This volume brings together a distinguished group of scholars working on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to examine in depth three waves of democratic change that took place in eleven different former Communist nations. Its essays draw important conclusions about the rise, development, and breakdown of both democracy and dictatorship in each country and together provide a rich comparative perspective on the post-Communist world. The first democratic wave to sweep this region encompasses the rapid rise of democratic regimes from 1989 to 1992 from the ashes of Communism and Communist states. The second wave arose with accession to the European Union (from 2004 to 2007) and the third, with the electoral defeat of dictators (1996 to 2005) in Croatia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. Although these three waves took place in different countries and involved different strategies, they nonetheless shared several overarching commonalities. International factors played a role in all three waves, as did citizens demanding political change. Further, each wave revealed not just victorious democrats but also highly resourceful authoritarians. The authors of each chapter in this volume examine both internal and external dimensions of both democratic success and failure.

This collection of essays is the result of a conference convened at Princeton University marking the ten-year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of the best minds in post-Soviet studies focused on the task of identifying in what ways the post-Communist experience with transition has confirmed or confounded conventional theories of political and economic development. The result is a rich array of essays examining vital aspects of the transitional decade following the Soviet collapse and the comparative lessons learned. These essays explicitly tally the gains and losses to post-Soviet countries of the last ten years as well as comparing the post-Soviet experience implicitly and explicitly with that of other developing countries. Each essay blends political science theory with fresh empirical analysis.

Why do new, democratizing states often find it so difficult to actually govern? Why do they so often fail to provide their beleaguered populations with better access to public goods and services? Using original and unusual data, this book uses post-communist Russia as a case in examining what the author calls this broader 'weak state syndrome' in many developing countries. Through interviews with over 800 Russian bureaucrats in 72 of Russia's 89 provinces, and a highly original database on patterns of regional government non-compliance to federal law and policy, the book demonstrates that resistance to Russian central authority not so much ethnically based (as others have argued) as much as generated by the will of powerful and wealthy regional political and economic actors seeking to protect assets they had acquired through Russia's troubled transition out of communism.

The Soviet dictatorship was a strong state, committed to dominating and transforming society in the name of a utopian ideology. When the communist regime crumbled and the post-Soviet countries committed to democracy, most observers took for granted that their state structures would be effective agents of the popular will. Russia's experience demonstrates that this assumption was overly optimistic. This book, based on a major collaborative research project with American and Russian scholars, shows that state capacity, strength, and coherence were highly problematic after communism, which had major consequences for particular functions of government and for the entire process of regime change. Eleven respected contributors examine governance in post-Soviet Russia in comparative context, investigating the roots, characteristics, and consequences of the crisis as a whole and its manifestations in the specific realms of tax collection, statistics, federalism, social policy, regulation of the banks, currency exchange, energy policy, and parliamentary oversight of the bureaucracy.

In "Local Heroes," Kathryn Stoner-Weiss analyzes a crucial aspect of one of the great dramas of modern times--the reconstitution of the Russian polity and economy after more than seventy years of communist rule. This is the first book to look comprehensively and systematically at Russia's democratic transition at the local level. Its goal is to explain why some of the new political institutions in the Russian provinces weathered the monumental changes of the early 1990s better than others. Using newly available economic, political, and sociological data to test various theories of democratization and institutional performance, Stoner-Weiss finds that traditional theories are unable to explain variations in regional government performance in Russia.

"Local Heroes" argues that the legacy of the former economic system influenced the operation of new political institutions in important and often unexpected ways. Past institutional structures, specifically the concentration of the regional economy, promoted the formation of political and economic coalitions within a new proto-democratic institutional framework. These coalitions have had positive effects on governmental performance. For democratic theorists, this may be a surprising conclusion. However, it is possible, as Stoner-Weiss suggests, that the needs of democratic development may be different in the short run than in the long run. The "local heroes" of today may be impediments to the further development of democracy tomorrow. This provocative work, solidly grounded in research and theory, will interest anyone concerned with issues of economic and political transition.

This collection of essays is the result of a conference convened at Princeton University marking the ten-year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of the best minds in post-Soviet studies focused on the task of identifying in what ways the post-Communist experience with transition has confirmed or confounded conventional theories of political and economic development. The result is a rich array of essays examining vital aspects of the transitional decade following the Soviet collapse and the comparative lessons learned. These essays explicitly tally the gains and losses to post-Soviet countries of the last ten years as well as comparing the post-Soviet experience implicitly and explicitly with that of other developing countries. Each essay blends political science theory with fresh empirical analysis.