Suchergebnisse

Do ties between political parties and businesses harm or benefit the development of market institutions? The post-communist transition offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore when and how networks linking the polity and the economy support the development of func-tional institutions. A quantitative and qualitative analysis covering eleven post-socialist countries combined with detailed case studies of Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania documents how the most successful post-communist countries are those in which dense networks link polit-icians and businesspeople, as long as politicians are constrained by intense political competition. The comparison of original network data sets shows how this combination allowed Poland to emerge with stable institutions. Bulgaria, marred by weak institutions, corruption, and violence, cautions us that in developing economies intense political competition alone is harmful in the absence of dense personal and ownership networks.

Do ties between political parties and businesses harm or benefit the development of market institutions? The post-communist transition offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore when and how networks linking the polity and the economy support the development of func-tional institutions. A quantitative and qualitative analysis covering eleven post-socialist countries combined with detailed case studies of Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania documents how the most successful post-communist countries are those in which dense networks link polit-icians and businesspeople, as long as politicians are constrained by intense political competition. The comparison of original network data sets shows how this combination allowed Poland to emerge with stable institutions. Bulgaria, marred by weak institutions, corruption, and violence, cautions us that in developing economies intense political competition alone is harmful in the absence of dense personal and ownership networks. Indeed, as Romania illustrates, networks are so critical that their weakness is not mitigated even by low political competition. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

Across the post-communist region, new parties are gaining support from voters by promising to reject the status quo and orthodox policy. Some have come to govern on the basis of such promises and their "outsider" identity. But do these new parties actually make different post-crisis policy once they are in government? This paper compares policies adopted to address economic crisis in Bulgaria and Romania. Both governments pursue a standard set of austerity measures, but the Bulgarian government was able to take a more aggressive stance for a much longer time before losing support due to its outsider image.

Do ties between political parties and businesses harm or benefit the development of market institutions? The post-communist transition offers an unparalleled opportunity to explore when and how networks linking the polity and the economy support the development of functional institutions. A quantitative and qualitative analysis covering eleven post-socialist countries combined with detailed case studies of Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania documents how the most successful post-communist countries are those in which dense networks link politicians and businesspeople, as long as politicians are constrained by intense political competition. The comparison of original network data sets shows how this combination allowed Poland to emerge with stable institutions. Bulgaria, marred by weak institutions, corruption, and violence, cautions us that in developing economies intense political competition alone is harmful in the absence of dense personal and ownership networks. Indeed, as Romania illustrates, networks are so critical that their weakness is not mitigated even by low political competition.This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

In the 1990s, post-socialist states faced a critical dilemma: how to privatize and transform thousands of firms in the absence of domestic entrepreneurs with enough capital to assume control of the state's industrial patrimony. In the fifteen years of post-socialism, the elites created by the processes of transformation have been a decisive force in the economic and political development of Eastern Europe. Yet few studies focus on these early winners of reform. This article explores the interactions between the new economic elite, their firms, and the Polish state to construct a multilayered framework of state-society relations in post-communism. It concludes that the structure of state-firm relations and heightened political pluralism was crucial in limiting the predatory behavior of the new economic elite during the period of restructuring and privatization despite. This was critical in avoiding the rampant corruption present in other post-socialist countries and placed Poland on a markedly different path.