The Postsocialist Experience and Comparative Politics

Extract

I see four areas where the study of postsocialism has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, One is in providing an ideal laboratory for comparison. Here, I refer to three aspects of the region. First, it contains a large number of cases—28 in all and a good deal more, once we take into account “patch-work” politics and economics of the Russian Federation, for example. Second, the “great transformation,” to borrow from Polanyi and to refer in this instance to an even “greater” process involving the construction of economic and political regimes, nations, and states, deals with virtually all the fundamental issues of politics. Finally, the region exhibits enormous variation in political and economic outcomes, whether we focus on economic and political regime types and the institutional details of these regimes; economic performance, levels of economic development, types of economic reforms, and the role of foreign capital; the age and size of the state and its capacity to define and defend borders, command compliance and extract resources; and the national composition of the population. At the same time, causes are limited, largely because of the homogenizing effects of state socialism and the temporal similarities in when these great transformations commenced. This combination of variable outcomes and constrained causes is, of course, precisely what comparativists value.