Post-Soviet de facto states are presented in the social science literature, first of all, as a by-product of research on secession, nationalism, and conflict resolution. The paper focuses instead on issues of institution-building and governance in de facto states. It examines the construction of a hybrid political regime in the most populous of post-Soviet de facto states, Transnistra. The paper analyzes secessionist elites’ strategies of maintaining power and sources of domestic pressures to democratize political institutions of the de facto state. The evolution of the Transnistrian regime, it is argued, provides interesting ground for exploring the mechanisms of democratization under an unfavorable choice of institutions and problematic external environment.

This paper explores the effects that different institutional mechanisms for legislative representation have on ethnic diversity in the lower chamber of the Romanian parliament. It uses an original data set to examine representational outcomes generated by a combination of proportional representation and reserved seats provisions. The findings highlight the benefits that Romania’s choice of electoral rules generated for smaller minority communities and limitations that these rules impose on the nature and extent of legislative representation of large minority groups. The paper provides evidence for qualifying the scholarly support in favour of proportional representation. It also draws attention to potential trade-offs between communal representation and ethnic inclusiveness of main political parties that the use of special mechanisms for minority representation might encourage.

This paper examines the roles that key political institutions play in formulating Ukraine’s and Russia’s responses to European Union (EU) enlargement. It provides a structured comparison of how EU-related policies are designed in the two countries. It shows how the differences in institutional setting, mindset of political actors occupying these institutions, and the character of the party system affect the variation in presidential, cabinet, and parliamentary terms of involvement in EU-related matters. It demonstrates that the variation in these terms of involvement has a lasting effect on the nature of policy output in this specific policy area.