Download or read book Institutional Design and Party Government in Post communist Europe written by Csaba Nikolenyi and published by Comparative Politics. This book was released on 2014 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the institutional foundations of coalition government in the ten post-communist democracies of Eastern and Central Europe, arguing that differences in the arrangement of political institutions systematically explain variations in patterns of multi-party government.
Download or read book Institutional Design in Post Communist Societies written by Jon Elster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-03-28 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors of this book have developed a new and stimulating approach to the analysis of the transitions of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia to democracy and a market economy. They integrate interdisciplinary theoretical work with elaborate empirical data on some of the most challenging events of the twentieth century. Three groups of phenomena and their causal interconnection are explored: the material legacies, constraints, habits and cognitive frameworks inherited from the past; the erratic configuration of new actors, and new spaces for action; and a new institutional order under which agency is institutionalized and the sustainability of institutions is achieved. The book studies the interrelations of national identities, economic interests, and political institutions with the transformation process, concentrating on issues of constitution making, democratic infrastructure, the market economy, and social policy.
Download or read book Institutional Design and Party Development in Post communist States written by Sergiu Gherghina and published by Editura Lumen. This book was released on 2007 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Embodying Democracy written by S. Birch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-10-04 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embodying Democracy analyzes the politics of electoral reform in eight post-communist states including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia and Ukraine. By exploring the multiple factors that shaped the design of electoral institutions during the first ten years of post-communist transition, it accounts for an important element of the post-communist reform process and illuminates general features of institutional design in post-transition states.
Download or read book Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post Communist Europe written by S. Birch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-11-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe assesses the influence of electoral systems on political change in 20 post-communist European states. The main finding is that electoral institutions have systematic effects on the formation of representative structures. 'Party-enabling' aspects of electoral laws such as list proportional representation tend to foster popular inclusion in politics and institutionalized party systems, whereas 'politician-enabling' rules such as single-member districts and ballots that allow voters to select individuals often favour the development of weakly structured systems and high levels of popular exclusion from the representative process.
Download or read book Governing After Communism written by Vesselin Dimitrov and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely comparative analysis explores the evolution of governance in Central and Eastern Europe. The book considers post-communist leaders' key challenge: the development of central government institutions capable of coordinating, integrating, and steering the policymaking process. Building on a broad range of primary sources and extensive field research, the distinguished authors analyze the processes and outcomes of institution-building in Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria since the late 1980s. They examine in detail the organization and inner workings of central executives; explain differences in executive trajectories across time and countries by considering the influence of institutional legacies, the impact of evolving party systems, and the role of crises in spurring institutional change; and show the effects of executive institutions on patterns of public policy, especially the budgetary process. Through a rigorous application of the core-executive framework, this study offers nuanced conceptual and analytical insights that will enhance understanding of both the evolving institutions of Central and Eastern Europe and the more stable West European systems. The in-depth analysis of the development of national executive institutions casts a distinctive new light on debates about EU enlargement, Europeanization, and patterns of governance.
Download or read book Institutional Design In New Democracies written by Arend Lijphart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on the relationship between the tasks of institutional design and the outcomes of the process of economic and political liberalization in Latin America and in Central and Eastern Europe. The contributors emphasize the design of institutions to serve a market economy, the design of electoral laws, and the design of executive-legislative relations. Within this framework each chapter discusses the legacy of the pre-existing authoritarian regime; the range of preferences among various strategic actors with regard to the pace and mix of reforms; and the consequences of final choices for the institutionalization of effective economies and the process of democratization. Countries throughout Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe are moving from semi-closed to open economies and from authoritarian to democratic political systems. Despite important differences between the regions, these transitions involve similar tasks: the establishment of governmental institutions and electoral systems conducive to legitimation of the new and fragile democracies and expansion of the institutional infrastructure of a market economy. This volume looks at both regions, focusing on the relationship between the tasks of institutional design and the outcomes of the process of economic and political liberalization. In particular, the contributors emphasize the design of institutions to serve a market economy, the design of electoral laws, and the design of executive-legislative relations. Each chapter discusses the legacy of the pre-existing authoritarian regime; the range of preferences among various strategic actors (the government, state bureaucracies, opposition parties, and interest groups) with regard to the pace and mix of reforms; and the consequences of final choices for the institutionalization of effective economies and the process of democratization.
Download or read book Political Parties and the State in Post Communist Europe written by Petr Kopecky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-10-11 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not possible to understand the nature and functioning of post-communist political parties without understanding their relationship with the state. On the one hand, few parties in the region would be able to survive and perform without state resources as they lack strong roots within the wider society. On the other hand, the relatively weak st
Download or read book Institutional Design and Party Government in Post Communist Europe written by Csaba Nikolenyi and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This books examines the institutional foundations of coalition government in the ten post-communist democracies of Eastern and Central Europe for the 1990-2010 period: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Its central argument is that differences in the arrangement of political institutions systematically explain variations in patterns of multi-party government across these states. The book starts with the premise that electoral systems and constitutional provisions about the powers, the structure, and the relationship between parliament and the presidency determine the degree to which political power is dispersed or concentrated in the political system. On the basis of these institutional features, three groups of states are distinguished with regard to their degree of power concentration; the substantive chapters of the book demonstrate how these institutional combinations and differences shape three specific facets of party government which capture the main stages of the lifecycle of coalitions governments: the formation of electoral coalitions, government formation and government duration. Specifically, three comparative chapters assess the impact of institutional power concentration on the size of electoral coalitions; the likelihood that political parties form a minority government; and the number of days that a government lasts in office. The main finding of the book is that power concentration matters: political parties in those democracies where institutions are designed to concentrate political power tend to form large electoral coalitions, they tend to form majority rather than undersized governments, and they build more durable cabinets. In addition, the book contains a detailed case study of government formation in Hungary and a previously unstudied comparison of indirect presidential elections in four states: the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Latvia. Comparative Politics is a series for students, teachers, and researchers of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu.
Download or read book Post Communist Democracies and Party Organization written by Margit Tavits and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of post-communist politics often argue that parties in new democracies lack strong organizations - sizable membership, local presence, and professional management - because they do not need them to win elections and they may hinder a party's flexibility and efficiency in office. Post-Communist Democracies and Party Organization explains why some political parties are better able than others to establish themselves in new democracies and why some excel at staying unified in parliament, whereas others remain dominated by individuals. Focusing on the democratic transitions in post-communist Europe from 1990 to 2010, Margit Tavits demonstrates that the successful establishment of a political party in a new democracy crucially depends on the strength of its organization. Yet not all parties invest in organization development. This book uses data from ten post-communist democracies, including detailed analysis of parties in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland.
Download or read book Governing the Post communist City written by Martin Horak and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When faced with the rapid and disorienting transition from communism to democracy, many eastern European leaders sought simple, immediately rewarding answers to complex policy problems. Undoubtedly, this hurried approach had a significant impact on the quality of democratic government in formerly communist countries. Through an analysis of urban politics in Prague between 1990 and 2000, Governing the Post-Communist City sheds new light on the factors that shaped policy in eastern Europe at the time of its democratic transformation. The first book-length study of post-communist urban politics in a city outside of Russia, Governing the Post-Communist City links the difficulties of democratic government in 1990s Prague to decisions made shortly after the fall of communism. Focusing on the issues of road infrastructure and downtown development, Martin Horak argues that local leadership was more concerned with insulating policy-making processes from public influence than with creating new policies suited to post-communist urban development. This set a precedent for the whole institutional environment of post-communist Prague and entrenched itself in the city's politics throughout the 1990s. Original, engaging, and authoritative, this study has much to say about the political climate in Prague after the downfall of communism, and makes insightful conclusions about the factors that contributed to present political circumstances in the region.
Download or read book The Regulation of Post Communist Party Politics written by Fernando Casal Bértoa and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-06 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of how political parties are, and ought to be, regulated has assumed an increased importance in recent years, both within the scholarly community and among policy-makers and politicians as the state assumes an increasingly active role in the management of, and control over, their behaviour and organisation This book concentrates on the regulation of political parties in the EU post-communist democracies, and on Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania, in particular. In analysing the various dimensions of party regulation, it builds on the main premises derived from the neo-institutionalist literature in political science, concerning the ways in which the (formal and informal) rules and procedures may influence, constrain or determine the behaviour of political actors. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive overview of the regulation of Eastern European political parties provided by leading experts in the field and casts theoretical and empirical light on the manner in which the constitutional and legal regulation of party organizations and finances have had an impact (or not) on the consolidation of party politics in post-communist Europe since 1989. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Political Parties and Behaviour, East European and Post-Communist Politics and Comparative Politics.
Download or read book Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe written by Grzegorz Ekiert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-09-15 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a shared effort to apply a general historical-institutionalist approach to the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe. It brings together a number of leading senior and junior scholars with outstanding reputations as specialists in postcommunism and comparative politics to address central theoretical and empirical issues involved in the study of postcommunism. The authors address such questions as how historical 'legacies' of the communist regime be defined, how their impact can be measured in methodologically rigorous ways, and how the effects of temporal and spatial context can be taken into account in empirical research on the region. Taken as a whole, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature by utilizing the comparative historical method to study key problems of world politics.
Download or read book Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World written by Valerie Bunce and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World examines three waves of democratic change that took place in eleven different former Communist nations. It draws important conclusions about the rise, development, and breakdown of both democracy and dictatorship in each country, providing a comparative perspective on the post-Communist world. The first democratic wave to sweep this region encompasses the rapid rise of democratic regimes from 1989 to 1992 from the ashes of Communism and Communist states. The second wave arose with accession to the European Union (from 2004 to 2007) and the third, with the electoral defeat of dictators (1996 to 2005) in Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. The authors of each chapter in this volume examine both internal and external dimensions of both democratic success and failure.
Download or read book Post communist EU Member States written by Susanne Jungerstam-Mulders and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing insights into the parties and party systems of post-communist EU member states within the framework of each country's specific conditions and developments, this volume examines the cases of Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia. It is suitable for courses on party systems and EU politics.
Download or read book Designing Democracy written by G. Pridham and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-05-11 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designing Democracy is the first systematic and in-depth study of the effects of the EU's democratic conditionality, originally set out in the Copenhagen conditions of 1993, on the new political systems of Central and Eastern Europe. Using new material drawn from extensive elite interviews in several of these countries as well as in Brussels, the book throws much light on how far the EU enlargement process has really strengthened these new post-Communist democracies following their transitions in the 1990s.
Download or read book Institutional Capital written by Laura Brunell and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2005 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Institutional Capital documents and explores the new forms of relationships developing between local governments and organized elements of civil society in post-Communist Poland.
