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What Is the Leninist Legacy? Assessing Twenty Years of Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

In this review essay, Jody LaPorte and Danielle N. Lussier examine the “legacies” paradigm dominating postcommunist scholarship in the social sciences. The legacies paradigm has produced a growing list of factors that qualify as historical antecedents to contemporary outcomes without establishing a set of shared standards to guide comparative analysis. Scholars have paid less attention to developing a conceptual definition of legacy, thereby limiting our ability to evaluate the importance of historical factors versus more proximate causes. This critique presents a thoughtful analysis of the communist legacy, develops a typology that can be used to categorize legacy variables for meaningful comparison, and brings the concept into discussion with the broader literature on historical institutions and path dependency. By suggesting tools to aid comparative study, LaPorte and Lussier’s goal is to stimulate both conceptual and empirical analysis in evaluating the effect of communism on contemporary outcomes.

Type
Critical Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2011

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References

1 In discussing legacies of the communist era, numerous adjectives have been used: “Leninist legacies,” “communist legacies,” “socialist legacies,” and “Soviet legacies.” Although we are choosing to speak about the more general framing, “communist legacies,” our argument applies to all related articulations as well. Some examples of scholarship that consider communist legacies in analyzing these outcomes include Frane Adam, Primoz Kristan, and Matevi Tomsic, “Varieties of Capitalism in Eastern Europe (with Special Emphasis on Estonia and Slovenia),” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42, no. 1 (March 2009): 65-81; Valerie Bunce, “Regional Differences in Democratization: The East versus the South,” Post Soviet Affairs 14, no. 3 (July- September 1998): 187-211; M. Steven Fish, “Postcommunist Subversion: Social Science and Democratization in East Europe and Eurasia,” Slavic Review 58, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 794-823; Bela Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin Ameiican Transformations Compared (Budapest, 1998); Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield, “Understanding Cleavages in Party Systems: Issue Position and Issue Salience in 13 Post-Communist Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 2 (February 2009): 280-313; and David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (New York, 1998). See also several edited volumes on the topic, including Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (Cambridge, Eng., 2003); Beverly Crawford and Arend Lijphart, eds., Liberalization and Leninist Legacies: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Transitions (Berkeley, 1997); and Millar, James R. and Wolchik, Sharon L., eds., The Social Legacy of Communism (Cambridge, Eng., 1994), as well as a special issue of Communist and Post- Communist Studies 42, no. 4 (December 2009).Google Scholar

2 We also searched the plural “legacies.”

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30 For more detail on these concepts and their application to historical arguments, see Kathleen Thelen and Sten Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Sten Steinmo, Thelen, Kathleen, and Longstreth, Frank, eds., Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics (Cambridge, Eng., 1992);Google Scholar Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics” and Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, “Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies,” in Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, eds., Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies (Oxford, 2005).

31 Hall, Peter A. and Taylor, Rosemary C. R., “Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms,” Political Studies 44, no. 4 (December 1996): 942.Google Scholar See also James Mahoney, “Path Dependence in Historical Sociology,” Theory and Society 29, no. 4 (August 2000): 507-48; Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institudonalism,” World Politics 59, no. 3 (April 2007): 343, 348; Dan Slater and Erica Simmons, “Informative Regress: Critical Antecedents in Comparative Politics,” Comparative Political Studies 43, no. 7 (July 2010): 887; Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, 1991), 29; and Ira Katznelson, “Periodization and Preferences: Reflections on Purposive Action in Comparative Historical Social Science,” in James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 282.

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35 For reproduction, see Page, “Path Dependence”; Pierson, “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics”; and Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 35-37. For critical junctures, see Capoccia and Keleman, “The Study of Critical Junctures.”

36 Thelen, Kathleen, “How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis,” in Mahoney and Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, 208-40.Google Scholar

37 Ibid.

38 See, for example, Kitschelt, Mansfeldovna, Markowski, and Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems; Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past; Jones Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia; Grzegorz Ekiert, “Patterns of Postcommunist Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe,” in Ekiert and Hanson, eds., Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, 89-119; and Wittenberg, Jason, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church, Institutions and Electoral Continuity in Hungary (New York, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar