Grigore Pop-Eleches - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Grigore Pop-Eleches

The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies

Communism's Shadow

This chapter analyzes the mechanisms underlying the large and temporally resilient democratic val... more This chapter analyzes the mechanisms underlying the large and temporally resilient democratic values deficit among residents of post-communist countries. While a number of pre-communist and post-communist demographic, political, and economic factors affect democratic support patterns, these features of living in a post-communist country alone cannot account for the significant democratic deficit of post-communist citizens. However, the study found very strong support for the effects of exposure to communism at the individual level: the extent of the democratic deficit increases substantially with the length of time a given individual spent living in a communist regime, even after controlling for a citizen's age. The data, therefore, strongly suggest that the legacy of living through communism contributed to anti-democratic attitudes in the post-communist period.

Problems of Post-Communism, 2014

Although none of the color revolutions has proved to be completely successful in bringing about l... more Although none of the color revolutions has proved to be completely successful in bringing about long-term democratic change, differences in outcomes among them cast light on both the possibilities and the limitations that countries face when liberalization opportunities present themselves. Comparison of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan is instructive.

It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important e... more It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. This book instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. This book introduces two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the book demonstrates that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of de...

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2018

Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the rel... more Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the relationship between ethnicity, language practice, and civic identities on the one hand and political attitudes on the other. We find that while ethnic identities and language practices change little on the aggregate level over the period, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of people thinking of Ukraine as their homeland. There has also been a large fall in support for a close political and economic relationship with Russia and some increase in support for joining the European Union. Nevertheless, we find that identities in general, and language practice in particular, remain powerful predictors of political attitudes and that people are more likely to shift attitudes to reflect their identities rather than modify their identities to match their politics. Ukraine won its independence from the USSR in 1992 on the back of a referendum in which 90% of voters supported independence. Moreover, support for independence was above 80% in all but two regions-Crimea and the Crimean city of Sevastopol-and even there more than 50% of voters (though less than 40% of the electorate) supported separation. This extraordinary moment of national unity did not last, however. Already by the 1994 presidential elections, Ukraine was sharply divided between an ethnically Ukrainian, and largely Ukrainian-speaking, west and center and a south and east that had large ethnic Russian minorities, was largely Russophone, and supported candidates promising closer relations with Russia. These deep differences have been a staple of Ukrainian politics in the democratic era, as the divide extended from support for particular candidates to views of domestic political upheaval (such as the Orange Revolution) and preferences over foreign policies such as European integration and relations with Moscow. Nevertheless, during the 2014 "Euromaidan Revolution" that overthrew then President Viktor Yanukovych, a key claim of the revolutionaries was that what they called the "Revolution of Dignity" was not about sectional interests but rather represented people from all across Ukraine. Moreover, the aftermath of the revolution, which involved war and the annexation of Crimea by Russia, led some scholars to argue that what we are seeing now is the emergence of a new and much stronger sense of identity in Ukraine and a greater sense of political unity (Alexseev 2015; Kulyk 2016). The extent to which this is indeed the case and the details of this new identity and its political implications are crucial questions for Ukraine in the post-Maidan era.

Communism's Shadow, 2017

This chapter looks at the questions of data and methodology. It is divided into three parts. The ... more This chapter looks at the questions of data and methodology. It is divided into three parts. The first part introduces in much greater detail the intuition behind the study's methodological approach. The second part provides information regarding the modeling choices made in the analyses, the justification for doing so, and a discussion of some of the consequences of the choices for how one ought to interpret the findings. The third part describes both the survey data sets analyzed and the aggregate-level data collected to augment these surveys. Ultimately, the chapter can function almost as a stand-alone reference section that is easily accessibly at any time during the reading of the book.

Communism's Shadow, 2017

This introductory chapter addresses the question of why post-communist citizens are less supporti... more This introductory chapter addresses the question of why post-communist citizens are less supportive of democracy and markets, and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The most intuitive answer to this question is that it is somehow a legacy of communism. However, as popular as it has become to attribute outcomes of interest in post-communist countries to “legacies,” and despite some recent theoretical efforts to conceptualize historical legacies more carefully, there is no clearly established theoretical or empirical blueprint for analyzing the effect of legacies on attitude. Accordingly, there are two more theoretically precise potential answers to the question of “why”: it may be because of the experience of living through communism; or it may be because of the experience of living in a post-communist country.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the changing role of partisan politics in the developing world since... more ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the changing role of partisan politics in the developing world since the 1980s. The analysis identifies two related but distinct dimensions of partisanship – ideology and institutional ties – and then tests their impact on IMF program initiation in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the last two decades. In addition to this conceptual distinction, I show that partisanship is best understood not in isolation but in its changing interaction with different types of economic crises. In particular, I show that some types of crises (e.g. low foreign currency reserves) elicit similar policy responses across political parties and temporal/regional contexts. By contrast, other crises (such as inflation and recessions) trigger different responses depending on the government's partisan preferences, and these patterns differ across regions and time periods as a function of historical legacies and the international economic and political context.

This paper analyzes the role of government ideology in IMF program initiation in Latin America an... more This paper analyzes the role of government ideology in IMF program initiation in Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1981-2012 period. Particularly in Eastern Europe, the statistical tests reveal a significant increase in the magnitude and resilience of partisan differences in the recent round of IMF programs compared to the pre-crisis years. Based on comparisons to earlier crises, this recent revival of ideology seems to be primarily due to the external roots and the large magnitude of the current crisis, which mirrors the dynamics of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. By comparison, regional partisan trends, such as the rise of the Latin American Left in the last decade, played a secondary role.

Post-communist citizens-all else being equal-are more supportive of government redistribution tha... more Post-communist citizens-all else being equal-are more supportive of government redistribution than citizens in the rest of the world. We seek to assess the extent to which these patterns are legacies of communist rule and what mechanisms brought them about. To do so, we introduce two general theoretical arguments for why post-communist citizens might hold systematically different views on these types of questions. The first focuses on the context in which post-communist citizens live (e.g., demographic, economic, and political conditions) and makes no reference to the actual experience of living through communism. The second is based on the idea that it is the actually exposure to communist rule that may have led to people adopting a particular set of attitudes. Furthermore, we suggest that exposure effects may be intensified or diminished by predictable factors (i.e., a year of communist exposure is not likely to have the same effect on all individuals or in all countries or time periods.) We present a method for testing both of these approaches, and provide empirical evidence in regard to the attitudes of post-communist citizens towards the welfare state. We find surprisingly little support for the contextual effects explanation for the higher post-communist welfare state support. Even when we control for pre-communist differences, conditions at the end of communism, and demographic, economic, and political differences between post-communist and non-communist countries at the time our surveys were conducted, we continue to find persistent and large differences in support for welfare states/redistribution among post-communist citizens. Instead, exposure to communism seems to be quite important, but the effect of exposure is moderated by the timing and social, economic and political context in which a given individual was socialized.

ABSTRACT Abstract will be provided by author.

ABSTRACT Abstract will be provided by author.

Explaining Post-Communist Differences In the world outside of the post-communist countries of Cen... more Explaining Post-Communist Differences In the world outside of the post-communist countries of Central and .Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, younger, more educated, and more democratically inclined citizens tend to have a left-wing bias in terms of their self-placement on a standard left-right scale. In post-communist countries, however, it is the opposite: younger, more educated, and more democratically inclined citizens all tend to have a right-wing bias. (1) Why might this be the case? One could point to the fact that older citizens in these countries had largely been socialized under communist--and hence leftwing--regimes. Or one could point to the fact that communism-- a non-democratic regime--had a leftist orientation, and thus democratic opposition and a propensity to self-identify on the right hand side of the political spectrum could seem like natural bedfellows. Alternatively, it is conceivable that those who are less educated might still expect the state to provide for all their basic social welfare needs, precisely as the communist state had done previously, while at the same time criticizing the new democratic state for failing to provide these benefits. We have actually tested these different explanations against each other, and find stronger support for the second and third hypotheses than for the early socialization explanation, but for now, the key point is that it is difficult to imagine an answer to that question that did not somehow invoke the specter of the communist past shared by these countries. In order to answer the above question, and a range of other similar questions about the underlying causes of post-communist political attitudes and behavior, we really have to tackle three main analytical tasks. First, we have to establish the key features that distinguished the communist experience from the social, political, and economic experiences of other countries in the world. Second, we need to formulate a set of theoretical arguments that link these distinctive features of communist regimes and societies to the political attitudes and behavior of the citizens who now live in these "post-communist" societies. Finally, we need a rigorous, falsifiable method for ascertaining whether or not our assertions about the effects of the communist past on political attitudes and behavior in post-communist countries are supported by empirical evidence. We are currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies, and Political Values and Behavior that addresses all three of these tasks, and then tests these competing theoretical explanations on a wide range of political attitudes and behaviors. (2) In the remainder of this article, however, we briefly present our general thoughts in terms of the second of these tasks: introducing a set of rigorous theoretical arguments about the manner in which the communist era past could affect political attitudes and behavior in the post-communist present. While this is not an empirical article, the eventual empirical analysis we have conducted (3) and plan to conduct in the future strongly motivates our overriding argument: if we want to claim that the past matters, then we need to have a priori theories about how the past matters, and these theories need to have observable implications that can be tested empirically. We identify four potential pathways by which communist-era legacies could affect political attitudes and behavior in the post-communist present. First, it is possible that living through communism, and in particular being "politically socialized" under communism results in different attitudes about politics and/or different forms of political behavior. Conversely, it is possible that people who lived through communism do not approach politics any differently than those who did not, but that communism left behind a different socio-demographic landscape, which in the aggregate leads to different patterns of political attitudes and behavior. …

Twenty Years After Communism, 2014

World Politics, 2010

The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puz... more The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals? Why did this reversal in Eastern Europe happen during a period of economic recovery, remarkable Western integration progress, and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town? This article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence. While protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism, the beneficiaries of these protes...

International Studies Quarterly, 2009

This article uses empirical evidence from Latin American and East European International Monetary... more This article uses empirical evidence from Latin American and East European International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs from 1982 to 2001 to analyze the nature and the extent of preferential lending practices by the IMF. Unlike prior work, which focused on narrow political interference from large IMF member states, the present analysis differentiates between such narrow interests and the Fund's international systemic responsibilities, which may justify the preferential treatment of systemically important countries to prevent broader regional or global crises. The empirical results suggest that systemically based deviations from technocratic impartiality predominate in situations-such as the Latin American debt crisis-where international financial stability is under serious threat. Under such circumstances, economically important countries do receive preferential IMF treatment but only when experiencing severe crises, while narrow ''private goods'' considerations are largely sidelined. When systemic threats are less immediate-such as in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1990s-IMF favoritism reflects a more volatile and region-specific mix of private and public considerations in line with the changing interests of powerful Western nations in the developing world.

Europe-Asia Studies, 2010

Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essa... more Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essay examines political reforms in Bulgaria and Romania since EU accession and, in particular, the 'backsliding' hypothesis-that these countries have abandoned or reversed the reforms they introduced in order to qualify for membership of the European Union. It finds no systematic evidence either that these countries have been backsliding or that their trajectories differ significantly from their first-wave Central and East European neighbours, though governance reforms have slowed after accession. The second part of the essay focuses on the mechanisms responsible for the lack of significant backsliding, emphasising the role of continued conditionality through the safeguard clauses, EU funding and increasing linkage between new and old EU members, including opportunities for East Europeans to work and travel in Western Europe.

The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies

Communism's Shadow

This chapter analyzes the mechanisms underlying the large and temporally resilient democratic val... more This chapter analyzes the mechanisms underlying the large and temporally resilient democratic values deficit among residents of post-communist countries. While a number of pre-communist and post-communist demographic, political, and economic factors affect democratic support patterns, these features of living in a post-communist country alone cannot account for the significant democratic deficit of post-communist citizens. However, the study found very strong support for the effects of exposure to communism at the individual level: the extent of the democratic deficit increases substantially with the length of time a given individual spent living in a communist regime, even after controlling for a citizen's age. The data, therefore, strongly suggest that the legacy of living through communism contributed to anti-democratic attitudes in the post-communist period.

Problems of Post-Communism, 2014

Although none of the color revolutions has proved to be completely successful in bringing about l... more Although none of the color revolutions has proved to be completely successful in bringing about long-term democratic change, differences in outcomes among them cast light on both the possibilities and the limitations that countries face when liberalization opportunities present themselves. Comparison of Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan is instructive.

It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important e... more It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. This book instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. This book introduces two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the book demonstrates that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of de...

Post-Soviet Affairs, 2018

Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the rel... more Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the relationship between ethnicity, language practice, and civic identities on the one hand and political attitudes on the other. We find that while ethnic identities and language practices change little on the aggregate level over the period, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of people thinking of Ukraine as their homeland. There has also been a large fall in support for a close political and economic relationship with Russia and some increase in support for joining the European Union. Nevertheless, we find that identities in general, and language practice in particular, remain powerful predictors of political attitudes and that people are more likely to shift attitudes to reflect their identities rather than modify their identities to match their politics. Ukraine won its independence from the USSR in 1992 on the back of a referendum in which 90% of voters supported independence. Moreover, support for independence was above 80% in all but two regions-Crimea and the Crimean city of Sevastopol-and even there more than 50% of voters (though less than 40% of the electorate) supported separation. This extraordinary moment of national unity did not last, however. Already by the 1994 presidential elections, Ukraine was sharply divided between an ethnically Ukrainian, and largely Ukrainian-speaking, west and center and a south and east that had large ethnic Russian minorities, was largely Russophone, and supported candidates promising closer relations with Russia. These deep differences have been a staple of Ukrainian politics in the democratic era, as the divide extended from support for particular candidates to views of domestic political upheaval (such as the Orange Revolution) and preferences over foreign policies such as European integration and relations with Moscow. Nevertheless, during the 2014 "Euromaidan Revolution" that overthrew then President Viktor Yanukovych, a key claim of the revolutionaries was that what they called the "Revolution of Dignity" was not about sectional interests but rather represented people from all across Ukraine. Moreover, the aftermath of the revolution, which involved war and the annexation of Crimea by Russia, led some scholars to argue that what we are seeing now is the emergence of a new and much stronger sense of identity in Ukraine and a greater sense of political unity (Alexseev 2015; Kulyk 2016). The extent to which this is indeed the case and the details of this new identity and its political implications are crucial questions for Ukraine in the post-Maidan era.

Communism's Shadow, 2017

This chapter looks at the questions of data and methodology. It is divided into three parts. The ... more This chapter looks at the questions of data and methodology. It is divided into three parts. The first part introduces in much greater detail the intuition behind the study's methodological approach. The second part provides information regarding the modeling choices made in the analyses, the justification for doing so, and a discussion of some of the consequences of the choices for how one ought to interpret the findings. The third part describes both the survey data sets analyzed and the aggregate-level data collected to augment these surveys. Ultimately, the chapter can function almost as a stand-alone reference section that is easily accessibly at any time during the reading of the book.

Communism's Shadow, 2017

This introductory chapter addresses the question of why post-communist citizens are less supporti... more This introductory chapter addresses the question of why post-communist citizens are less supportive of democracy and markets, and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The most intuitive answer to this question is that it is somehow a legacy of communism. However, as popular as it has become to attribute outcomes of interest in post-communist countries to “legacies,” and despite some recent theoretical efforts to conceptualize historical legacies more carefully, there is no clearly established theoretical or empirical blueprint for analyzing the effect of legacies on attitude. Accordingly, there are two more theoretically precise potential answers to the question of “why”: it may be because of the experience of living through communism; or it may be because of the experience of living in a post-communist country.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the changing role of partisan politics in the developing world since... more ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the changing role of partisan politics in the developing world since the 1980s. The analysis identifies two related but distinct dimensions of partisanship – ideology and institutional ties – and then tests their impact on IMF program initiation in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the last two decades. In addition to this conceptual distinction, I show that partisanship is best understood not in isolation but in its changing interaction with different types of economic crises. In particular, I show that some types of crises (e.g. low foreign currency reserves) elicit similar policy responses across political parties and temporal/regional contexts. By contrast, other crises (such as inflation and recessions) trigger different responses depending on the government's partisan preferences, and these patterns differ across regions and time periods as a function of historical legacies and the international economic and political context.

This paper analyzes the role of government ideology in IMF program initiation in Latin America an... more This paper analyzes the role of government ideology in IMF program initiation in Latin America and Eastern Europe during the 1981-2012 period. Particularly in Eastern Europe, the statistical tests reveal a significant increase in the magnitude and resilience of partisan differences in the recent round of IMF programs compared to the pre-crisis years. Based on comparisons to earlier crises, this recent revival of ideology seems to be primarily due to the external roots and the large magnitude of the current crisis, which mirrors the dynamics of the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. By comparison, regional partisan trends, such as the rise of the Latin American Left in the last decade, played a secondary role.

Post-communist citizens-all else being equal-are more supportive of government redistribution tha... more Post-communist citizens-all else being equal-are more supportive of government redistribution than citizens in the rest of the world. We seek to assess the extent to which these patterns are legacies of communist rule and what mechanisms brought them about. To do so, we introduce two general theoretical arguments for why post-communist citizens might hold systematically different views on these types of questions. The first focuses on the context in which post-communist citizens live (e.g., demographic, economic, and political conditions) and makes no reference to the actual experience of living through communism. The second is based on the idea that it is the actually exposure to communist rule that may have led to people adopting a particular set of attitudes. Furthermore, we suggest that exposure effects may be intensified or diminished by predictable factors (i.e., a year of communist exposure is not likely to have the same effect on all individuals or in all countries or time periods.) We present a method for testing both of these approaches, and provide empirical evidence in regard to the attitudes of post-communist citizens towards the welfare state. We find surprisingly little support for the contextual effects explanation for the higher post-communist welfare state support. Even when we control for pre-communist differences, conditions at the end of communism, and demographic, economic, and political differences between post-communist and non-communist countries at the time our surveys were conducted, we continue to find persistent and large differences in support for welfare states/redistribution among post-communist citizens. Instead, exposure to communism seems to be quite important, but the effect of exposure is moderated by the timing and social, economic and political context in which a given individual was socialized.

ABSTRACT Abstract will be provided by author.

ABSTRACT Abstract will be provided by author.

Explaining Post-Communist Differences In the world outside of the post-communist countries of Cen... more Explaining Post-Communist Differences In the world outside of the post-communist countries of Central and .Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, younger, more educated, and more democratically inclined citizens tend to have a left-wing bias in terms of their self-placement on a standard left-right scale. In post-communist countries, however, it is the opposite: younger, more educated, and more democratically inclined citizens all tend to have a right-wing bias. (1) Why might this be the case? One could point to the fact that older citizens in these countries had largely been socialized under communist--and hence leftwing--regimes. Or one could point to the fact that communism-- a non-democratic regime--had a leftist orientation, and thus democratic opposition and a propensity to self-identify on the right hand side of the political spectrum could seem like natural bedfellows. Alternatively, it is conceivable that those who are less educated might still expect the state to provide for all their basic social welfare needs, precisely as the communist state had done previously, while at the same time criticizing the new democratic state for failing to provide these benefits. We have actually tested these different explanations against each other, and find stronger support for the second and third hypotheses than for the early socialization explanation, but for now, the key point is that it is difficult to imagine an answer to that question that did not somehow invoke the specter of the communist past shared by these countries. In order to answer the above question, and a range of other similar questions about the underlying causes of post-communist political attitudes and behavior, we really have to tackle three main analytical tasks. First, we have to establish the key features that distinguished the communist experience from the social, political, and economic experiences of other countries in the world. Second, we need to formulate a set of theoretical arguments that link these distinctive features of communist regimes and societies to the political attitudes and behavior of the citizens who now live in these "post-communist" societies. Finally, we need a rigorous, falsifiable method for ascertaining whether or not our assertions about the effects of the communist past on political attitudes and behavior in post-communist countries are supported by empirical evidence. We are currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies, and Political Values and Behavior that addresses all three of these tasks, and then tests these competing theoretical explanations on a wide range of political attitudes and behaviors. (2) In the remainder of this article, however, we briefly present our general thoughts in terms of the second of these tasks: introducing a set of rigorous theoretical arguments about the manner in which the communist era past could affect political attitudes and behavior in the post-communist present. While this is not an empirical article, the eventual empirical analysis we have conducted (3) and plan to conduct in the future strongly motivates our overriding argument: if we want to claim that the past matters, then we need to have a priori theories about how the past matters, and these theories need to have observable implications that can be tested empirically. We identify four potential pathways by which communist-era legacies could affect political attitudes and behavior in the post-communist present. First, it is possible that living through communism, and in particular being "politically socialized" under communism results in different attitudes about politics and/or different forms of political behavior. Conversely, it is possible that people who lived through communism do not approach politics any differently than those who did not, but that communism left behind a different socio-demographic landscape, which in the aggregate leads to different patterns of political attitudes and behavior. …

Twenty Years After Communism, 2014

World Politics, 2010

The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puz... more The electoral rise of unorthodox parties (UOPs) in recent East European elections raises some puzzling questions about electoral dynamics in new democracies. Why did the power alternation of the mid-1990s not result in party-system consolidation, as suggested by some earlier studies, but instead give way to a much more chaotic environment in which established mainstream political parties lost considerable ground to new political formations based on personalist and populist appeals? Why did this reversal in Eastern Europe happen during a period of economic recovery, remarkable Western integration progress, and a broad acceptance of electoral democracy as the only game in town? This article suggests that these electoral dynamics can be explained by focusing on the interaction between protest voting and election sequence. While protest voting to punish unpopular incumbents has been a widespread but understudied practice since the collapse of communism, the beneficiaries of these protes...

International Studies Quarterly, 2009

This article uses empirical evidence from Latin American and East European International Monetary... more This article uses empirical evidence from Latin American and East European International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs from 1982 to 2001 to analyze the nature and the extent of preferential lending practices by the IMF. Unlike prior work, which focused on narrow political interference from large IMF member states, the present analysis differentiates between such narrow interests and the Fund's international systemic responsibilities, which may justify the preferential treatment of systemically important countries to prevent broader regional or global crises. The empirical results suggest that systemically based deviations from technocratic impartiality predominate in situations-such as the Latin American debt crisis-where international financial stability is under serious threat. Under such circumstances, economically important countries do receive preferential IMF treatment but only when experiencing severe crises, while narrow ''private goods'' considerations are largely sidelined. When systemic threats are less immediate-such as in Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1990s-IMF favoritism reflects a more volatile and region-specific mix of private and public considerations in line with the changing interests of powerful Western nations in the developing world.

Europe-Asia Studies, 2010

Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essa... more Using cross-national governance indicators and evidence from a recent Bulgarian survey, this essay examines political reforms in Bulgaria and Romania since EU accession and, in particular, the 'backsliding' hypothesis-that these countries have abandoned or reversed the reforms they introduced in order to qualify for membership of the European Union. It finds no systematic evidence either that these countries have been backsliding or that their trajectories differ significantly from their first-wave Central and East European neighbours, though governance reforms have slowed after accession. The second part of the essay focuses on the mechanisms responsible for the lack of significant backsliding, emphasising the role of continued conditionality through the safeguard clauses, EU funding and increasing linkage between new and old EU members, including opportunities for East Europeans to work and travel in Western Europe.