This paper deals with a critical stage in the dissolution of Soviet Communist (Bolshevik) Party?s domination commonwealth. The gradual emancipation European parties, starting Yugoslavia (1948), through developments that caused interventions Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), gave birth to independent strategies political struggle, autonomous from Moscow?s ideological centre, which were i...

The purpose of this work is to identify the positive and negative aspects of parties’ participation in the country’s modernization, which in turn, will help a country to determine the necessary steps to improve the social-economic development. The article considers a question of the role of the dominating party of Kazakhstan and ruling party of China in the country’s modernization. Using a comp...

Electoral heresthetics, or the manipulation of electoral systems to a political player’s advantage, had profound political consequences for post-communist transitional Poland. Choices of di¤erent electoral systems contributed ...rst to the fall of communism and later to the reclaiming of power by the postcommunists. Despite high stakes and top priority attached by political players to electoral...

The resurgence of civil society was credited with playing a critical role in the transitions of the socalled Third Wave of democracy (1974-1987). Social movements, human right organizations, churches, and other forms of organized “people power” mobilized repressed populations against authoritarian governments throughout the world and helped bring about regime change from Portugal to the Philipp...

I. Intellectuals and Workers It has been but a few short years since the revolutions of 1989 and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, but already one finds an orthodoxy in historical interpretation. The standard story goes something like this: the key to understanding 1989 is political mobilization, first of the intellectuals and then of society at large. In the post-Stalin period, East...

Political scientists have documented significant variation in political and economic outcomes of the 1989–91 revolutions. Countries bordering on western Europe have become relatively democratic and economically successful, with both democracy and wealth dropping off as one moves east and south. Explanations for this variation and the replication of an older pattern on the Eurasian landmass have...