Institutional Change After Socialism and the Rule of Law

Abstract

The rule of law has been studied by political philosophy, law, political science, sociology and economics. The representatives of these social sciences have used various approaches (including various mixtures of conceptual and empirical analyses), for the study of this important problem. This also applies to research on post-socialist transformation which provided a unique and powerful natural experiment for students of institutions. In this paper I attempt to place the rule of law within a broader context, that of institutional change after socialism. This is why I start with a stylized description of this system and of what has happened to it after the collapse of socialism in the former Soviet bloc (second section). Then I try to link institutional change after socialism to the rule of law (third section). This requires a minimal clarification of this concept. In the fourth section, I discuss the rule of law after socialism in the light of empirical studies on this variable, studies which were mostly prepared by economists. The final section sums up the main findings: Changes in the legal framework take less time than those in a country's institutional system, including the transformation of its enforcement apparatus. As a result, widespread implementation gaps emerged even in the most reformed transition countries.