Chapter 1: What Has a Quarter Century of Post-Communism Taught Us About the Correlates of Democracy?

The post-communist region furnishes students of democratization with a fertile field for investigation. Countries of the region span almost the entire spectrum of possible outcomes in terms of political regimes. Three decades ago, all of Eurasia and Eastern Europe slumbered in a hyper-authoritarian deep freeze. Now the region includes some of the world’s most open polities (e.g. Estonia) and some of its most closed (e.g. Uzbekistan), as well as everything in between. Empirical investigation suggests that several big background variables that are often considered drivers of democratization are indeed strongly associated with cross-national variation in regime outcomes in the region. But structure is not destiny; the performance of some countries contradicts the expectations raised by conventional theories.