In the confrontation between the two main economic systems that has marked the twentieth century, capitalism has been declared the winner–by default– over its adversary, socialism. Today, establishing a market economy has become the primary goal of the formerly socialist countries. The history of economic reform helps explain this remarkable turning point. Attempts to improve the old centralized system by expanding enterprise autonomy (in Poland, the Soviet Union, and East Germany) and more radical reforms that limited the role of central planning (in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and China) encountered social and political obstacles or had unexpected and undesired effects. During the 1980s, the idea of a socialist market economy, which had been seen as a "third way" between capitalism and centralized socialism, was abandoned as economists gradually came to support a free market rather than the dogma of planning. Through a comparative and historical analysis of change in socialist and post-socialist systems, this timely and original book clarifies the policies and pitfalls in this extraordinary transition. Bernard Chavance provides a succinct introduction and analysis of the politics and economics of Eastern Europe from the creation of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union through what he argues have been three major waves of reform since the 1950s to the dismantling of most socialist governments in the 1990s. Exploring the link between the one-party regime and the growing rigidity of socialist economic systems, the author analyzes the failure of both incremental and radical reforms to adapt to new economic challenges, thus leading to the ultimate collapse of communist regimes in Europe.

This book tackles different aspects of the adaptive and transformative process in communist and post-communist systems in Eastern Europe, offering competing models, which locate the explanatory variable in different places and account for the unfolding of change in different ways.

Electoral Systems and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe assesses the influence of electoral systems on political change in 20 post-communist European states. The main finding is that electoral institutions have systematic effects on the formation of representative structures. 'Party-enabling' aspects of electoral laws such as list proportional representation tend to foster popular inclusion in politics and institutionalized party systems, whereas 'politician-enabling' rules such as single-member districts and ballots that allow voters to select individuals often favour the development of weakly structured systems and high levels of popular exclusion from the representative process.

This book explores specific facets of systemic change in a theoretical way for understanding the processes of transformation in the communist systems. It is useful for historians and others concerned with the collapse of the communist system.

This book considers aspects of transformation of former state socialist countries: social and economic outcomes; forces in the transformation process; problems of consolidation of the new regimes;and other scenarios. It also looks at alternative types of society that might replace state socialism, particularly state capitalism and market socialism.

Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.