ECONOMY

chapter 36
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DEMOCRATIZATION
POST-COMMUNIST
IMPLICATIONS
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anna grzymala-busse
pauline jones luong
Why do some countries successfully democratize, while others fail to establish firmly
the rules and practices of democracy? Scholars have approached this question from
two distinct perspectives. The first one focuses on the role of structural preconditions
for democracy: a given society’s levels of economic development, urbanization, or
literacy. These are not easily influenced by any one individual, develop over decades
if not centuries, and act as a fundamental constraint on elite behavior. The second
concentrates instead on political agency, and argues that elite actors can “craft democracies:”
when authoritarian governments and their opponents confront each other,
they bargain over the distribution of power and authority. As a result, these actors
can write new democratic rules and create the legislative and judicial structures to
support and enforce these rules.
We argue here that the artificial divisions and unrecognized overlaps between the
two perspectives have hampered our understanding of democratization. Drawing
upon the experience of post-Communist countries, we show how structural preconditions
enable elite action as much as they constrain it. Elites deliberately use
existing structural legacies to construct new regimes. The rules and practices critical
to democracy are both formal and informal, and they are as much a product of preexisting
state structures as of societal preconditions.
The chapter proceeds as follows. We first review and contrast the two approaches.
We then focus on the post-Communist experience to synthesize the two perspectives.