From a normative standpoint the media are usually seen as one of the pillars of a national integrity system, entrusted with the tasks of exposing and preventing acts of corruption and educating the public of the harm caused by corruption. Nevertheless, corruption continues to be one of the most significant challenges that Europe faces, undermining citizens' trust in democratic institutions and weakening the accountability of political leadership. Evidence suggests that in fragile EU democracies such as Bulgaria, despite more than eight years of full membership and numerous preventive measures, corruption is rife and the press is hardly capable of exposing abuses of power or authority. On the contrary - drawing on in-depth interviews with 35 Bulgarian journalists - this paper argues that since communism collapsed in the late 1980s the media in post-communist societies such as Bulgaria has gradually become an instrument to promote and defend private vested interests, and is plagued by corruption. Senior journalists and editors cast serious doubt over the ability of the post-communist free press and journalism to act as a watchdog for society.

The suspense-filled attempted partial privatization of the Narva Power Plants in the neo-liberal darling Estonia involved a rich cast, from trade unions and local scientists, via Estonian courts and ombudsmen to international consulting firms, major global banks and the US government. More important, a detailed single case study on the democratic decision-making process in this privatization case makes it possible to go beyond common generalizations regarding the consequences of neo-liberalism for democratic processes. It shows that purported proponents of economic neo-liberalism such as the US government sometimes use their arguments to advance the narrow business interests of politically well-connected firms. Established private firms can behave in a more rent-seeking manner than publicly owned, ex-communist companies. Liberal economic principles of open competition and a level playing-field are at times used by actors in the democratic process to question top-down, opaque economic decisions.

Frustration/satisfaction under the post-Communist democracy and under the pre-1989 Communist authoritarianism were studied in the Czech Republic in 2008 using a nationwide sample of 1093 respondents and an original Societal Frustration inventory. The patterns of frustration were contrastingly opposite: The past was dominated by the memory of oppression, of curtailed self-actualization yet fulfilled basic needs. In contrast, current democracy allowed for free self-actualization but the intensity of the current frustrations has exceeded the past frustrating memories. Main current complaints included a) general insecurity, lack of fulfillment of basic needs; b) corruption, low political culture, decline of civility (rudeness, envy, and ethnic intolerance). The results and their discussion help to explain the psychology of Communism, post-Communism, transition, and democratic consolidation.

The ideology of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s was a contested arena in which three dominant currents fought for hegemony: the national democrats grouped around the UNDO party, the authoritarian nationalists who supported the OUN movement, and the more extreme brand of authoritarianism espoused by the publicist Dmytro Dontsov. The three currents can be distinguished by analyzing both ideological writings and the myth-system that underpinned creative literature of this period. Distinguishing between the three currents allows for a better understanding of ideological shifts among those calling themselves nationalists, particularly shifts which occurred during the Second WorldWar and its aftermath. It also helps to explain some of the confusions that surround the term “Ukrainian nationalism” in the present day.

The main interest of the study is to determine whether and how an individual’s perceived economic situation is related to emancipative values in Georgia. The analysis employs individual-level survey data from nationwide public opinion surveys conducted by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) in 2010 and 2011 in Georgia. Several dimensions of emancipative values are examined: gender equality, tolerance, participation, autonomy, interpersonal trust, satisfaction with life and religion. Level of education and age are brought in as alternative factors accounting for value change. The results are ambiguous and only partially confirm validity of the emancipative theory of democracy on an individual level in Georgia.

Discourse analysis reveals that Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary and his successors as Russian presidents have practiced a shared strategy of metaphorical – not spatial – centrism that has gradually slid the state from dictatorship toward democracy. Preservation of a political center for himself and his successors to occupy made it necessary for Boris Yeltsin to dismantle the USSR if elections in Russia were to continue. At the same time, for each successive exponent of this centrist strategy, an attempt to practice democracy without the repellent flaws of electoral fraud and political repression would forgo the strategic advantage of occupying the political center.

This paper attempts to create an overview of the Ukraine twenty years after independence by presenting prevailing conceptual narrative models of Ukraine employed by Ukrainian and foreign experts. Based on the analysis of 58 interviews of Ukrainian political and intellectual elites and foreign experts, the study revealed several categories of conceptual narrative models employed by respondents: (1) a state without a national idea and a common identity; (2) a country in an unfinished transition and degradation; (3) a divided society; and (4) Ukraine as a colony or “wild capitalism”. The analysis of these categories helps to assess conflict potential in Ukraine and discuss some ideas for conflict prevention and resolution.

The author challenges the dogma that complete openness of the country to the external world has only a positive impact on its current state of affairs and its future. He uses post-Soviet Russia to show that in several respects openness, in particularly systematic emigrations of active people from the country, creates a lot of the problems which, however, can be partially solved if society has true democratic institutions.

This article looks at the interdependences between the democratisation processes in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh and the management of the Karabakh conflict, focussing on the EU’s democracy promotion policies. The article argues that the EU’s normative foreign policy in the South Caucasus has been limited by the permanence of the protracted conflicts, in two interrelated ways. First, by not addressing the conflicts the EU focused on long-term goals but failed to provide short-term incentives towards peace. Second, by allowing only a limited involvement in the protracted conflicts, especially inside Karabakh, the EU was perceived as a reluctant partner, undermining its normative credentials.

Vladimir Putin provides us with an excellent example of a politician whose attitude toward ideology is instrumental to his political longevity. He has shown that in the fight between ideology and political expedience, to maintain authority and control within the country, or to achieve geopolitical ambitions in the international arena, ideology will almost always lose the battle. It is well known that the major threat to political power stems often not from the adversary who holds diametrically opposite views, but from the rivals who share almost the same ideological position. The closer the ideological position is of a rival, the more intense the competition. For just this reason Putin is implacable toward Communists who share many of his views. He tries as much as possible to reduce the political role of the Communist party – the most serious opposition to the regime – by using the same underhanded tactics which are used against the liberals.

Violations of rights, a weak Duma, political parties dominated by bureaucrats, and corrupt privatization are ordinarily taken as signs or even causes of the failure of democracy in Russia or at best as normal traits of electoral politics in a middle-income state. Yet all of these are natural consequences of introducing democracy in a country with the Russian electorate’s distinctive recent experience of a loss of a third of the state’s territory and half its population. In such a democracy only a centrist, not a liberal, strategy can block a return to authoritarianism, and such a strategy in Russia will subordinate rights to the task of privatization that a Duma weakened by ideological, demographic and geographic impediments to party development cannot conduct. Consequently what are taken as signs or causes of democratic failure in Russia are instead necessary effects of introducing democracy in Russia’s special circumstances.

Borrowing the dominant theoretical frameworks of studies of voter turnout in the developed world, this paper tests the applicability of these frameworks to a transitional democracy in a Muslim society. Using logistic regression, we estimate an individual’s likelihood of voting in Kyrgyzstan’s 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections.We find that traditional rural networks, rather than networks of voluntary associations, play the central role in the mobilization of voters. In addition, turnout is affected by long-standing cultural cleavages based on religion and ethnicity, and by education, occupation, and trust in government. Our findings suggest that the political behavior of the people of the Kyrgyz Republic is supportive of democracy, in spite of elite-level obstacles to a successful transition.

In this article we order the 28 post-communist countries in a theoretically informed typology of political regime forms. Our theoretical expectation is that a hierarchy exists in the extent to which the post-communist countries fulfill democratic criteria concerning electoral rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law. More particularly, we expect that the countries are doing better with respect to electoral rights than civil liberties and that they fare worst regarding the rule of law. The analyses confirm three — ever stricter — versions of this hypothesis, in the end establishing the presence of an almost perfect hierarchy across the attributes in the form of a Guttman scale. Furthermore, a systematic cross-spatial distribution is identified, which lends support to the notion that the present political differences must be traced back to structural constraints and are, therefore, likely to subsist.

The article challenges the hypothesis that there is cohabitation of civic engagement and democratic institutions and practices. While valid at a general level, the relationship is not confirmed once it is scrutinized thoroughly and heterogeneous categories are disaggregated. For the European post-Communist cases, the pattern of the relationship between the regime type and the propensity to associate closely resembles the one in Latin mature democracies and non-authoritarian countries, provided that voluntary associations are chosen as measurements of vitality of social capital and robustness of civil society. A possible consequence of this provocative finding would be re-evaluating the well-established concepts in social sciences.

This article examines one reason for the failure of full-scale authoritarianism in Ukraine, 1992e2004. The monopolization of political control in Ukraine was partially thwarted by the disorganization of Ukraine’s ex- nomenklatura elite that dominated the country after the Cold War. Elite Ukrainian politics in the 1990s can best be understood as an example of ‘‘rapacious individualism.’’ This term was used by Martin Shefter to describe pre-machine New York city politics in the 19th century, dominated by a non-ideological and unstructured competition for power and rents. Rapacious individualism in Ukraine had a contradictory impact. It hindered full-scale democratization but also undermined efforts to consolidate authoritarianism. At one level, widespread corruption allowed the executive to concentrate political power because he controlled key patronage resources. At the same time, weak organization reduced the costs of open confrontation with the executive while corruption distributed resources to a broad range of future opposition leaders. The result was competitive authoritarian rule.

The interplay between the state and the super rich has been a subject of intense debate since the time of Aristotle, who introduced the notion of oligarchs and the oligarchic regime as the ruling of a few rich people. The ideologically loaded debates about the role of wealthy people in society can be found in each country in the contemporary world. In recent times, the fact that Silvio Berlusconi is both Italy’s prime minister and the richest person in the country (who has almost complete control over Italian TV) has aroused intense debates about the impact of big business on politics (Stille, 2003). It is not surprising that the case of the Italian prime minister draws attention in Russia, where he is often compared to both the Russian president as well as to the oligarchs (Remnik, 2003). A dramatic struggle between Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose wealth was estimated before his arrest at eight-billion dollars, 1 unfolded in the summer and fall of 2003. This conflict will likely be recounted in any future textbook that discusses the relationship between political power and big money.

This paper examines 10 years of political transition in Cambodia. It is particularly relevant because Cambodia has just passed through a third stage of transition in the form of national grass roots elections to dilute elite power. The scope of the paper covers the three elections in the period 1991–2002 and is located in Dankwart Rustow’s transition theory. I conclude that while basic elements of the theory hold true, qualifications are required in relation to the length of the ‘acceptance’ phase for the elites, and the extent to which, even after 10 years, habitually normalised democratic processes are still unreliable at best, and violent at worst.

Following the demise of Soviet-type regimes most countries of postcommunist Inner Asia either experienced initial political openings followed by reversion to authoritarianism or moved directly from one type of harsh authoritarianism to another. Mongolia is exceptional. The extent of political opening there during the 1990s far exceeded anything seen in any neighboring country and the gains of the early post-Soviet period were maintained instead of reversed. This paper investigates the causes of Mongolia’s relative success and argues that the absence of several factors that are often regarded as propitious for democratization has actually facilitated Mongolia’s democratization. The experience of postcommunist Inner Asia casts doubt on some arguments current in thinking on regime change.

The role and status of women in the post-communist countries has been and continues to be varied and full of contradictions. This article discusses the historical, social, economic, and political dynamics affecting the lives of women during the transition from communism to democracy. It argues that democracy, rather than diminishing gender discrimination, has widened the gender gap through declines in women's political representation and increases in women's unemployment and underemployment. Recently, however, the proliferation of women's organizations and the growth of women's studies programs suggests a more optimistic outlook for the future.

This article asks how new rules of political conduct are established in a country attempting political transformation and sweeping economic change. Based on a close analysis of the conflict over property policy and its effect on Russian executive–legislative relations in the 1990s, the study argues that regardless of formal distributions of power, the real allocation of policy-making authority is shaped in struggles over substantive policy issues. Those arenas, especially during the first years after the fall of an authoritarian regime, can function as “political classrooms” in which leaders either adopt or reject such practices as compromise and negotiation.