This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974
The concept of 'elite consensus' is pivotal to the work of John Higley and his associates, but like many key political concepts its meaning is not precise. Consensus implies broad agreement, but just how much agreement, over what matters, among whom (i.e., who are the relevant elites), and how enduring remain to be specified. Higley et al. recognize these problems, placing their emphasis on procedural rather than substantive agreement and granting that individual cases may lie somewhere on the borderline between elite consensus and disunity. In this essay I explore the consensus issue by examining several cases from East Central Europe and that of Germany in the aftermath of the fall of Communism. Higley and Burton see especially in the Polish and Hungarian 'roundtables' instances of near-contemporary 'elite settlements.' But in both cases observers have recently pointed to a degree of political polarization whose intensity seems to call into question the actual achievement of elite consensus and indeed of 'democratic consolidation.' I assess these apparently conflicting perspectives by examining the divergent views of the new political institutions and of the legitimacy of one another held by rival elites in Poland and Hungary and compare the cases of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany.
"The concept of 'elite consensus' is pivotal to the work of John Higley and his associates, but like many key political concepts its meaning is not precise. Consensus implies broad agreement, but just how much agreement, over what matters, among whom (i.e., who are the relevant elites), and how enduring remain to be specified. Higley et al. recognize these problems, placing their emphasis on procedural rather than substantive agreement and granting that individual cases may lie somewhere on the borderline between elite consensus and disunity. In this essay I explore the consensus issue by examining several cases from East Central Europe and that of Germany in the aftermath of the fall of Communism. Higley and Burton see especially in the Polish and Hungarian 'roundtables' instances of near-contemporary 'elite settlements.' But in both cases observers have recently pointed to a degree of political polarization whose intensity seems to call into question the actual achievement of elite consensus and indeed of 'democratic consolidation.' I assess these apparently conflicting perspectives by examining the divergent views of the new political institutions and of the legitimacy of one another held by rival elites in Poland and Hungary and compare the cases of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany." (author's abstract)
In a period in which ''strong'' and even ''presidential'' prime ministers have arguably become more the rule than the exception in the major states of Western Europe, most prime ministers in the new democracies of East Central Europe appear to have been relatively weak figures. This article investigates the reasons for that relative weakness in the ten East Central European countries, which together have had 87 prime ministers in the 16 years since the fall of Communism. It evaluates several possible explanations: party system weakness, the institutional structure, elite recruitment patterns, and policy constraints. It then seeks to explain several notable exceptions to the prime ministerial weakness rule.
Laurence McFalls and Lothar Probst, eds., After the GDR: New Perspectives on the Old GDR and the Young Länder. German Monitor No. 54 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2001)Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London: Arnold Publishers, 2002)
