Trajectories of Regime Transformation and Types of Stateness in Post-Communist Countries

In this paper, we address the issue of what types of factors are crucial for regime transformation in post-communist countries. First, we test the relative importance of structural and actor-oriented factors using a specially constructed index of democracy. Cross-country regression analysis reveals that policy-related variables have higher statistical explanatory power: presidentialism vs. parliamentarism; opposition coming to power in the first founding elections; foreign policy orientation towards the West and state capture as the most significant variables. These findings are further corroborated and expanded by qualitative analysis. Following this we examine types of post-communist stateness as another possible explanation of differences in regime transformation results. We propose a vector measure of stateness which is based on both statistical data and expert evaluations. This measure allows us to develop a typology of stateness in post-communist countries which is used to assess the relationship between regime and stateness dynamics. We find that those post-communist states which fulfil a broad range of social functions are more successful in their democratic development