Political Culture Legacies in European Post-Communist Societies ꟷ From the Protection of Property Rights to State Capture: A Modelling Perspective

After 1989, the property rights have represented an issue of a special importance: Central and Eastern European countries have experienced communist regimes characterized by a common feature, namely the state property. Estonia has been the only one to create legally appropriate and operationally efficient institutions for the protection of the private property. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic have succeeded to find mechanisms of protection of the private property based on the restitution of property. Other countries, like Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Slovakia, Slovenia have adopted a similar mechanism. While presumed morally decent and economically operational and efficient, the mid-, and long-term effects of such mechanism have revealed the strength of political culture legacies, on the one hand, and the weaknesses of the institutional background in their simultaneous state-building and democracy-building approach, on the other hand. All this has resulted in a particular characteristic of the Central and Eastern European polity: the low quality of democracy and the increasing political instability. Both proved the essential role played by the low scores in the protection of property rights. Moreover, the low performances in the protection rights have had side-effects hard to predict in the early 1990s: the elite circulation mechanisms and the market economy performances have all been marked by this approach on the property rights. Property rights domain in general is one of the very few areas of research which has a special relationship with the study of the state. Our approach aims at identifying and extracting some of the fundamental issues of polity modelling by means of the property rights dynamics modelling in the Eastern and Central European political regimes and political cultures. The correlations to voice and accountability indicators in Eastern European countries as well the correlations to the elite circulation mechanisms to state capture (Voinea, 2015) are relevant for defining a particularity of the political culture legacy and also of the typical democracy in Eastern Europe. The study of state capture in the Central and Eastern European countries is intrinsically related to the study of the dynamics of the property rights in these countries after the fall of the communist regimes in 1989. The study of the relationship between property rights, on the one hand, and state capture, on the other hand, covers a complex perspective over the mechanisms of power, property rights and the protection of private property including land property and intellectual property up to the fundamental mechanisms for the stability and high quality of the democratic regimes. The empirical data from several European databases has served as support to the modelling of the relationship between property rights protection and polity dynamics. The model has been employed in explaining several emergent political phenomena in the CEE polities, like the advance of illiberalism, the deepening of Euroscepticism and populism, and the expanding of political corruption to state capture phenomena. Our modelling approach is based on research methodologies which develop an operational view of political culture and its relationship to state organization, operation and dynamics.