with László Bruszt, Jan Fidrmuc and Gérard Roland
September 2009
For the WIDER Conference on the Twenty Years of Transition, 18-19 September 2009, Helsinki
This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society
development under communism
and divergence in the nature and pace of political and economic reform
and transformation after 1989.
We put together a unique data set on dissident activities for the 27 former
centrally planned economies of
Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Un-ion during the years
immediately preceding the collapse
of communism: 1985 to 1989 for Central and Eastern Europe and 1985 to 1991
for the former Soviet Union.
Our data measure the nature and intensity of political opposition to the
communist regime, and the communist
governments response to such opposition. We relate the data to subsequent
political and economic developments
in the post-communist countries. We find that political opposition was
considerably more intense in the Central and
Eastern European countries than in the former Soviet Union. Moreover, the
frequency of government reaction, and
the probability that the reaction was violent, was substantially higher
in the former Soviet Union. This rich data
allows tests of conflicting hypotheses on the politics of institutional
change and economic reform. Both the extent of
political opposition and the frequency and severity of government reaction
help explain the choice of political regime
after 1989/1991, the concentration of power in the executive branch of
government. The vibrancy of civil societies
and their level of organization before the collapse of communism is an
important factor in explaining the nature and
pace of market oriented reforms.
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