Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T15:11:45.322Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2017

Stephen E. Hanson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR naturally provokes us to reflect on the course of Eurasian and world history in the post-communist era. Upon closer examination, however, it is not clear what significance the precise time span of two and a half decades has for the scientific study of political and institutional change. A review of the social science literature indicates that we are very far from having any consensual understanding of how long processes of regime evolution typically take—and thus, how to establish the relevant time span for judging the scientific accuracy of initial predictions about the outcomes of post-communist “transitions.” I argue that the first step in assessing the lessons of post-Soviet political change to date, from a social-scientific point of view, lies in defining the term “regime” more precisely, so that scholars can at least agree when one regime has ended and another begun. In this respect, Weberian sociological theory provides useful conceptual materials for a more general theory of “regime evolution” within which the empirical results of the first twenty-five years of post-Soviet change can be situated.

Type
Articles
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 328 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London and New York: Verso.Google Scholar
Arthur, W. Brian. 1994. Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Aslund, Anders. 1994. “Russia’s Success Story.” Foreign Affairs 73(September-October):58–71.Google Scholar
Barash, David P. 1977. Sociobiology and Behavior. New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Barkow, Jerome H., Cosmides, Leda, and Tooby, John, eds. 1995. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Blyth, Mark, Hodgson, Geoffrey M., Lewis, Orion, and Steinmo, Sven. 2011. “Introduction to the Special Issue on the Evolution of Institutions.” Journal of Institutional Economics 7(3): 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Archie. 1996. The Gorbachev Factor. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chirot, Daniel. 2012. How Societies Change. 2d ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.Google Scholar
Cirtautas, Arista. 1995. “The Post-Leninist State: A Conceptual and Empirical Examination.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 28(4): 379–92.Google Scholar
Collier, David and Levitsky, Steven. “Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research.” World Politics 49(3): 430–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coppedge, Michael, et al. . 2011. “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy: A New Approach.” Perspectives on Politics 9(2): 247–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crawford, Beverly and Lijphart, Aaron. 1995. “Explaining Political and Economic Change in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Old Legacies, New Institutions, Hegemonic Norms, and International Pressures.” Comparative Political Studies 28(2): 171–99.Google Scholar
Dahl, Robert. 1971. Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Darden, Keith and Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2006. “The Great Divide: Literacy, Communism, and the Soviet Collapse.” World Politics 59(1): 83–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darwin, Charles. 1859. The Origin of Species. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Dawkins, Richard. 1989. The Selfish Gene. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dennett, Daniel Clement. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.Google Scholar
Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Di Palma, Giuseppe. 1990. To Craft Democracies: An Essay on Democratic Transitions. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ekiert, Grzegorz and Hanson, Stephen E., eds. 2003. Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fish, M. Steven. 2006. “Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies.” Journal of Democracy 17(1): 5–20.Google Scholar
Fish, M. Steven and Kroenig, Matthew. 2011. The Handbook of National Legislatures: A Global Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fowler, James H., Baker, Laura A., and Dawes, Christopher T.. 2008. “Genetic Variation in Political Participation.” American Political Science Review 102(2): 233–48.Google Scholar
Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” National Interest 16: 3–18.Google Scholar
Fukuyama, Francis. 1993. “The Modernizing Imperative: The USSR as an Ordinary Country.” National Interest 31: 10–18.Google Scholar
Gel’man, Vladimir. 2015. Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh.Google Scholar
Grzymala-Busse, Anna. 2011. “Time Will Tell? Temporality and the Analysis of Causal Mechanisms and Processes.” Comparative Political Studies 44(9): 1267–97.Google Scholar
Hale, Henry E. 2006. “Democracy or Autocracy on the March? The Colored Revolutions as the Normal Dynamics of Patronal Presidentialism.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39(3): 305–29.Google Scholar
Hale, Henry E. 2008. The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Henry E. 2015. Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hanson, Stephen E. 1995. “The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change.” Comparative Political Studies 28(2): 306–14.Google Scholar
Hanson, Stephen E. 2010. Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanson, Stephen E. 2011. “Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin’s Russia.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 636(1): 32–68.Google Scholar
Hatemi, Peter and McDermott, Rose. 2012. “The Political Psychology of Biology, Genetics and Behavior.” Political Psychology 33(3): 307–12.Google Scholar
Howard, Marc Morjé. 2003. The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huxley, Julian. 1943. Evolution, the Modern Synthesis. New York and London: Harper Bros.Google Scholar
Ingelhart, Ronald and Weizel, Christian, 2009. “How Development Leads to Democracy.” Foreign Affairs 88(2): 33–48.Google Scholar
Jowitt, Ken. 1992. New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kohli, Atul, et al. . 1995. “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium.” World Politics 48(1): 1–49.Google Scholar
Kolesnikov, Andrei. 2015. “The Russian Middle Class in a Besieged Fortress.” Carnegie Moscow Center, April 6, 1–8.Google Scholar
Kopstein, Jeffrey and Reilly, David A.. 2000. “Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation of the Postcommunist World.” World Politics 53(1): 1–37.Google Scholar
Levitsky, Steven and Way, Lucan. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lewin, Moshe. 1987. The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Orion and Steinmo, Sven. 2012. “How Institutions Evolve: Evolutionary Theory and Institutional Change.” Polity 44: 314–339.Google Scholar
Linz, Juan J. 2000. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder: Lynne Reiner.Google Scholar
Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred C.. 1996. Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Lopez, Anthony and McDermott, Rose. 2012. “Adaptation, Heritability, and the Emergence of Evolutionary Political Science.” Political Psychology 33(3): 343–62.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. 2010. Colonialism and Post-Colonial Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James and Thelen, Kathleen Ann. 2010. “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change.” In Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, ed. Mahoney, J. and Thelen, K. A.. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mayr, Ernst. 1963. Animal Species and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McFaul, Michael. 2001. Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
McGlinchey, Eric. 2011. Chaos, Violence, Dynasty: Politics and Islam in Central Asia. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
Munck, Geraldo L. 1996. “Disaggregating Political Regime: Conceptual Issues in the Study of Democratization.” Working Paper No. 228, August, Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, Indiana.Google Scholar
North, Douglass C. 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Parsons, Talcott. 1964. “Evolutionary Universals in Society.” American Sociological Review 29(3): 339–57.Google Scholar
Pfaff, Steve and Yang, Guobin. 2001. “Double-Edged Rituals and the Symbolic Resources of Collective Action: Political Commemorations and the Mobilization of Protest in 1989.” Theory and Society 30(4): 539–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pierson, Paul. 2004. Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Przeworski, Adam and Limongi, Fernando. 1997. “Modernization: Theories and Facts.” World Politics 29(2): 155–83.Google Scholar
Radnitz, Scott. 2010. Weapons of the Wealthy: Predatory Regimes and Elite-Led Protest in Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Runciman, W. G. 2009. The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rupnik, Jacques. 1999. “The Postcommunist Divide.” Journal of Democracy 10(1): 57–62.Google Scholar
Sachs, Jeffrey D. 1993. Poland’s Jump to the Market Economy. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2012. “What I Did in Russia.” Accessed at http://jeffsachs.org/2012/03/what-i-did-in-russia/, September 5, 2016.Google Scholar
Sartori, Giovanni. 1971. “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics.” American Political Science Review 64(4): 1033–53.Google Scholar
Shleifer, Andrei and Treisman, Daniel. 2000. Without a Map: Political Tactics and Economic Reform in Russia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sil, Rudra and Katzenstein, Peter J.. 2010. Beyond Paradigms: Analytical Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Singh, Prema and vom Hau, Matthias. 2016. “Ethnicity in Time: Politics, History, and the Relationship between Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision.” Comparative Political Studies 49(10): 1303–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sperling, Valerie. 2003. “The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel: Patriotism, Militarism and the Russian National Idea.” Nations and Nationalism 9(2): 235–53.Google Scholar
Steinmo, Sven. 2010. The Evolution of Modern States: Sweden, Japan, and the United States. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Svolik, Milan. 2012. The Politics of Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tajfel, Henri and Turner, John. 1979. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. Austin, William G. and Worchel, Stephen. Chicago: Nelson Hall.Google Scholar
Tetlock, Robert. 2006. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Thelen, Kathleen. 2004. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tismăneanu, Vladimir, Howard, Marc Morjé, and Sil, Rudra, eds. 2003. World Order after Leninism. Herbert J. Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Treisman, Daniel. 2007. The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Way, Lucan. 2015. Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Weyland, Kurt. 2008. “Toward a New Theory of Institutional Change.” World Politics 60(2): 281–314 Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. 2 vols. Ed. Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Laurence. 2011. “Enlivening the Concept of Democratization: The Biological Metaphor.” Perspectives on Politics 9(2): 291–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, E. O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar