According to welfare chauvinism, access to the welfare state should be reserved for the native population, whereas immigrants are seen as a drain on resources. The curious aspect of welfare chauvinism in Europe is that it is more prevalent in the East. Why is this the case? This article uses the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Life in Transition Survey (LITS) in order to locate the most robust individual-level determinants of welfare chauvinism for countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. The results suggest that there is no support for the socioeconomic explanation of welfare chauvinism. There is support for the cultural capital explanation of welfare chauvinism, but only for Western Europe. Finally, there is support for the theory that higher levels of trust lessen the likelihood that a person adopts welfare chauvinism. This finding holds for both Eastern and Western Europe.

This paper explores the rise of rights-based regulation through litigation as a distinctive feature of legal culture in Central and Eastern Europe post-1989. This type of adversarial legalism was born at the intersection of post-communist, European integration, and neoliberal discourses, and is characterized by legal mobilization at national and supranational levels, selective adaptation of adversarial mechanisms, and the growth of rights consciousness. The paper distinguishes Eastern European developments from both American and Western European types of adversarial legalism, assesses the first quarter century of post-communism and represents a first step towards constructing a genealogy of the region’s legal culture post-1989.

We discuss the political economic development of Romania since 1989, with a focus on the evolution of higher education (HE). First, we place this evolution in the context of demand for HE by prospective students and employers, focusing on the low demand for skills in the MNC-dominated Romanian economy. Second, we provide empirical insight on indicators of quality, enrolment, and funding as key features of the HE system. We argue that Romania has evolved into a dependent market economy entrenched in a low-skills equilibrium, and that the weakness of the HE system is a key element in this process.

This article explores the tension between civil rights and security by examining the perceptions of the general public and elites in Eastern and Western Europe on (i) the terrorist threat; (ii) external pressure to stay within or step outside the law when combatting terrorism; and (iii) how best to combat terrorism. Large scale qualitative and quantitative data collected in Western and Eastern Europe before the terrorist act in Norway in 2011 and the Russian intervention in Ukraine and subsequent annexation of the Crimea in 2014 suggest that at the time terrorism was perceived as a greater threat in Western than in Eastern Europe. Further, Europeans felt that the US had extended pressure on their countries to combat terrorism by stepping outside the law. While ordinary citizens believed that terrorism should be fought by introducing more security — if necessary at the expense of civil rights — elites emphasized the need to protect civil rights while combating terrorism. Finally, European Muslims claimed that the terrorist threat was exaggerated and that protecting civil rights is more important than combating terrorism.

On the background of continuous global economic instability and debt problems in the Eurozone, the significance of post-communist external debt goes without saying. The article will explore the scope and dynamics of external indebtedness in the post-communist world in a comparative and historical framework. Particular attention will be paid to a likelihood of a debt crisis in the region similar to the one in the developing world in the early 1980s. The debt crisis will be an ultimate price for reform mistakes and may have serious political economy implications by hampering or even reversing the process of the post-communist transformation.

Optimism and opportunity in Russian–East European relations just a couple of years ago, especially with the Obama government’s express desire to “press the reset button” with Moscow, generated much hope, but it seems now that this also camouflaged deep issues of structure and process. Beyond historical mistrust and fear, an increasing drift away from democracy by Russia, while Eastern Europe, (geographically more broadly defined than during the Cold War), largely has sought closer political, economic and military integration with their Western neighbors, appears to have created two solitudes that may be irrevocably moving in different directions. Further, Russian ambitions and unrealistic expectations of regaining superpower status together with the belief that there may even be a shortcut to that restoration by manipulating the Western European powers, encouraging divisions within NATO and the European Union and isolating Eastern Europe or at least some of the states in the region, not only increases regional mistrust but ironically also diverts Russia away from the much needed fundamental economic and political changes that could transform it into a truly modern and successful state and a better neighbor and partner. Add issues such as the deployment of anti-ballistic missile defense systems in Eastern Europe over which Moscow continues to express vociferous military alarm but which in reality disguises Russian hegemonic ambitions or at best political fear, as well as Russia’s political use of energy and pipelines, and we have a combination that makes regional relations increasingly acrid and thus does not bode well for the future.

This study tries to remedy the current lack of tax compliance research analyzing tax morale in 10 Eastern European countries that joined the European Union in 2004 or 2007. By exploring tax morale differences between 1999 and 2008 we show that tax morale has decreased in 7 out of 10 Eastern European countries. This lack of sustainability may support the incentive based conditionality hypothesis that European Union has only a limited ability to influence tax morale over time. We observe that events and processes at the country level are crucial to understanding tax morale. Factors such as perceived government quality, trust in the justice system and the government are positively correlated with tax morale in 2008.

Russia’s recent intent to use gas supplies to influence the former Soviet Union Republics, and now New Independent States (NIS), has mirrored that of the Soviet’s handling of hydrocarbon supplies to the Eastern bloc, or the Council on Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). This paper explores the historical and unique conditions in making a comparison of energy trading patterns in the 1970s and 2000s. In the end, by comparing ‘then’ and ‘now’, we see a pattern of negative repercussions when the energy card is employed. This study employs a within case study cross-temporal comparative framework and asks: why would Russia transfer a failed policy of subsidies onto its newly independent states?

A sometimes heated debate between authoritarianism researchers takes place on the issue of authoritarianism on the left. Some researchers argue that authoritarianism is typical for right-wing political orientation while other researchers assert that authoritarianism can also be found at the left side of the political spectrum. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on left-wing authoritarianism. Using representative samples, the relationship between authoritarianism and political preferences is examined in 13 ex-communist Eastern European countries. Employing six different indicators of left-wing/communist political orientations make clear that, despite cross-national differences, left-wing authoritarianism is definitely not a myth in Eastern European countries. Second, it was aimed to survey whether authoritarian persons in Eastern European countries might be a possible threat for the transition to democracy. Based upon five items it was demonstrated that in general the Eastern European population seems to hold a positive opinion on democracy. However, it becomes also clear that authoritarian persons in the ex-communist countries are significantly less positive towards democracy.

This paper reviews some theoretical and empirical literature written on welfare state development in post-communist Eastern Europe in the light of the theories and approaches that have been developed to study affluent capitalist democracies. The aim of this discussion is to critically reassess the old welfare state theories, definitions and approaches and their implications regarding the study of post-communist Eastern Europe. The paper ends with the conclusion that the exclusion of ‘communist’ countries for more than twenty years from welfare state theorising has created an empirical and theoretical gap. This creates fresh challenges for welfare state research and calls for a new paradigm. It is evident that the not so well explored Eastern European region with regards to social policy research suggests that it is necessary not only to test already existing welfare state theories, definitions, typologies and approaches on these countries, but also to advance them.

The structure of the requirements for citizenship in a Romanian city differs by and large from the structure of the same requirements in other European cities. The peculiarity lies in the lack of distinctiveness between the origin, the ethnic aspect and the civic aspect of citizenship and also in the emphasis on the language requirements for citizenship. The explanations could be traced back to the previous century and to the cultural and political project of state and nation-building. But the importance assigned to the national identity and national sovereignty issues in Romania may affect the European integration by hindering the feelings of European belonging and solidarity.

Hungary outpaced the Czech Republic in reforms of the telecom sector during the first decade of transition. In the Czech Republic, prices remained low, competition limited and the state maintained ownership of the incumbent operator. Hungary, in contrast, experienced extensive privatization, liberalization of prices and some deregulation. This outcome challenges the assumption that institutional veto points (frameworks that constrain or enable political agents) manipulated by conservative bureaucrats hindered the initiatives of reform minded politicians in Hungary, while allowing reforms to occur in the also reforming Czech Republic. It is shown that the Czech telecom administration had only a few possibilities to block policy decisions through veto points. The slow reform process was rather a result of a conscious political strategy of maintaining control and accommodating a conservative constituency in context of a relatively sound economic environment. In Hungary, bureaucrats acting as agents of change pushed though the reforms despite opposition from politicians. This insight challenges the traditional picture of civil servants in post-communist systems as inherently conservative and anti-reform.

Researchers analyzing self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe have frequently adopted a “dualist” model which relegates the self-employed to marginal sectors of the economy. This paper challenges the dualist approach and argues that the self-employed cannot be regarded as refugees from poverty with few resources and few opportunities to earn high incomes and accumulate wealth. Data from the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia are used to show that self-employment in post-communist Eastern Europe encompasses two distinct class locations: the individually self-employed on the one hand, whose socioeconomic status differs little from that of ordinary workers, and employers on the other, who receive incomes and possess assets far in excess of that of both the individually self-employed and ordinary workers. A proper understanding of the manner in which systems of stratification have changed in Eastern Europe thus requires that one acknowledge processes of differentiation among the self-employed as well as the importance of property ownership in generating new forms of social inequality in the post-communist period.

One area which has been generally overlooked in the literature on institutional choice in post communist politics has been the design of judicial institutions . This paper seeks to evaluate a number of different explanations for judicial systems choice in post communist politics, especially those which emphasize the influence of socio-cultural factors, economic factors, the judicial legacies of the past, and political bargaining. As an empirical test of these explanations, we examine variations in the amount of judicial power that constitution makers granted to the constitutional courts in the countries of the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Eastern Europe.

This article is an attempt to identify the role of politically relevant values and attitudes in voting behaviour in the Czech Republic. In view of the results of earlier analyses, which show there has been a process of intense crystallization of left–right political axis of the Czech political spectrum, this paper aims to demonstrate the specific roles of declared and value-based left–right political orientations, the effects of external and internal political efficacy, the feelings of anomie, and the required role of state. The analysis of data from the ISSP survey carried out at the end of 1996 shows that a person's declared position on the left–right axis of political orientation has far stronger influence on voting behaviour than does his or her position on the left–right scale based on socio-economic values traditionally underlying left–right political orientations. This difference indicates, among other things, that in the Czech Republic the declared right-wing political orientations so far acted as barrier to voting for left-wing political parties, for which people would likely vote if they voted according to their value-based left-wing orientations.