On the Elites in the Eastern European Post-communist Countries - Political Elites in the Eastern European Political Regimes After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Interdisciplinary Methodological Approach

Abstract

This paper presents interdisciplinary methodological research concerning the emergence and dynamic behavior of elites in the democracies in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The research on political elites has been mainly guided so far by the interest in their origins, characteristics, functionalities, and political roles. These studies have raised several methodological questions concerning the collection of data on the political elite, and the validity and reliability of the survey data. Our approach focuses instead on a complexity-based approach by studying the social and political generative mechanisms which could illustrate elites’ emergence and dynamics. To this goal, we introduce a research methodology based on simulation and agent-based modeling which (i) constructs an artificial polity, and (ii) investigates the elites’ influence on the artificial polity’s outcomes. This type of approach enhances the study of some issues which are too complex to be studied by classic analytical and empirical means, like the emergence and self-organization of (political) elites as context-dependent and path-dependent phenomenon in the Central and Eastern European post-communist societies. After the 1990s, the democratization processes in these countries have often been questioned for their poor capacity to overcome the privilege-generating mechanisms which have affected the newly-constructed democratic institutions. Our approach identifies the privilege-generative mechanisms aimed to obtain and retain power in the post-communist polities in Eastern and Central Europe. The methodological issues approached in this experimental setting are concerned with (a) the construction of the context as an artificial polity, (b) the generation of the elites, and (c) the study of their dynamics.