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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Chapter 3: Trajectories of Political Development in the Post-Soviet States

Author : Graeme Gill

Published in: A Quarter Century of Post-Communism Assessed

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Some 25 years after the collapse of the USSR, most successor states are ruled by non-democratic regimes. This chapter explores why this is so. After looking at some arguments about culture, the chapter turns to an argument about the circumstances of these countries’ emergence from the USSR, and especially the role of mass-based civil society forces in that process. Most of the post-Soviet countries experienced an overwhelmingly elite-based transition in which the populace played only a subsidiary part. The result was the creation of political systems that were semi-closed, in the sense of providing little scope for real popular participation. Politics was overwhelmingly an elite phenomenon, and those elites acted to maintain the semi-closed nature of their polities.

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previous chapter Chapter 2: Post-Communist Transition Under the Umbrella of Uneven EUropeanisation: East Central Europe, the Baltic States and the Balkans
next chapter Chapter 4: Curbing Post-Communist Corruption: External Pressure vs. Domestic Commitment
Footnotes
1
This chapter is only concerned with the 15 former union republics of the USSR and does not include those statelets that have emerged as a result of frozen conflicts, North Ossetia, Abkhazia or Transdnistr.
 
2
A regime is defined as the set of rules that govern access to power in the political system.
 
3
The danger of circularity also exists when scholars shift from an understanding of political culture as subjective values to a wider one including institutions and patterns of action (Lukin 2000, pp. 28–31; McAuley 1984).
 
4
This is a more general argument about the effect of authoritarian parties in mitigating elite conflict and bringing about unity. For an extended analysis, see Brownlee (2007).
 
5
Although, he does acknowledge some failures in this initially: Gamsakhurdia in Georgia, Elchibey in Azerbaijan, Nabiev in Tajikistan and Kravchuk in Ukraine (Hale 2015, pp. 127–133).
 
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Metadata
Title
Chapter 3: Trajectories of Political Development in the Post-Soviet States
Author
Graeme Gill
Copyright Year
2017
Book
A Quarter Century of Post-Communism Assessed

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-43436-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-43437-7

Copyright Year: 2017

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43437-7_4

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