POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES

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A Conceptual Framework

POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES

Bálint Magyar – Bálint Madlovics

The

ANATOMY

of

Preface by Alena Ledeneva

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THE ANATOMY OF POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES

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The Anatomy of Post-Communist

Regimes

Bálint MAGYAR and Bálint MADLOVICS

A Conceptual Framework

Central European University Press Budapest–New York

press

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Central European University Press Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Magyar, Bálint, 1952- author. | Madlovics, Bálint, 1993- author.

Title: The anatomy of post-communist regimes : a conceptual framework / Bálint Magyar, Bálint Madlovics.

Description: Budapest, Hungary ; New York, NY : Central European University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020005183 (print) | LCCN 2020005184 (ebook) | ISBN 9789633863718 (paperback) | ISBN 9789633863701 (adobe pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Post-communism--Europe, Eastern. | Europe, Eastern--Social

conditions--1989- | Europe, Eastern--Politics and government--1989- | Post-communism--China. | China--Social conditions--21st century. |

China--Politics and government--21st century.

Classification: LCC HN380.7.A8 M34 2020 (print) | LCC HN380.7.A8 (ebook) | DDC 303.40947--dc23 | LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005183

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005184

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List of Tables and Figures

All Tables and Figures are the authors’ own compilation, unless otherwise noted. The following Tables and Figures are modified from Magyar, “Towards a Terminology for Post-Communist Regimes”: Tables 1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 2.5, 3.1, 3.3, 4.7, 5.1, 5.19, Figures 3.3, 3.4, 3.5.

Table I.1. Proliferation of political regime categories . . . 6

Table 1.1. Comparing the paradigms of Western Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy 37 Table 1.2. Legacies of patronalism at the end of the communist rule . . . 50

Table 1.3. The formal position of the chief patron, the decision making “body” and the type of patronal networks in Russia . . . 58

Table 1.4. Formal constitutions and patronalism in post-communist countries since the mid-1990s . . . 59

Table 1.5. Primary features of ideal typical democracy, autocracy, and dictatorship . . . 63

Table 1.6. Secondary features of democracy, autocracy, and dictatorship . . . 63

Table 1.7. Post-communist countries of Eurasia by political institutional system (as of 2019) . . . 64

Table 2.1. The state in the three polar type regimes (with the topics of the chapters’ parts) 71 Table 2.2. Main features of ruling elites in the three polar type regimes . . . 78

Table 2.3. Ideal type principles of state functioning . . . 86

Table 2.4. Conceptualization of states subordinated to elite interests . . . 92

Table 2.5. Interpretative layers of categories for the ruling elite . . . 94

Table 2.6. Interpretative layers of categories for patrimonialization . . . 96

Table 2.7. Interpretative layers of categories for appropriation of property . . . 99

Table 2.8. Interpretative layers of categories for the legality of elite-interest based action . 103 Table 2.9. Defining the post-communist mafia state . . . 106

Table 2.10. Relations between violence-managing agencies (agents) of different status 120 Table 3.1. Political-economic actors in the three polar type regimes (with the topics of the chapters’ parts) . . . 132

Table 3.2. Opposition parties with different formal and de facto status in a patronal autocracy . . . 158

Table 3.3. Model differences in the positions of the ideal typical major entrepreneurs and oligarchs . . . 167

Table 3.4. A typology of oligarchs in patronal regimes (in descending order according to distance from the chief patron in a patronal autocracy) . . . 169

Table 3.5. Annexation of elites by the leading political elite in the six ideal type regimes 213

Table 4.1. Political phenomena in the three polar type regimes (with the topics of the chapters’ parts) . . . 228

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xii •

Table 4.2. Ideologies of civil legitimacy in the three polar type regimes

(constitutionalism, populism, Marxism-Leninism) . . . 230

Table 4.3. Legal-rational legitimacy and substantive-rational legitimacy . . . 243

Table 4.4. Open, closed, and dominated spheres of communication . . . 246

Table 4.5. Mobilizing structures of the people and demobilizing structures of the state in the three polar type regimes . . . 258

Table 4.6. Types of multi-party systems in post-communist regimes . . . 269

Table 4.7. Campaigns in the three polar type regimes . . . 273

Table 4.8. Types of elections . . . 279

Table 4.9. Types of custom-tailored lexes, with general examples for rewarding and punishing policies . . . 293

Table 4.10. The status of law in the three polar type regimes . . . 303

Table 4.11. Democratic and autocratic legalism . . . 312

Table 4.12. Institutions of state coercion and their functions . . . 315

Table 4.13. Different levels of autocratic change . . . 328

Table 4.14. Twelve post-communist countries by constraints on government and improper government influence in civil justice . . . 345

Table 4.15. Twelve post-communist countries by constraints on government and fundamental rights . . . 346

Table 4.16. Ideal typical separation of resources of power within the adopted political family . . . 349

Table 4.17. Different levels of democratic change . . . 356

Table 5.1. Economic phenomena in the three polar type regimes (with the topics of the chapters’ parts) . . . 362

Table 5.2. Main characteristics of the six corruption patterns . . . 387

Table 5.3. A typology of corruption brokers . . . 391

Table 5.4. Modes of control of unauthorized illegality and the result in a criminal state 406 Table 5.5. Comparing types of corruption by the dimensions of collusion and the separation of supply and demand . . . 414

Table 5.6. The status of corruption in states of different legal status . . . 421

Table 5.7. Comparing normatively and discretionally closed markets . . . 433

Table 5.8. The main features of business groups and informal patronal networks . . . 436

Table 5.9. Intersections between interpretative layers of state action targeting property and legality . . . 438

Table 5.10. The possible functions of the three types of taxes . . . 442

Table 5.11. The ideal typical modes of government expenditure . . . 443

Table 5.12. The three types of political reorganization of ownership structure in the post-communist region . . . 451

Table 5.13. Privatization methods by the object of privatization (technocratic dimension) 453 Table 5.14. Privatization methods by the openness of the privatization market (technocratic dimension) . . . 455

Table 5.15. Privatization methods by dimensions of justice-making (ideological goal) 457 Table 5.16. Privatization methods by dimensions of power transformation (political goal) 458 Table 5.17. Destinations of the old economic nomenklatura . . . 461

Table 5.18 Different types of coercive takeover of non-monetary property. . . . 463 List of Tables and Figures

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List of Tables and Figures • xiii

Table 5.19. Types and certain features of reiderstvo in post-communist regimes . . . 464

Table 5.20. Nationalization methods (forms of violations of exogenous property rights) in predatory states . . . 472

Table 5.21. Endogenous property rights of actors in a liberal democracy and patronal autocracy . . . 477

Table 5.22. Karl Polanyi’s The Economy as Instituted Process . . . 504

Table 5.23. Market economy, relational economy, planned economy . . . 508

Table 5.24. Correcting mechanisms in socialist markets . . . 510

Table 5.25. Distorting and annexing mechanisms in capitalist markets . . . 514

Table 5.26. Ideal typical patterns of power distribution in the IPS model . . . 522

Table 5.27. Tensions between formal and informal rules in Chinese politics . . . 531

Table 5.28. Types of political capitalism . . . 533

Table 6.1. Societal phenomena in the three polar type regimes (with the topics of the chapters’ parts) . . . 539

Table 6.2. Types of individual and institutional ties to the chief patron . . . 547

Table 6.3. Networks growing freely (in open-access / market economy) and under compulsion (in limited access / command or relational economy) . . . 549

Table 6.4. Types of social groups in various social orders . . . 552

Table 6.5. Means of mass political persuasion in the three polar type regimes . . . 571

Table 6.6. Ideal types of political actors by role of ideology . . . 578

Table 6.7. Ideological panels applied to cover personal-wealth accumulation in the Hungarian patronal autocracy . . . 584

Table 6.8. Stigmatized groups’ criteria to meet the needs of ideology-applying functionality . . . 602

Table 6.9. God, nation and family by their functions and stigmatized groups . . . 610

Table 6.10. Modalities of informal governance . . . 612

Table 7.1. Typology of pattern change (with ideal-typical examples) . . . 636

Table 7.2. Ideal typical pattern changes from dictatorship . . . 638

Table 7.3. Ideal typical primary trajectories in post-communist region . . . 647

Table 7.4. Ideal typical secondary trajectories (of democratic backsliding) in post- communist region . . . 648

Table 7.5. Processes of regime dynamics and cycles . . . 661

Table 7.6. The disparate logic of EU and U.S. sanctions . . . 691

Table 7.7. An analytical framework for patronal policies, with the case of Hungary as an illustration (2010–2018) . . . 717

Figure I.1. The democracy dictatorship axis, with a grey zone between the two poles 5 Figure I.2. Disaggregation of regimes along the dimension of electoralism . . . 7

Figure I.3. The conceptual space of regimes, with six ideal types and twelve post- communist examples (as of 2019) . . . 9

Figure 1.1. Civilizations in post-communist Eurasia . . . 35

Figure 1.2. The logic of basic structures of pre-communist societies . . . 39

Figure 1.3. The internal logic of communist systems . . . 45

Figure 1.4. Schematic depiction of the effect of the stubborn structures . . . 52

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Figure 1.5. Cultural map of World Values Survey wave 4 (1996) with post-communist

countries encircled . . . 54

Figure 1.6. A triangular conceptual space of regimes . . . 66

Figure 2.1. A scale of states running on the principle of societal interest (and eventually ideology-implementation) . . . 90

Figure 2.2. The amplitude of arbitrariness (correlation between the nature of corruption and state action) . . . 112

Figure 2.3. Violence-managing agencies and agents of different strength by the public/ private and illegal/legal dichotomies . . . 118

Figure 2.4. Types of state by dominant extra-market means and interaction with property owners . . . 126

Figure 3.1. Possible trajectories of autonomous oligarchs in a single-pyramid patronal network . . . 173

Figure 3.2. Number of Hungarian oligarchs associated with MSZP or Fidesz, 2005–2018 . . . 174

Figure 3.3. Autonomous elites in an ideal typical liberal democracy . . . 215

Figure 3.4. Incorporated elites in the ideal typical communist dictatorship . . . 216

Figure 3.5. Patronalized elites in the ideal typical patronal autocracy . . . 217

Figure 3.6. Partially autonomous elites in an ideal typical conservative autocracy . . 219

Figure 3.7. Partially incorporated elites in the ideal typical market-exploiting dictatorship . . . 220

Figure 3.7. Patrially patronalized elites in ideal typical patronal democracy . . . 222

Figure 4.1. State advertising incomes by political groups in Hungary (2006–2019). Measures are in 1,000 Ft (approximately 3.5 USD) . . . 253

Figure 4.2. Comparison of democratic governance in the color revolution countries 339 Figure 4.3. Ideal type comebacks from different levels of autocratic change . . . 353

Figure 5.1. Three challengers of the neoclassical synthesis questioning some of its basic axioms . . . 364

Figure 5.2. Schematic depiction of free-market corruption . . . 375

Figure 5.3. Schematic depiction of cronyism.. . . 376

Figure 5.4. Schematic depiction of state organization collusion . . . 379

Figure 5.5. Schematic depiction of bottom-up state capture. . . 381

Figure 5.6. Schematic depiction of top-down state capture. . . 383

Figure 5.7. Schematic depiction of the criminal state pattern . . . 385

Figure 5.8. Corruption risk in public procurements in Hungary, 2009–2015 . . . 398

Figure 5.9. Proportion of public procurements without advertised tenders as a percentage of all public procurements in Hungary, 2009–2015 . . . 399

Figure 5.10. Price distortions for Hungarian public procurements in Hungary, 2009–2015 . . . 400

Figure 5.11. The correlation between the means of state intervention, the level of collusive corruption, and the inactivity of controls . . . 424

Figure 5.12. Ideal typical dynamics of competitive and relational market value of prey companies . . . 482

Figure 5.13. Investment cycles in the Chinese market-exploiting dictatorship . . . 524

Figure 6.1. The process of value appropriation through redefinition . . . 594 List of Tables and Figures

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List of Tables and Figures • xv

Figure 6.2. Forms of conspirators in conspiracy theories . . . 607

Figure 6.3. Populism summarized . . . 608

Figure 7.1. Patronalism of rule (with explanatory table) . . . 628

Figure 7.2. Ruling party’s members (with explanatory table) . . . 628

Figure 7.3. Formality of institutions (with explanatory table) . . . 629

Figure 7.4. Ruling party’s function (with explanatory table) . . . 629

Figure 7.5. Dominant economic mechanism / dominant form of property . . . 629

Figure 7.6. Corruption (with explanatory table . . . 630

Figure 7.7. Ideology (with explanatory table) . . . 630

Figure 7.8. Limited nature (with explanatory table) . . . 630

Figure 7.9. Plurality of power networks / legitimacy (with explanatory table) . . . 632

Figure 7.10. Autonomy of civil society (with explanatory table) . . . 632

Figure 7.11. Hybrid regime type (with explanatory table) . . . 633

Figure 7.12. Ideal typical primary regime trajectories . . . 639

Figure 7.13. Modelled trajectory of Estonia (1964–2019) . . . 641

Figure 7.14. Modelled trajectory of Romania (1964–2019) . . . 642

Figure 7.15. Modelled trajectory of Kazakhstan (1964–2019) . . . 644

Figure 7.16. Modelled trajectory of China (1949–2019) . . . 646

Figure 7.17. Modelled trajectory of Poland (1949–2019) . . . 649

Figure 7.18. Modelled trajectory of the Czech Republic (1964–2019) . . . 652

Figure 7.19. Modelled trajectory of Hungary (1949–2020) . . . 655

Figure 7.20. Modelled trajectory of Russia (1964–2019) . . . 657

Figure 7.21. Modelled trajectory of Ukraine (1964–2019) . . . 662

Figure 7.22. Modelled trajectory of Macedonia (1964–2019) . . . 664

Figure 7.23. Modelled trajectory of Moldova (1964–2020) . . . 667

Figure 7.24. Modelled trajectory of Georgia (1964–2019) . . . 670

Figure 7.25. Russian oil and gas rents in 1950–2010 . . . 707

Figure 7.26. Losses for the leader and policy-making in liberal democracy and patronal autocracy . . . 723

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Acknowledgments

When the idea of this book came about in late 2016, it was planned to be an elaboration of the concepts delineated in “Towards a Terminology for Post-Communist Regimes,”

a study one of this book’s authors, Bálint Magyar, had contributed to the volume Stubborn Structures: Reconceptualizing Post-Communist Regimes (Budapest—New York: CEU Press, 2019). That this book eventually became much more than that could not have been possible without the help of many, in various forms and at various stages of writing.

The present authors held separate fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University (CEU IAS) and the Financial Research Institute in Budapest at the time of writing. Beyond financial support, we are particularly grateful for the institutional advantages of CEU, including access to its wonderful library and a range of scholarly journals. CEU IAS also made a workshop with international researchers possible, which was one of the three events where we had the opportunity to discuss our framework. For organizing the two other workshops (with Hungarian scholars), we have to thank the Re- publikon Institute and the Institute of Social Relations at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) Faculty of Social Sciences. We received useful comments and are beholden to everyone who participated, especially to Oleksandr Fisun, Mikhail Minakov, Nikolay Petrov, Andrey Ryabov (CEU IAS workshop), Gábor Horn, Mária M. Kovács, József Péter Martin, Péter Mihályi (Republikon workshop), and György Csepeli, Zoltán Fleck, Pál Juhász, and Antal Örkény (ELTE workshop).

A person who attended two of these workshops was Kálmán Mizsei, who has been an ardent supporter of our project for years. His unique comprehension of post-communist countries was indispensable to this volume, and so was his absolute selflessness in sharing his knowledge and experience with us. We can say the same about Iván Szelényi as well, who we thank for his kindness in reading the manuscript and helping us in innumerable ways during the project.

To model post-communist regime trajectories (see Chapter 7) we received help from several country experts, namely Attila Ara-Kovács, András Bereczki, Zoltán Sz. Bíró, Mária Csanádi, András Deák, András Keszthelyi, Kálmán Mizsei, Miloš Resimić, and Péter Vámos.

We are grateful to them for visiting us at CEU IAS and for being readily available to answer our questions and offer further insights. Credit goes to István János Tóth and the Cor- ruption Research Center Budapest as well who analyzed more than a hundred thousand Hungarian public procurements, and we used their results for a short case study on the evolution of corruption in Hungary (see Chapter 5). We are indebted to Tibor Szathmáry and the team of RenderNet, who developed a 3D model of our triangular framework, and to Gábor Ligeti for his help in developing the book’s website (www.postcommunistregimes.

com).

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xviii • Acknowledgments

We wish to offer our special thanks to the students from Alena Ledeneva’s Gover- nance and Corruption class (UCL, 2019 Fall), who read an early version of the manuscript and gave us most valuable suggestions about it. We also thank Michael C. Zeller for his comments and knowledgeable editing of the text. Other critical remarks were made by András Bozóki, László Csaba, Henry E. Hale, and Júlia Király, and we received further scholarly help at various parts of the book from Claudia Baez-Camargo, Balázs Benkő, János Boris, Zsolt Enyedi, Miklós Haraszti, Dávid Jancsics, János Kornai, Márton Kozák, Balázs Krémer, Alena Ledeneva, Armen Mazmanyan, Klára Sándor, Károly Attila Soós, Andrea Szabó, János Széky, Mehrdad Vahabi, Éva Várhegyi, Balázs Vedres, and Jiangnan Zhu. We are grateful to them all.

Special thanks also to the Central European University Press. As a company they were prepared to support this publication. Their committed staff engaged fully in the project ever since publishing Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary by Bálint Magyar in 2016. We would especially like to thank Frances Pinter, Linda Kúnos and Péter Inkei for their help during the editing of this book. Károly Pavela deserves a special tribute for the ingenious typesetting accomplished before his sudden death early in 2020.

We would also like to thank Éva Szalay for the cover design and for her finishing touches on the typesetting.

Both of us are lucky to have family members and friends who have supported us all the way through from the first thoughts to the finishing touches. “Thank you” does not quite cover it—without them, we would not have had the power to finish this volume, or to do it with such joy and unfailing enthusiasm as we did.

None of the above-mentioned are responsible for any errors or opinions in this book.

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Reader’s Manual for QR codes and Online Supple- mentary Material

The book is linked to a website, www.postcommunistregimes.com. The site contains:

•

the text of the book;

•

the draft of a seminar, with syllabus and eleven PowerPoint-presentations pre- pared for a course on post-communist regimes (MA or PhD-level);

•

a 3D interactive model of post-communist regime trajectories;

•

other supplementary materials, including the appendix (related to the details of the regime trajectories that only appear in a visualized way in Chapter 7).

At relevant points, links to the “other supplementary materials” will be provided in foot- notes. The book also includes QR codes for the three other types of online content.

The following QR code links to the online version of the text:

In the book, every QR code framed by a rectangle links to the seminar presentation:

In the book, every QR code framed by a triangle links to the 3D interactive model:

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xx • Reader’s Manual for QR Codes and Online Supplementary Material

QR codes are placed at relevant points of the text. The 3D model, which is included in the printed book in form of static figures, is available on the website in both an online “basic”

version and a downloadable “advanced” version. (The triangle-framed QR-codes lead to the former.) The website also contains the authors’ contact info, CVs, and former publications, as well as links to reviews and information about related events.

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Preface

by Alena Ledeneva, University College London, Founder of the Global Informality Project

Back in the 1980s, when I was a student in the Soviet Union, sociology was not an officially recognized discipline. This is not to say that I could not study it. As it was often the case in ‘real socialism’, everything was prohibited, but anything was possible. Deep in the taiga, sociologists of the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, have been conduct- ing sociological research since the 1960s. The Institute of Economics department of social problems had produced multiple classified papers on social problems in rural Siberia. One of them, stating a yawning gap between the claims of communism and the actual performance of stagnating socialism, the so-called Novosibirsk report was leaked and published in the Washington Post in the August of 1983. The Soviet realities of informal economy and informal governance have shaped the agenda and methodology of economic sociology emerging from the department of Tatiana Zaslavskaya.

That paper and many others developed by Siberian sociologists had been influenced by their Hungarian colleagues, already working on ideologically marginal subjects of in- equality and social stratification under communism, income distribution and privilege systems. I remember the samizdat translations being circulated and discussed, tested and applied. Iván Szelényi’s research on social inequalities, elitism and hidden marketization within the communist system and János Kornai’s conclusion of the systemic nature of its flaws—soft-budget constraints, state ownership, and ideological decision-making—were particularly subversive.¹ Yet these early analyses of socialism also drew attention to the inner logic and complexity of socialist systems, as well as controversies in the communist governance.

They identified the grey zones, which became much more obvious with hindsight.

Hungary had pioneered the economic reforms, but not in a direct manner. Kornai wrote:

There was no question of communist political power imposing private ownership on the economy in the period between 1968 and 1989. Nonetheless, private ownership began to develop spontaneously once the political sphere had become more tolerant.²

Similar ambivalence can be observed on a vast scale in China, where the communist party reaffirmed has reaffirmed its commitment to non-democratic values in 1989 by a brutal crush of the Tiananmen square protests, but at the same time not only allowed, but en- couraged markets to develop and the private sector to grow on an unprecedented scale.

1 Kornai, Economics of Shortage.

2 Kornai, “What the Change of System from Socialism to Capitalism Does and Does Not Mean,” 29.

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xxii • Preface

It is such paradoxical attitudes applied by communist parties, ability to sustain ideology while dealing with complexity, to believe yet remain pragmatic, to turn a blind eye in some circumstances yet exercise punishment in others, to coopt but also to control, that sustained sophistication of socialist governance. It is these practices of navigating the doublethink, double-deed, double standards and double motivation that have been lost on the preachers of democracy since the collapse of the Berlin’s wall in 1989. It was presumed that once people are given freedom from communism, they would embrace democracy.

The outcome has turned out to be much more complex.

However temporary the existence of socialist regimes may seem from the 21st century, it is paramount to acknowledge their lasting legacies and learn their lessons in tack- ling ideological constraints, governance issues, and the complexity of ‘real’ socialism. Thirty years on, we continue to witness the boomerang effect of the post-1991 euphoria, an in- tense happiness about the end of the enemy-number-one and passionate self-confidence predominant in democratic discourses since “by the grace of God, America has won the cold war” in the current affairs.

As a result of the spectacular 1989 withdrawal of communist ideology across Europe and Eurasia, the 1990s’ intellectual scene became dominated by the protagonists of transition economies³ and theorists of post-socialism.⁴ In the decade of the 2000s, and especially since the accession of formerly socialist countries to the European Union in 2005–2007, concerns over the language of transition have emerged from the comparative analyses of the three waves of democratisation globally. Transitioning economies have departed from authoritarian dictatorships yet have never arrived to consolidated democracies.⁵

The thesis of the ‘end of the transition paradigm’ pointed to the prevalence of grey zones where the majority of transiting regimes find themselves and the academic incapacity to describe them without references to non-existing poles of the authoritarianism-democracy binary. The puzzle can be formulated as follows: political scientists have a critical mass of cases that cannot be categorized clearly and fall into the grey area of ‘neither-nor’

or ‘both,’ which brings the binaries themselves into a question.⁶ Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics place this theoretical point, made in social theory much earlier, into the context of post-communist regimes.⁷

Magyar and Madlovics’s The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes could not have been more timely. Once a testing ground for normative and confidently prescribed ‘one- size-fits-all’ democratic reforms, neo-liberal macro-economic packages and the open- ing-breakthrough-consolidation logic of democracy, the so-called post-communist regimes start reflecting upon their pathways and seek legitimacy within rather than outside national borders. The emerging governance crises in democratic regimes press further for finding adequate ways to reflect what binaries, such as capitalism and socialism, good and bad governance, democracy and authoritarianism could not grasp. The complexity of

3 World Bank, “Transition - The First Ten Years”; World Bank, “Economies in Transition.”

4 Müller, “Goodbye, Postsocialism!”

5 Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm.”

6 Ledeneva, The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality.

7 Merton, Sociological Ambivalence & Other Essays; Bourdieu, In Other Words; Bauman, “Modernity and Ambivalence”; Magyar, Stubborn Structures.

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Preface • xxiii the post-communist regimes, not fitting the transition paradigm or engaged in political

U-turns has put pressure on the normative, top-down, US-centred theoretical approaches to their conceptualisation.

Not paying attention to the ambivalence of communist regimes has led scholars to arrive at categorising regimes with reference to their past (post-), to their performance against teleological target (quasi-, semi-, illiberal, democracies with adjectives), or to their hybrid nature (hybrid regime). It might be worth pointing out the obvious: hybrid regimes are hybrid from the perspectives of observers, who prefer to compress the puzzle of ambivalence into a hybrid category that allows us to come up with a narrative or conceptualisation in a short term. In the language of participants, there is nothing hybrid about the regimes. There are front and backstage practices, complex overlaps of rules and norms, various terminologies depicting competing interests, yet the synthesis that would result in a clear categorisation of the regime remains beyond reach. Arguably, hybrid concepts are a practical solution to delay the necessity of facing the ambivalence and the complexity it produces for the governance, an issue by no means restricted to the post-communist world.

This book makes an ambitious attempt to assemble concepts that proved robust and relevant for participants as well as for observers of post-communist regimes. In fact, the book starts with an observation that a ‘renewal of the language used to describe [post-communist] regimes’ is long overdue. The authors’ major contribution here is twofold. First, they establish the state-of-the-art vocabularies bottom up to balance off the predominant top-down conceptualisations of post-communist trajectories. The second, and more ambitious, contribution is systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories, de- parting from the ideological hegemony, bureaucratic structure and state-dominated economy but not really arriving at proclaimed destinations. Consistent with Magyar’s previous project, this new book investigates ‘stubborn structures’ and path-dependency, defined as deeply embedded norms shaping political outcomes behind the facades of formally reformed institutions. The authors associate such norms with “informal, often intention- ally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions.”

The cross-disciplinary connotations of ‘stubborn structures’ are immediate: from Weber’s “habitual action,” de Certeau’s “quotidien,” de Sardan’s “practical norms” to Hall’s

“high-context cultures,” Geertz’s “thick description” and “local knowledge,” Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge,” Chomsky’s “deep structures” etc. Through social interactions, individuals develop a shared meaning of the “rules of the game”, “rule-following” or “rule-bending.”⁸ Indi- vidual strategies of problem-solving rely on collectively shared expectations, context-bound norms and result in social practices deemed appropriate. Such practices may derive from historical preference, cultural legacies, religious values, tacit understanding and habitual behaviour that work against the rational choice-based modelling. To a large extent, such practices account for the democratic back-pedalling associated with the underperformance of democratisation efforts in post-socialist Europe and Eurasia and the persistence of ‘stubborn structures.’

The authors search through the existing literature to establish relevant conceptions to relate to such practices and combine these with their own findings in order to offer

8 Respectively North, “Institutions”; Ledeneva, Unwritten Rules.

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xxiv • Preface

a coherent multi-level analytical framework for post-communist regimes. Effectively, they produce a conceptual “toolkit” or “vocabulary” for important actors, processes, and (often informal) institutions. When faced with a choice of formats for the resultant assemblage of concepts, trajectories and terms, whether used by participants or coined by observers, the authors opt for a mixture of encyclopaedic and anatomical ones.

The encyclopaedic format has both advantages and disadvantages. While it may bor- der on the descriptive or lack room for discussion, it also allows for an inductive, bottom-up approach to data collection, accommodates conceptual multiplicity in the field and sets out grounds for experimental take on post-communism and modelling its complexity. Ana- tomical format splits material into functional clusters: politics, economy and society; structures and actors. The advantage is evident, as one can embrace clusters of concepts related to the same domain and be briefed about the range of existing approaches in an effective way. The disadvantage is that, strictly speaking, it is not possible to associate each particular entry with a specific cluster. Thus, church, for example, could appear in all clusters, as it performs different functions in society, while also playing a role in economy and politics, extracting economic benefits and political gains from colluding with the executive power.

In a similar effort to structure The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, I faced a similar challenge, whereby the same practice could be representative of network-based re-distribution, communal solidarity, individual survival and systemic coercion. Solving this structural problem has pointed to the centrality of ambivalence to the functioning of practices we aim to conceptualise. In dealing with the Global Informality Project dataset I have opted for the encyclopaedic principle at the start, i.e. non-normative, non-hierarchical, non-geographical approach, and applied rigour by including entries generated bottom-up, by user communities and expressed in the vernacular, while also making it possible to create a multiplicity of observer-standpoint clusters in the online version of the dataset (www.in-formality.com).

In a similar way, the authors of The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes adopt a structuralist approach, driven by language. They tackle complexity and multidimen- sionality of post-communist regimes not simply by cataloguing existing concepts but by relating them to each other and constructing a broader, overarching framework: a new language for post-communist regimes. The authors focus on categories of the higher order, as it were, that is those used by observers: patronal democracy, conservative autocracy, and market-exploiting dictatorship. The notion of the adopted political family, for example, includes kinship and quasi-kinship relationships, thus constituting networks that differ from other types of human associations such as class, feudal elite, or nomenklatura. Innovative methods like the proposed triangular model, use of certain terms, and instances of concept-stretching necessary for fitting them into the proposed framework sometimes stagger the reader, overwhelmed by the colossal effort undertaken by the authors. The scope and ambition of the book are balanced off by the integration of the valuable perspectives “from within,” taking us beyond the existent top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Countries analysed from a variety of aspects, comparatively or as single, illustrative short case studies, include Estonia, China, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakh- stan, North Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine. The resulting outcome significantly expands our understanding of the “real politics” of post-communist regimes and represent a shift from the Western-centred perspectives to the context-rich

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Preface • xxv conceptualisations. With the ongoing global U-turns to dictatorships and democratic

back-pedalling occurring in democracies, we witness a certain linguistic turn in political science in response to the post-communist experience. With some notable exceptions, a switch of terms from democracy to kleptocracy does not yet mean a change in the top- down, US-centred, normative approaches, often grounded in the oblivion of their own histories.

The conceptual, methodological and semantical innovations contained in The Anat- omy of Post-Communist Regimes will undoubtedly produce an abundance of reactions among scholars, students and readers yearning for orientation in the complex world of post-communist realities.

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Introduction

Trapped in the Language of Democratization

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a political regime was accompanied by a newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a descriptive language. This means that the social science concepts that had been de- veloped for the analysis of Western-type polities were applied to the various phenomena in the newly liberated countries. Scholars started to describe these polities as some forms of “democracy” with certain kinds of “governments,” “parties,” “politicians,” “checks and balances” and so on. Indeed, such categories are intertwined and form a special narrative context, a framework of Western-type democracies where the categories have their particular characteristics and their relative place and connections to the other categories of the framework. Therefore, the use of this language of liberal democracies implicitly assumes the structure and logic of Western-type polities, that is, that the regimes the language is used for do share the essential features, the pattern of elements and internal dynamics, of liberal democracies.

This belief is deeply rooted in the euphoric state that followed the collapse of communist regimes. “The end of history” quickly became the hallmark phrase of this period.

This phrase, somewhat simplifying what Francis Fukuyama actually said in his 1992 book of the same title,¹ expressed an outright optimism about the decisive victory of liberal democracy leading to an irresistible wave of democratization around the globe. The geo- political argument, underpinning this belief, saw the above-mentioned collapse as the end of the relatively unambiguous world order defined by the competition of two su- perpowers, a democratic and a dictatorial one. For the world’s polities had either been associated with one pole or the other,² the obvious conclusion from the fall of the latter pole—the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc—was that countries can only be associated with the winner pole—the United States and the Western Bloc. Adding to this the active American policy of democracy assistance,³ it is easy to see why democratization appeared to be inevitable and history, indeed, ended.

The euphoric view also embodied a normative, liberal argument. This meant a moral impetus for the universal extension of human rights as well as the political sys- tem that can guarantee those rights the best.⁴ From this standpoint, the post-communist regime changes provided a unique opportunity for the peoples who had suffered under

1 Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man.

2 O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule; Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries.

3 Carothers, “Democracy Assistance”; Carothers, Aiding Democracy Abroad.

4 Holmes, “Democracy for Losers.”

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2 • Introduction

communist rule to build free democracies for themselves, adopting the values of the post- WWII West. On the other hand, the liberal position also meant a moral inhibition toward taking into full account the historical and cultural background of post-communist societies. It was more in line with the liberal view of human equality to disregard the institutional and cultural ruins of communism: to believe that every nation has the same potential to build Western-type liberal democracies, and that there exists an inherent desire for the freedoms the West values—indeed, the freedoms the people are entitled to—just this desire had been suppressed by communist dictatorships.⁵ This is an important reason why transitology and the studies of the success of democratization have tended to focus more on the political method of regime change, the quality of institutional setup, the interests of the elites, and finally the visible hand of the West manifested in economic and political linkage.⁶

The geopolitical and the liberal arguments seemingly justified that post-communist countries should be analyzed in the terminological framework of liberal democracy, which was seen as the endpoint of a linear development for which the base conditions were more or less granted. The specific features of every polity were to be expressed in terms of con- gruence and deviance from the teleological vision of democracy. All divergences from the way of democratization were seen as mere “teething problems” that are surmountable and are to be surmounted.

As “deviances” became more and more disturbing and the end of the transition paradigm developed,⁷ the scholarly reaction was a widespread change of regime labels without a change of the regime framework. In other words, while new terms were coined to name the various non-democratizing regimes, the underlying language that was used to describe their specific features remained almost intact. The introduction of new categories for sub-regime elements was much more ad hoc than the labeling attempts of comparative regime theory,⁸ and basically no one has attempted systemically to revise the categories and harmonize them with the new labels.

Indeed, we are trapped in the analytical language that gained dominance in the 1990s. Although the transition paradigm has been consensually rejected, we kept the terminological framework of Western-type polities and have continued to use the lan- guage of liberal democracy to describe post-communist systems. The same terms are used to describe the inner elements of post-communist regimes as if they indeed retained the above-mentioned logic and dynamics of liberal democracies—even though they are not recognized as liberal democracies anymore.

The language of liberal democracies perpetuates misunderstanding in the theories and views regarding the present state of post-communism. Using the same analytical categories for the Western as well as the post-communist region inevitably results in conceptual stretching and brings in a host of hidden presumptions, many of which—as we will

5 Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value.”

6 Schmitter and Karl, “The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists”; Bunce, “Should Transitologists Be Grounded?”; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.

7 Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm”; Levitsky and Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.”

8 For a critical meta-analysis of these developments, see Cassani, “Hybrid What?”

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Introduction • 3 show in this book—simply do not hold for post-communist countries. Also, the context

expressed in the language distorts attempts at empirical analysis and data collection.

From this respect, the effect of the presumption of simple comparability of Western regimes with post-communist regimes can be best captured with so-called continuous measures.

These measures assess the state and trend of “democraticness” of the countries of the world quantitatively, selecting a range of institutions or criteria, and ranking them on continuous scales. These measures are then aggregated and the country is given regime label according to its cumulative score.⁹ Research institutes like Polity and Freedom House collect, for every country, a uniform set of available variables and they are aggregated according to the same algorithm in case of every country. While it produces decent databases for scholarly use, this method indeed presupposes that every regime, Western or otherwise, looks essentially the same: that they can be understood by focusing on the same kind of components—the actors and institutions the collected variables focus on—which are all structured in the same way with the same pattern of emphases—as expressed by the uniform method of ag- gregation. These presumptions, and the dubious nature thereof, would have already become clear had different words been used for the elements of different contexts; it would have been obvious that what happens is indeed analyzing apples and oranges, or rather apples and kangaroos in the same way.¹⁰ But the language of liberal democracies has concealed structural differences and even their probability, and allowed for the analysis of post-communist polities just as if they were Western ones.

The Inadequacy of Existing Models for the Post-Communist Region

But is it really unjustified to look for the same elements in post-communist and Western regimes? Are post-communist countries fundamentally different? To answer this, we have to see what the regimes’ fundamentals are. We need to take a closer look at the ex- isting models, that is, the scholarly understandings of the systems which have developed after the so-called “third wave of democratization”¹¹ so we can reveal their presumptions, and why they are not applicable to post-communism.

The failure of the paradigm of linear transition from communist dictatorship to liberal democracy became apparent within a decade after the regime changes. Some post-communist countries, like Estonia, Poland or Hungary, moved remarkably close in a few years to the Western-type model of liberal democracy, whereas in post-communist countries further east, like Russia and the Central Asian countries, democratization seemed to have stopped or turned back soon after the beginning of the process.¹² As it became increasingly difficult to overlook the disappointment in this regard, the literature on the

9 For a critical meta-analysis, see Bogaards, “Where to Draw the Line?”

10 Bunce, “Should Transitologists Be Grounded?,” 112. Cf. Sartori, “Comparing and Miscomparing.”

11 Huntington, The Third Wave.

12 Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.”

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4 • Introduction

transition grew richer: scholars started to introduce new regime labels, reflecting on the nature of the not-so-democratic polities.

At first, in the period that may be called “the transitology phase” of analysis, political scientists presumed that post-communist countries set off in the direction of the liberal democratic world, just not arrived yet. Indeed, transitology appeared not only as a transformation of social systems but also as a reference to its own literal meaning: these systems are underway, and form different models according to the rate of their distance or deviation from liberal democracy.¹³ Under this assumption, several branches of research have appeared in the literature. First, the most literal branch of “transitology” focused on the process of transition itself, both in the post-communist region and Latin America. Samuel P. Huntington, Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter and Adam Przeworski are regarded as classics of this branch.¹⁴ Second, the “consolidology” branch—popular mainly in the second half of the 1990s—placed emphasis on the consolidation of democracy in transition countries, as analyzed in the works of Juan Linz, Scott Mainwaring, and Larry Diamond, among others.¹⁵ Finally, “Europeanization” can be regarded as a branch of transitology, although it evolved differently from mainstream comparative regime theory. With exponents like Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier, the Europeanization literature examined the convergence of Central-Eastern European post-communist countries to the European Union (EU).¹⁶ It was also the longest surviving branch of transitology (at least until 2008), which is explained by the fact that it focused on the “success countries,”

that is, where the assumption of transitology—regime change from communism to the Western model—was the least obviously wrong. The scholars of Europeanization hoped the EU accessions of 2004 and 2007 would deepen democracy further, whereas Western linkage and leverage was presumed to be strong enough incentives against any kind of

“backsliding” on the road to liberal democracy.¹⁷ Later on, though, even in this part of the region the failure of linear progression became obvious, most spectacularly in the cases of Hungary and Poland.¹⁸

Conceptualizing regimes, for transitology the adequate labels for “transitional regimes” that were “gravitating toward the democratic end at a varying pace” were the so-called diminished subtypes. Diminished subtypes are democracies with adjectives:

categories that add privative suffixes to the term democracy like “illiberal,” “electoral,” “de- fective,” and so on. The aim of such conceptualization was to point out the defects of the given regime vis-à-vis the Western model. As two leading scholars of democratization put it, democracies with adjectives should be seen as “less than complete instances of democ-

13 For a meta-analysis, see Kopecký and Mudde, “What Has Eastern Europe Taught Us about the Democratization Literature (and Vice Versa)?”

14 Huntington, The Third Wave; O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule; Schmitter,

“Transitology”; Przeworski, “Transitions to Democracy.”

15 Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation; Mainwaring, O’Donnell, and Valenzuela, Issues in Democratic Consolidation; Diamond, Developing Democracy.

16 Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier, The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe.

17 Levitz and Pop-Eleches, “Why No Backsliding?”

18 Magyar, “Parallel System Narratives.”

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Introduction • 5 racy,” and also “in using these subtypes the analyst makes [a] modest claim about the extent

of democratization.”¹⁹ Despite the obsolescence of the transition paradigm, such labels in the genre of diminished subtypes remain highly popular to this day.²⁰

The transitology phase of analysis was gradually replaced by “the hybridology phase of analysis” in the literature of comparative regime theory. The new regimes were finally seen as stable, that is, not gravitating towards the democratic or the dictatorial pole but sitting on specific equilibria between them. This is not to say that these regimes are static;

only the linear development toward liberal democracy was no longer presumed. Realizing the presence of sui generis, electoral but not democratic regimes,²¹ scholars introduced the concept of a permanent “grey zone” between democracy and dictatorship, positioning existing polities along the democracy-dictatorship axis (Figure I.1).

Figure I.1. The democracy dictatorship axis, with a grey zone between the two poles

First categorization: Larry Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 21.

Second categorization: Marc Morjé Howard and Philip G. Roessler, “Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Au- thoritarian Regimes,” American Journal of Political Science 50, no. 2 (April 1, 2006): 367.

Third categorization: János Kornai , “The System Paradigm Revisited: Clarification and Additions in the Light of Experiences in the Post Communist Region,” in Stubborn Structures: Reconceptualizing Post-Communist Regimes, ed. Bálint Magyar (Budapest–New York: CEU Press, 2019), 21–74.

Conceptualization attempts of the grey zone may be categorized into two groups. First, the zone can be understood as not a scale, extended between the endpoints of the axis, but a mere group of regimes that are neither democracies nor dictatorships. Regime labels

“hybrid” or “mixed” are included in this category, for such terms do not seek to define the respective regime in correlation to any polar type at all. Also in this group, there are the various labels that were created for concrete, stable regime types inside the grey zone without defining a fixed position relative to both of the axis’ ends. Instead, they position the respective regime nearer one pole which they feel it closer to, and define the regime as a twisted form of that polar type. For examples, one can think of labels such as “managed democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism.” Indeed, several diminished subtypes have joined this group, too, starting to mean a distinct regime type instead of a transitional

19 Collier and Levitsky, “Democracy with Adjectives,” 437–38.

20 For a meta-analysis, see Bogaards, “How to Classify Hybrid Regimes?”

21 Diamond, “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes.”

Liberal

democracy Hybrid regimes Dictatorship

Dictatorship Liberal

democracy

Democracy Autocracy

Electoral

democracy Competitive

authoritarianism Hegemonic

authoritarianism Closed

authoritarianism

POST-COMMUNIST REGIMES

A Conceptual Framework