The Games of the Velvet Revolution : An Integrative Approach to the Transition in Czechoslovakia 1989

Twelve years ago, in their influential article, James Mahoney and Richard Snyder (1999) reviewed contemporary research on regime change. They focused on problems of methodology and methods preference, and on the ‘chicken-egg’ controversy between the proponents of voluntarism on one side (Di Palma 1990; Przeworski 1991) and structuralism on the other (Luebbert 1991; Rueschmeyer et al. 1992) and argued that ‘laying the groundwork for the next generation of studies of regime change requires [...] integration of structural and voluntarist approaches’ (Mahoney and Snyder 1999, 4). This chapter seeks to combine structural and actor-oriented approaches in an analysis of the transition of Czechoslovakia in 1989. Such a combination promises to get around the rigid conditions of socio-historical macro-structures as well as the vague, non-explaining flexibility of games in political arenas. It aims to uncover how structural variables affect the possibilities of politicians and citizens during the process of democratic transition. In this chapter, game theory is employed as the actor-related framework for its analytical rigour and its theoretical potential to achieve a ‘prediction regarding the outcome of interaction among human beings using only data on the order of events, combined with a description of the players’ preferences over the feasible outcomes of the situation’ (Rubinstein 1991, 923). The game theoretical models make use of Joseph Colomer’s classification of regime change actors (Colomer, 1991), where actors are defined by their preference orderings. Four groupings in the classification – Reformists, Openists, Continuists, and Involutionists – constitute the ruling bloc, while the remaining two – Rupturists and Revolutionaries – represent the opposition (Figure 9.1).