Current Research in Comparative Communism PDF Download

Author: Lawrence L. Whetten
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Author: Jørgen Møller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134014872
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This book seeks to explain the divergent political pathways of twenty six post-communist states, following the breakdown and eventual collapse of communism in 1989-1991. Considering the trajectories of individual states between 1990 – 2007, this book challenges two central bodies of theory relating to democratization and regime change. Through a sustained analysis of global and post-communist developments within this time period, the author shows that claims of an increasing asymmetry between the ‘electoral’ and ‘liberal’ elements of modern democracy have been greatly exaggerated. The author goes on to contend that in accounting for the geographical dispersion of post-communist regime forms, deeper structural factors should be considered as crucial. The book is divided into the following parts: Part I demonstrates how different conceptualisations of democracy can lead to very different conclusions about the empirical dynamics of democratization. Part II contrasts different explanations of post-communist political change and provides an integrated framework for explaining the political pathways encountered within the former Eastern Bloc. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of post-communist studies, democratization studies, comparative politics and regime change.

Author: Steven Saxonberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134435142
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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With a foreword by Seymour Lipset, Hoover Institution and George Mason University, USA The Fall examines one of the twentieth century's great historical puzzles: why did the communist-led regimes in Eastern Europe collapse so quickly and why was the process of collapse so different from country to country? This major study explains why the impetus for change in Poland and Hungary came from the regimes themselves, while in Czechoslovakia and East Germany it was mass movements which led to the downfall of the regimes.

Author: Agustina Giraudy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110849658X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Offers a groundbreaking analysis of the distinctive substantive, theoretical and methodological contributions of subnational research in the field of comparative politics.

Author: Grigore Pop-Eleches
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400887828
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality. A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.

Author: Katarzyna Chmielewska
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863791
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon. The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves. The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Communism
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Author: Bálint Magyar
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863708
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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Book Description
Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

Author: Glennys Young
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 9780195366907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Using a source-based approach, The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century is the first text designed to help students, general readers, and scholars understand how people constructed Communist ways of life around the world. Taking a global approach, it extends beyond Russia and Eastern Europe to examine the lives of people in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Algeria, Peru, Cuba, and elsewhere. The book provides an inside look at the Communist experience, where people were--sometimes simultaneously so--enthusiasts, reshapers, resisters, and victims of an ideological project that was (and, for some, still is) both humanity's darkest nightmare and brightest hope.

Author: Anna Ohanyan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 178831719X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
In April 2018, Armenia experienced a remarkable popular uprising leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan and his replacement by protest leader Nikol Pashinyan. Evoking Czechoslovakia's similarly peaceful overthrow of communism 30 years previously, the uprising came to be known as Armenia's 'Velvet Revolution': a broad-based movement calling for clean government, democracy and economic reform. This volume examines how a popular protest movement, showcasing civil disobedience as a mass strategy for the first time in the post-Soviet space, overcame these unpromising circumstances. Situating the events in Armenia in their national, regional and global contexts, different contributions evaluate the causes driving Armenia's unexpected democratic turn, the reasons for regime vulnerability and the factors mediating a non-violent outcome. Drawing on comparative perspectives with democratic transitions across the world, this book will be essential reading for those interested in the regime dynamics, social movements and contested politics of contemporary Eurasia, as well as policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of democracy assistance and human rights in an increasingly multipolar world.