Suchergebnisse

Communist regimes are very secretive concerning how their states are organized. This goes for the historical Soviet Union as well as contemporary China. In effect, until the fall of East European communism in 1989-91, researchers faced great problems figuring out the facts. How was communism organized? Few people knew, and those who knew wouldn't tell. Today, three decades' worth of archives-based research is slowly accumulating into a new map of the communist state. However, this development is happening within native-language historical research. Meanwhile, the political science agenda remains largely unreformed. At a time when students need to better understand China, Russia, and the quagmires of post-communist reforms, much new knowledge about historical communist regimes sits unused, says Astrid Hedin. In effect, political science curricula need an upgrade. Textbooks on comparative politics tend to fall back on one of three outmoded lines of analysis, all of which are misleading. They reduce differences between communist regimes and liberal democracies to single aspects, such as the organization of the economy. They fail to teach students about the distinctive administrative doctrines and practices of Soviet-type states. And they compare post-communist countries not with their own history, but with an envisioned future as liberal democracies. In effect, scholarly inquiry gets stuck in a loop of 'traveling problems' and 'conceptual stretching' (Sartori 1970, 1991). ; Published in "Insights : the online publication of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University"

The 1976 Swedish landmark law on workplace democracy, Medbestämmandelagen (MBL), has traditionally been regarded as a victory of social democracy over recalcitrant employers. In contrast, this article shows how, in fact, before the law, the Swedish Employers' Confederation (SAF) was the main driver behind Swedish research on work life reform, and the main promoter of employer-union dialogue on the matter. Crucially, in the 1960s, SAF endorsed the internationally pioneering thinking of economist Eric Rhenman, who argued that conflict within the firm between managers and unions was unavoidable, healthy, and could be good for business if framed in a productive manner. Today, this line of management thinking is termed the Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage.However, in the early 1970s, Swedish social democracy radicalized abruptly. The SAF board initially interpreted the new radicalism as a masquerade to appease activists. SAF assumed that, behind the scenes, the Swedish spirit of consensus-oriented labour market dialogue would prevail, as it had since the 1938 Saltsjöbaden agreement. And assuredly, the actual effects of the MBL law proved to be considerably less radical than advertised, and broadly compatible with Rhenman's thinking. Still, social democracy's new ideological rhetoric helped prompt SAF's late 1970s shift from cooperation to conflict.

Much social theory takes for granted that transnational people-to-people dialogue is inherently liberal in process and content – a haven of everyday authenticity that shelters ideas of human rights and democratic reform. In contrast, this contribution shows how communist regimes built and institutionalised an encompassing administrative state capacity to control and shape micro-level professional contacts with the West. This extensive but secret system of coercion, which was brought to light only with the opening of former communist regime archives, set a markedly illiberal framework for everyday East–West deliberations during the Cold War. Effectively, the travel cadre system may not only have delayed the demise of Soviet bloc communism, by isolating the population from Western influences. It was also intended to serve as a vehicle for the discursive influence of Soviet type regimes on the West. The article provides one of the first and most detailed English language maps of the administrative routines of a communist regime travel cadre system, based on the East German example. Furthermore, drawing on social mechanisms methodology, the article sets up a micro-level 'how it could work' scheme over how travel cadre systems can be understood as a state capacity, unique to totalitarian regimes, to help sway political discourse in open societies.

AbstractIn 1976 Sweden adopted a law on workplace democracy, presented by the Social Democratic government as the 'reform of the century'. What can the reform tell us about the history of the Swedish Model and how it was revised during the early 1970s under the prime minister, Olof Palme? This article compares four grand narratives of the development of welfare states, viewing dominant narratives of the Swedish Model as influential myths in their own right. The article argues that despite its global reputation as a hallmark of 'democratic socialism', the Swedish workplace democracy reform was a broad cross-class compromise, in the wake of a pan-European wave of similarly labelled reforms. Furthermore, the reform served to protect workplaces against Communist activism. The argument builds on the internal meeting protocols of the board and executive committee of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

Discusses a coming research project on how the Soviet Union used soft economic power to increase their influence in other countries. The differences in spreading policy and ideas in democratic and communist systems are researched. Preliminary results indicate that decision making structures in youth organizations and workers unions in Europe come from different sources varying from communists to Christian democrats. L. Pitkaniemi

A new line of inquiry into the history of communist regimes and the cold war has emerged. Pioneered by Stephen Kotkin and other American historians, it views Stalinism as the defining era of socialism, building a specific anti-capitalist and illiberal modernity that mustered voluntary participation and international legitimacy. This model of Stalinism as a rival civilization, held together by participatory totalitarianism, challenges older research on communist regimes – both revisionist and totalitarian studies. However, the degree of originality of this perspective is questioned here, citing precursors, parallels and contrasts within European research and political science.

Flyvbjerg makes a brave call for social science to invite itself to public debate, setting its own agenda, making social science matter. The transparency and clarity of Flyvbjerg's line of argument of course makes it easier to pick apart. For example, Flyvbjerg's critique of Habermas at times bites its own tail. While Foucault claims that "power is everywhere", Habermas distinguishes between power and rationality in communication. But in his success in improving the democratic process in Aalborg, does Flyvbjerg not rely on the power of the better argument? If we should succumb to the notion that the political impact of social science rests only on its traditional authority, rather than on the power of the better argument - does this not risk becoming a self-fulfilling profecy? While Habermas' work is often criticized for being too idealistic, it is seldom appreciated how these types of considerations tie into his particular mode of theorizing.

New institutionalist approaches are inherently weak at accounting for institutional change. In this book, social network analysis is proposed as a key to institutional change. The social network perspective focuses emergent patterns of interpersonal interaction and the resulting ties of interpersonal trust. As a complement and contrast to both March and Olsen's influential new institutionalist "logic of appropriateness" and to economic models of organization, I propose a social network model of agency: the "logic of interpersonal trust". In my case study, I show how, during the 1989/1990 democratization of East Germany, pre-existing social network ties guided informal cooperation, recruitment and programmatic development in the reformation of the East German communist party SED into the PDS. With the help of interviews, auto-biographies and documents, I retrace the takeover of the SED as a process of social network entrepreneurship. I also show how feminist ideas and feminist candidates accessed the reforming PDS through bridges of interpersonal trust, resulting in a surprising programmatic turn to feminism and a quota for women. A separate chapter discusses the importance of social similarity for the formation of social network ties. A model of "the strength of similarity" is proposed, which helps explain the strengths as well as limited flexibility of informal structures, such as same-gender informal circles. The book also includes a brief critique of the feminist critique of democratic revolutions and of the determinist tendencies of feminist theory. Social network approaches should be relevant for example to rapid political transitions, such as the democratizations of former East Bloc countries, where old institutions succumbed to external pressures for reform. Where institutional structures are weaker, social network structures are likely to be more salient. Social network approaches may also be relevant to ongoing information age transformations, such as emerging forms of less hierarchical, more complex and informal inter-organizational networks.