Building A Trustworthy State In Post Socialist Transition

Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition considers the problems and prospects for creating trustworthy and reliable public institutions in the aftermath of the transition from socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. The volume draws on the experience of those who have lived through and studied the transition and contrasts their insights with those of generalist scholars who study government accountability and democracy. The contributions originated in the Collegium Budapest project on Honesty and Trust: Theory and Experience in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition, organized by János Kornai and Susan Rose-Ackerman. A second volume entitled, Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Transition , is being published simultaneously.

Beneficial social and economic exchange relies on a certain level of trust. But trust is a delicate matter, not least in the former socialist countries where illegitimate behaviour by governments made distrust a habit. The chapters in this volume analyze the causes and the effects of the lack of social trust in post-socialist countries. The contributions originated in the Collegium Budapest project on Honesty and Trust: Theory and Experience in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition. A second volume entitled, Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition , is being published simultaneously.

The countries of Central Europe in the first round for admission to the European Union have all established constitutional, electoral democracies and market economies. However, much remains to be done to achieve fully consolidated democratic states. This study documents the weaknesses of public oversight and participation in policymaking in Hungary and Poland, two of the most advanced countries in the region. It discusses five alternative routes to accountability including European Union oversight, constitutional institutions such as presidents and courts, devolution to lower-level governments, the use of neo-corporatist bodies, and open-ended participation rights. It urges more emphasis on the fifth option, public participation. Case studies of the environmental movement in Hungary and of student groups in Poland illustrate these general points. The book reviews the United States' experience of open-ended public participation and draws some lessons for the transition countries from the strengths and weaknesses of the American system.

This volume explores the effects of transitional justice measures on trust-building and democratization across twelve countries in Central and Eastern Europe and parts of the Former Soviet Union over the period 19892012. The author argues that transitional justice measures have a differentiated impact on political and social trust-building, supporting some aspects of political trust and undermining other aspects of social trust. Moreover, the structure, scope, timing, and implementation of transitional justice measures condition outcomes. More expansive and compulsory institutional change mechanisms register the largest effects, with limited and voluntary change mechanisms having a diminished effect, and more informal and largely symbolic measures having the most attenuated effect. These differentiated and conditional effects are also evident with respect to transition goals like supporting democratic consolidation and reducing corruption, since these goals respond differently to the mixtures of institutional and symbolic reforms found in transitional justice programs. The author develops an original transitional justice typology in order to test hypotheses linking trust-building and transitional justice across twelve cases in the post-communist region. The resulting new datasets allow for a quantitative examination of the relationship between different types of transitional justice programs and a range of possible state building and societal reconciliation goals, including political trust-building, social trust-building, democratization, the strengthening of civil society, the promotion of government effectiveness, and the reduction of corruption. Comparative case studies of four transitional justice programs-Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Bulgariadraw on field work, primary and historical documents, and interview materials to explicate trust-building dynamics, with particular attention to regime complicity challenges, historical memory issues, and communist legacies. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

The purpose of this book is to move beyond the approach which views energy as a purely geopolitical tool of the Russian state and assumes a 'one size fits all' approach to energy security in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It argues that in order to fully understand Russian involvement in the regional energy complex, the CEE-Russian energy relationship should be analysed in the context of the political and economic transitions that Russia and the CEE states underwent. The chapters on individual countries in the book demonstrate that, although Russia has and will continue to play a substantial role in the CEE energy sector, the scope of its possible influence has been overstated.

An analysis of post-Soviet state-building and of post-communist transition in Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus and Russia.

This book documents a worrisome gap between principles and practice in democratic governance. The State of Access is a comparative, cross-disciplinary exploration of the ways in which democratic institutions fail or succeed to create the equal opportunities that they have promised to deliver to the people they serve. In theory, rules and regulations may formally guarantee access to democratic processes, public services, and justice. But reality routinely disappoints, for a number of reasons—exclusionary policymaking, insufficient attention to minorities, underfunded institutions, inflexible bureaucracies. The State of Access helps close the gap between the potential and performance in democratic governance.