What explains the divergent political paths that the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have followed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? While some appear today to be consolidated democracies, others have all the features of consolidated autocracy. This study reviews the patterns of change and examines correlates of progress towards democracy. Variation acros...

Unlike other research papers, we will start our exploration into the Romanian higher education system during communist times, by going through some statistical data. This will be followed shortly by a short review of some other papers approaching the subject of higher education during communist times and, at the end, will be summed up to provide a theoretical framework for analysis. It must be ...

The different social contexts and historical backgrounds of countries in which companies operate may influence how their managers understand apply the concept environmental commitment. Thus, understanding commitment post-communist societies Central Eastern Europe can be expected to from Western markets. This study sheds light on these issues by analyzing managerial stories about Russia. It expl...

This study of workers' altitudes compares data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) surveys for former commuiiisi countries in Europe with ISSP data for Western countries over the period 1987-93, which covers the beginning of the transition to a market economy for the former communist countries. Omsistent with their hypothesis that communist-run economies left an altiiiidinal "lega...

In The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz describes two mechanisms of intellectual enslavement, namely Murti-Bing pills and Ketman. Although these are similar, in reality they function somewhat differently. I believe that the former, pills, leads to more significant enslavement than latter, This is because former blurs distinction between fiction reality, while latter can coexist with awareness decei...

When Russia launched mass privatization, it was widely believed that it would create a powerful constituency for the rule of law. That didn’t happen. We present a dynamic equilibrium model of the political demand for the rule of law and show that beneficiaries of mass privatization may fail to demand the rule of law even if it is the Pareto efficient “rule of the game.” The reason is that uncer...

BACKGROUND In western countries, prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and most risk factors is higher in lower socioeconomic groups. The social gradients in the former communist societies are less well known. Because in western countries different indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) are correlated, this gradient is found with a number of different measures of SES. We have analysed the pre...

TV serials became the most important genre of the popular culture in Czechoslovakia during the period of so-called normalisation – the 1970s and the 1980s. The new post invasion regime shifted the propagandistic emphasis to the popular culture sphere and thus TV serials became a space, where the conscientiously controlled dominant ideology met the mindsets and opinions of the audience. The pape...

Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the European East-West divide has not been relegated to the annals of history. Among other areas, it persists tenaciously within the ethnological/anthropological sciences practised in Europe. This article deconstructs and challenges reified differences between ethnologies in Central-Eastern Europe and Western, mainly British-s...