Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World

This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to examine in depth three waves of democratic change that took place in eleven different former Communist nations. Its essays draw important conclusions about the rise, development, and breakdown of both democracy and dictatorship in each country and together provide a rich 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. Although these three waves took place in different countries and involved different strategies, they nonetheless shared several overarching commonalities. International factors played a role in all three waves, as did citizens demanding political change. Further, each wave revealed not just victorious democrats but also highly resourceful authoritarians. The authors of each chapter in this volume examine both internal and external dimensions of both democratic success and failure.

Valerie Bunce is the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and Professor of Government at Cornel University. Bunce is the author, most recently, of Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Collapse of Socialism and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Politics and Society, and International Organization, together with a variety of area-based journals and edited volumes. Michael McFaul is the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a nonresident Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His contributions to this book were made before joining the U. S. government as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russia and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council in the administration of President Barack Obama in January 2009. The views reflected in this publication are his alone and in no way represent or reflect U.S. government policy. He is the author and editor of several monographs, most recently Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough (with Anders slund, 2006), Between Dictatorship and Democracy: Russian Postcommunist Political Reform (with Nikolai Petrov and Andrei Ryabov, 2004), and After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions (with Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, 2004). Kathryn Stoner-Weiss is Deputy Director and Senior Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (1997). She is also coeditor of After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions with Michael McFaul (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Her articles on contemporary Russia have appeared most recently in Foreign Affairs, Publius, Current History, Journal of Democracy, and Politics and Society.