Varieties of Capitalist Democracy: What Difference Does East-Central Europe Make? (original) (raw)
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2003
The identification of the sub-types of capitalist democracy has been one of the great projects of political science. The issue of the distinctiveness of East-Central European models of capitalist democracy is implicit in much of the literature on this region. Existing studies are based on samples of countries and choices of variables which are too narrow to provide a plausible assessment of the distinctiveness of East-Central Europe. This article compares twenty-two capitalist democracies, including the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, across fifty-two measures of political institutions, social welfare regimes and economic structures. The data is analysed by cluster analysis. While the cluster analysis cannot tell us how many varieties of democratic capitalism there are, it provides a consistent clustering of countries. If there are six or more varieties of democratic capitalism, the East-Central European cases form a cluster on their own. If there are three or four varieties, they cluster with Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. If there are only two varieties, East-Central Europe is clearly associated with the continental European, as opposed to the liberal, model.
2016
After 1989, the Central European states have been experiencing both political and economic transitions. However, there is still no consensus of opinion on how these processes were correlated. This essay argues that the speed of economic transition affected the regimes’ political transition to democracy in the Central European states. Economic transition is to be interpreted as a liberalisation of the economy; whereas democracy is to be defined as a political system in which citizens enjoy free and fair elections, freedom of expression, and the ability to participate in politics.
Most European post-communist societies after 1989-1991 appeared to be on the road to liberal democratic capitalism. However, a quarter of century after the change of the system, at least some of the countries - Russia and Hungary in particular (arguably setting trend for many other nations) - began to drift sharply away from liberal democracy. We treat liberalism and democracy as two distinct dimensions of “good governance”. We interpret liberalism as separation of powers and security of private property rights. We interpret democracy as majoritarian rule. As the regimes shift to illiberalism, secure private property tends to be converted into “fief” (neo-patrimonialism – like during the rule of Yeltsin), or eventually into “benefice” (neo-prebendalism, this turn happened with the rise of Putin to power). While the principle of majoritarian rule is retained, it is also “managed”. But as long as democratic institutions operate, as long as leaders are elected to office the ruling elites of illiberal democracies need a legitimating ideology which can appeal to a broader electorate. We call this post-communist neo-conservative ideology. Post-communist neo-conservatism emphasizes the value of patriotism, religion and traditional family values much like some of the socially conservative neo-cons in the USA do. On the other hand, unlike their American soul brothers, the post-communist neo-cons attribute the critical role of preserving these values to the state.
Emerging varieties of capitalism in central and eastern Europe
Varieties of capitalism in post-communist …, 2006
The basic premise of this paper is that individual countries have distinctive strategies for growth, giving rise to many different varieties of capitalism. It takes the view that institutional arrangements and the action of governments have a major influence on decision-making of economic actors and on national economic performance. This issue is particularly important issue for the post-socialist countries since they have social systems of production that were largely transformed in the 1990s. To show its importance, we develop a simple empirical framework that highlights some of the characteristics of the emerging varieties of capitalism in the post-socialist countries relative to developed countries. Using data from a variety of sources, we are able to differentiate between liberal market economies and coordinated market economies. The study finds that the postsocialist countries appear across the spectrum with Belarus, Ukraine, Slovenia and Croatia being among the most coordinated, while Russia and Estonia being the most liberal.
Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits: Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery
Croatian Economic Survey, 2014
The emergence of different types of capitalist regimes across Eastern Europe during post-socialist transition has shifted scholarly interest away from analyzing what countries need to do in order to "become capitalist democracies" and directed it towards a more complex research agenda on the various structural, political and social configurations that make this regime diversity possible. An example of this shift emerged during the second half of the 2000s, when attempts were made to extend the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) typology beyond the Western liberal market economies (LMEs), epitomized by the US and the UK, and the coordinated market economies (CMEs), as represented by Germany and Japan. These attempts included the identification of South European economies as mixed market economies (Molina and Rhodes, 2007) and Latin American economies as hierarchical market economies (Schneider, 2009). Eastern European countries have been attributed a greater regime diversity. While the Baltic states have been identified as the LME type, Slovenia has been classified as a CME (Feldmann, 2006). The Visegrád countries, on the other hand, have been identified as belonging to a completely different type, the so-called dependent brought to you by COR w metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk