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

It is commonplace that a sovereign state is a prerequisite to democracy. But not all states are alike, each having different resources, capacities, priorities, properties, and so forth. What kinds of states and what particular features are conducive to democracy or autocracy? How do different types of stateness and their dynamics relate to different trajectories of regime transformation in post-communist countries? In light of the significant debate in comparative politics regarding the importance of structural and procedural (actor-oriented) factors in democratization and democratic consolidation, we address the effect of stateness on regime transformations in a broad framework, allowing us to specify the role of structural conditions and the decisions of key political actors in post-communist regime change. The focus of this research is empirical, implementing a combination of qualitative comparative and multivariate statistical methods in order to study a sample of post-communist countries from the two past decades. This Working Paper is an output of a research project implemented as part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.