scientific Explanation. Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schöpflin, George
1993 Politics in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shefter, Martin
1994 Political Parties and the State. The American Historical Experience.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Snow, David A., E Burke Rochford, Steven K. Warden and Robert D. Benford
1986 "Frame Alignment Processes, Micromobilization, and Movement
Participation," American Sociological Review, Vol. 51: 464-81.

Somers, Margaret
1998 "'We're No Angels': Realism, Rational Choice and Relationality in Social
Science," American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 104, No. 3: 722-84.

Stark, David, and Laszlo Bruszt

1997 Postsocialist Pathways. Transforming Politics and Property in East Central
Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stinchcombe, Arthur
1968/87 Constructing Social Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taras, Ray, ed.

1997 Post-Communist Presidents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thelen, Kathleen
1999 "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics," The Annual Review
of Political Science 1999. Palo Alto: Annual Review Press.
Thelen, Kathleen and Sven Steinmo
1992 "Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics," pp. 1-32, in: Sven
Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics.
Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Vorozheikina, Tatiana

44
 1994 "Clientelism and the Process of Political Democratization in Russia," pp.
105-19 in Luis Roniger and Ayse Günes-Ayata, eds., Democracy, Clientelism,
and Civil Society. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.
Weber, Max
1968/78 Economy and Society. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press.
Willerton, John P.
1992 Patronage and Politics in the USSR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

45
 APPENDIX TABLE A-1: POST-COMMUNIST COUNTRIES AND THEIR SCORES ON CRUCIAL VARIABLES

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

RELIGION DISTANCE COMMUNIST NEW STATE ETHNO- CORRUPTION 1985 PER

DISPLACMENT
FROM LEGACIES FORMATION CULTURAL IN 1995 CAPITA GDP
OF COMMUNIST
CLOSEST HOMOGENEITY INCUMBENTS
EU CAPITAL IN FIRST
ELECTIONS
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ALBANIA 1 2 1 0 92 5.7 2509 3

ARMENIA 2 5 0 1 93 7.0 5822 4
AZERBAIJAN 1 5 0 1 83 7.6 5170 0
BELARUS 2 5 1 1 78 6.9 7388 0
BULGARIA 2 2 1 0 80 4.4 7120 3

CROATIA 3 1 1.5 1 78 4.0 6382 5

CZECH REPUBLIC 3 1 3 0 96 1.4 8105 5
ESTONIA 3 1 2 1 62 2.9 7163 5
GEORGIA 2 5 1 1 70 8.4 6391 3
HUNGARY 3 1 2 0 95 1.2 7259 5

KAZAKHSTAN 1 5 0 1 42 7.4 4776 1

KYRGYZSTAN 1 5 0 1 52 6.7 3512 3
LATVIA 3 1 2 1 52 3.4 7720 5
LITHUANIA 3 2 2 1 80 3.2 6663 5
MACEDONIA 2 2 1 1 67 5.4 3254 4

MOLDOVA 2 3 0 1 65 6.5 5314 2

POLAND 3 1 2 0 97 1.4 5630 5
ROMANIA 2 2 1 0 85 5.0 4735 3
RUSSIA 2 3 1 0 82 7.7 7804 4
SLOVAKIA 3 1 2 1 79 3.4 6880 5

SLOVENIA 3 1 2 1 91 0.7 10,772 4

TAJIKISTAN 1 5 0 1 65 8.6 3096 1
TURKMENISTAN 1 5 0 1 73 7.1 4070 1
UKRAINE 2 3 1 1 73 7.5 5853 2
UZBEKISTAN 1 5 0 1 62 8.0 3573 1

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

DATA SOURCES: column (1) through (4) see text; column 50: seee Bremmer and Taras (1997); column (6) see
footnote 30; column (7), see Hellman (1996); column (8): see Fish (1998b).

47