Can We Distinguish Varieties of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe?

The study of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe has become more and more diversified over the last 25 years. Beyond minimalist definitions of democracy, we are now able to look at time-series data such as the Nations in Transit project, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index or the Comparative Political Data Set. This paper will take this research further by examining what we can learned about Central and Eastern Europe using the newly-released Varieties of Democracy dataset. Specifically it will ask the question, whether we can, indeed, discern different varieties of democracy within the region akin to, for example, work that has already been done identifying varieties of capitalism (e.g. Greskovits & Bohle). Moreover, the V-Dem dataset speaks to how we can detect democracy in different forms because it contains specific indices for sub-types of democracy, including electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian. In addition, we can do any number of other configurational analyses in order to detect latent constellations of variables. This paper will, therefore, contribute to the study of representation using a wider context of different types of democracy and by harnessing comparative data and a broad regional perspective. Whilst it will not be focused on particular groups or specific actors, it will look at some of the over-arching patterns of democracy, which set the tone for how individual representative claims might be advanced. In this respect, the paper will aim to provide a fresh approach to the analysis of CEE politics.