Political Parties, Party Systems and Economic Reform: Testing Hypotheses against Evidence from Postcommunist Countries

Abstract

Testing hypotheses from the literature on political institutions & the political economy of democratic transitions against recent evidence from postcommunist cases allows us to gauge variations in the institutional correlates of reform in democratic systems in different regions at different levels of development. Analysis of evidence from postcommunist dual transitions, specifically from Poland & the Czech Republic, also forces us to consider the possibility that variables & causal patterns driving outcomes in one group of cases may be systematically different than variables & causal patterns in another.