Variations in Post-Communist Europe: a Worthwhile Addition (original) (raw)

2014, Studies of Transition States and Societies

points out that he has two goals: fi rst, to outline a grounded general theory of postcommunist transformation, using techniques of qualitative comparative analysis as a framework for the construction of this theory; and second, to apply typological ideas of capitalism and democracy for the analysis of the state and trends in the development of post-communist Lithuania. The book is divided into two parts based on these general goals. The fi rst part is devoted to twenty-nine diff erent case studies, and it covers the patterns of political and economic change during the fi rst decade of post-communist transformation. In order to describe the initial conditions of post-communist transformation, three variables are used: (a) orientation of post-communist transformation; (b) economic mode of exit from communism; and (c) political mode of exit from communism. Hence, the analysis is related to the transformation of the economic as well as of the political system. Zenonas Norkus diff erentiates four types of economic modes of exit from communism: minimal, partial, gradual-incremental and radical (or shock therapy) in order to supersede the entrenched dichotomy between gradualism and shock therapy. Compared with the analysis of the economic modes, the analysis of the political mode presented by the author is not as sharply revisionist with respect to the transitological mainstream. The conceptual framework of the book integrates and relativises the claims of the varieties of capitalism theory (VoC) of Peter A. Hall and David Soskice (Hall & Soskice, 2001). Norkus claims that in its original formulation this theory can be applied only to the core countries of the capitalist world system. This means that the theory is more useful for the analysis of the alternative futures of post-communist capitalism than for the description of its present state. Norkus departs from Andreas Nölke and Arjan Vliegenthart, analysing the features of post-communist capitalism in the Central European countries and classifying them as dependent market economies (DME). He also elaborates the VoC theory (Nölke & Vliegenhart, 2009), supplementing their analysis with the diff erentiation of the two subtypes of DME-Weberian-Porterian capitalism characteristic for Central European countries and Weberian-Friedmanian capitalism in the Baltic States. The preparatory work for the qualitative comparative analysis in search of general patterns of post-communist transformation is closed by a brief description of the diff erent subtypes of democracy and authoritarianism and the classifi cation of the post-communist political regimes. The following chapter is the central chapter of the book. Zenonas Norkus describes empirically observable pathways of post-communist transformation. He states that among 29 countries there were only 17 individual ways in which countries departed from communism. Thereafter, he tries to understand which formula has contributed to the emergence of a specifi c outcome-liberal democratic capitalism. In searching for generalisations, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is used. This method is based on the Boolean minimisation, which is the reduction of a long, complex expression of individual pathways into a shorter, more parsimonious one. The number of pathways depends on how many conditions that may aff ect the outcome are used. Not all conceptual distinctions made in theory sections are exploited by the author in the QCA, as otherwise there would be too many conditions STSS Vol 6 / Issue 2 Studies of Transition States and Societies