Political Legacies and Democratization of Post-Communist Countries

In his article, Pop-Eleches (2007) examined the link between historical legacies and democratization in 28 post-communist countries. He showed that different legacies affect different aspects of democratization. Moreover, the results revealed that the explanatory power of some democratization approaches (e.g., institutional choices and external conditionality) is less than one may expect. Pop-Eleches’s article provides an important contribution to the studies on authoritarian regimes and democratization. It showed the effects of economic, statehood, culture, and modernization legacies on the quality of democracy in post-communist countries. The effects of political variables, however, has not been systematically studied. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the effects of parliamentary representation and cabinet formation during the communist period on the quality of democracy in the 15 former Soviet republics and 6 Eastern European countries. For the quality of democracy, the Polity IV, Freedom House, and Democracy Barometer measures will be used as dependent variables. For the independent variables, parliamentary factors (e.g., the share of women in communist parliaments, the share of ethnic and religious minorities, the share of candidates with pronounced political experience i.e., more than one political position) and cabinet factors (e.g., the share of technocrats, the mean duration of the cabinet, the share of reshuffles and dismissals) will be used in the model. Moreover, the type of communist regime (Kitschelt 2001) and various types of trust (World Value Survey) will be employed.