Did the threat of communism influence income distribution in developed capitalist economies during the Cold War? This article addresses this question by testing whether income inequality in OECD countries was related to events linked to the spread of communism—revolutions and Soviet interventions—around the world. We argue that the threat of the spread of communism acted as an incentive for the elites and governments to keep economic inequality low. This article provides an empirical contribution to the recent literature on inequality, which highlights the role of domestic institutions but ignores the role of the Cold War in redistributing income. We find a robust relationship between income inequality and the distance to communist events. The results, reinforced by cases studied, suggest that the spread of communism fostered income redistribution deals between domestic elites and workers. Finally, we show that these effects were reinforced by strong unions and the presence of strong communist parties.

In this study, we investigate how socioeconomic status is related to people’s commitment to liberal democracy. Based on sociological and psychological theories of social conflict and dominance, we argue that those who enjoy a more privileged position in the social hierarchy tend to develop stronger preferences for the existing social and political order. Conversely, people in underprivileged positions tend to be less supportive of that order. Hence, we expect the relationship between socioeconomic status and commitment to liberal democracy to be context-specific: positive in liberal democracies but negative in autocracies. Furthermore, we argue that income inequality amplifies these dynamics, widening the gap between low and high status individuals. We test our hypotheses using the fifth wave of the World Value Surveys.

It has been sixty years since the first sub-Saharan nation declared independence. Over the past three decades, the region has undergone significant changes. Though few, if any, would question that colonial histories shaped African societies, it is unclear to what extent these legacies continue to be relevant to contemporary inter-group relations. Does it still make sense to speak about colonial legacies? And if so, which ones? This article explores these questions by examining whether ethnic groups who were privileged during the colonial period are more likely to hold political power decades later. To do so, I conduct a multiple case study analysis of twenty-five sub-Saharan countries from which I create an original dataset of how ethnic groups were positioned during the latter stages of colonialism. With these data, I run auto-regressive logistical models correlating former colonial position to executive power since independence. I find that many of the assumptions made in the scholarship about the importance of colonial privilege are not supported by these models. However, colonial institutional legacies may still help us understand inter-group dynamics and be the source of contemporary political grievances.

Religion is one of the most commonly cited explanations for cross-country variation in institutional quality. In particular, Protestantism, and the cultural values that follow from its doctrine, has been identified as particularly beneficial. Nevertheless, micro-level studies provide little evidence for religion producing norms and values conducive to good institutions. We propose an alternate explanation for the observed macro-level variation: historical systems for local religious financing, contrasting the medieval parish system in Northwestern Europe, where members collectively paid for and administrated religious services as public goods, with the Ottoman Empire, where such goods were normally provided through endowments from private individuals and tax collection was comparatively privatized. We argue that a legacy of collective financing and accountability in the former region created a virtuous cycle of high state capacity and low corruption, reverberating to this day as good institutions.

The article develops a typology of revolutions based upon women’s roles over the course of revolutionary struggle. In addition to the patriarchal and the emancipatory models, the study proposes a hybrid model of women’s participation in a revolution, characterized by the diversity and fluidity of women’s roles. According to the hybrid model, women’s involvement in a revolution can follow three different strategies: (1) acquiescence to a traditional gender-based division of labor, (2) appropriation of the masculine forms of resistance, and (3) mixing of diverse modes of action. Using the case of the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, the empirical analysis demonstrates multifaceted forms of women’s activism. The study contributes to the literature by broadening the conceptualization of women’s participation in a contemporary urban revolution.

This article examines the informal dimension of political integration for refugees: how, after a lifetime of authoritarianism, do they make sense of their newfound democratic citizenship? I identify the perceptual lenses that refugees use through a narrative study of North Korean refugees in South Korea. Discourse analysis of thirty-one personal narratives and twenty paired debates on topics about democratic citizenship reveals a surprising phenomenon. For refugees who feel co-national identification with South Koreans, a deeply communal script of duty to the nation—socialized in the authoritarian North—is extended toward South Korea, framing new democratic roles such as voting as a matter of obligation. Those who lack such identification tend to rely on an instrumental approach instead, with implications for divergent integration trajectories.

Scholars of electoral authoritarianism contend that elections make autocratic regimes more durable, while scholarship on democratization states that authoritarian elections can lead to electoral revolutions and regime change. In this article, we argue that these two lenses occlude smaller instances of activism during election periods and the influence that this activism has on bringing about gradual political change. To build our argument, we draw on two presidential elections held in Iran in 2009 and 2013. We show how grassroots activists use elections to abort gains made by hardliners, push centrist and moderate candidates toward more reformist and democratic stances, promote issues that would otherwise be considered beyond the pale of formal regime politics, and encourage solidarity and opposition coalition building.

Understanding why elites extend the franchise is one of the central questions in comparative politics. However, most theories fail to account for subsequent extensions of voting rights to once-excluded groups, including women, racial and religious minorities, and the poor. This article reviews three new books in comparative politics that focus on the struggle for voting rights and representation in the first-wave democracies. These books challenge classic assumptions and show that democratization is punctuated by ongoing struggles over inclusion that continue to this day. Together, these books contribute to debates over modernization theory, democratic responsiveness, and the use of the United States as a case in comparative analysis.

The Tunisian General Labor Union (UGTT) emerged as a major player in the country’s transition from authoritarianism. Existing explanations—focusing on authoritarian legacies, the degree of trade union autonomy from the state, and labor’s material incentives to support democratization—do not sufficiently account for the high-profile nature of the union’s political role in Tunisia’s transition. Instead, as this article argues, the importance of unions’ pre-authoritarian legacy is key to understanding the role of unions in the transition from authoritarian rule. If unions enter the regime formation stage with a history of political struggle and with strong organizational capacities, they are more likely to develop a degree of internal autonomy that makes it difficult for authoritarian incumbents to disempower them. The article employs a historical institutional approach and draws on fieldwork and interviews with labor activists in Tunisia.

What explains individual preferences for austerity during the eurozone crisis? To what extent are such preferences affected by the specific content of austerity policies or EU-related factors? To address these questions, we present new data and embedded experiments that test theories of austerity preferences, from a survey of a crisis-hit country, Spain. We find little support for austerity as conventionally measured, but such support can increase if specific reasons or benefits are made salient. The endorsement by the EU has no effect on austerity support, but support for spending wanes when tax increases and concerns about fiscal commitments to the EU are made salient. The results help understand how unpopular policies such as austerity might be sometimes palatable to large segments of the general public.

How does the circle of inner elites evolve over time in dictatorships? We draw on theories of authoritarian power-sharing to shed light on the evolution of politics in North Korea. Given challenges in collecting individual-level data in this context, we employ web-scraping techniques that capture inspection visits by the dictator as reported by state-run media to assemble network data on elite public co-occurrences. We test the durability of this network since Kim Jong-un’s rise to power in December 2011 to find suggestive evidence of elite purging. Our findings contribute to the broader literature on authoritarian elite dynamics and to subnational studies on power-sharing in communist states. Importantly, our approach helps bring the study of North Korean politics more firmly in the mainstream of political science inquiry.

Refugees’ preflight class interacts with host state policies to shape refugees’ post-displacement class trajectories. This interaction affects whether refugees of different backgrounds experience mobility over time and how refugees of various backgrounds disperse over space. “Selective engagement” hosts that leave refugees to self-settle accentuate stratification insofar as refugees with capital can attain entrepreneurial success, poor refugees lack protection from further impoverishment, and middle-class professionals have both the means and motivation to try to migrate elsewhere. “Interventionist engagement” hosts lessen the gap between rich and poor both by attracting middle-class refugees and by imposing integration programs that further compress all refugees toward the middle. Demonstrating these arguments, analysis of Syrian refugees in Turkey and Germany illustrates a diaspora’s class-remaking in ways not attributable to displacement alone.

How do authoritarian states implement policies that curb individual freedom? In this article, I examine the implementation of the One Child Policy in China, which has had an enormous impact on Chinese society and yet has received little attention from political scientists. I argue that the success or failure of the policy hinged on using frontline bureaucrats to infiltrate society. Important theories suggest that bureaucratic penetration may increase bureaucrats’ responsiveness to citizens and decrease implementation of the law. Drawing on a unique dataset and natural experiment, I show the opposite to be true in China: a one standard deviation increase in bureaucratic penetration lowers over-quota births by 2 to 7 percentage points. There is suggestive evidence that bureaucrats leverage their social embeddedness to control society. The article shows how frontline bureaucrats beyond the police, military, or ruling party are key agents of repression and political control.

Scholars suggest that charismatic movements must institutionalize to survive beyond the death of the founder. Yet charismatic movements around the world that have maintained their personalistic nature have persisted or reemerged. This article investigates the conditions under which politicians can use their predecessors’ charismatic legacies to revive these movements and consolidate power. I argue that three conditions—the mode of leadership selection, the presence of a crisis, and the ability to conform to the founder’s personalistic nature—shape successors’ capacity to pick up their forefather’s mantle and restore the movement to political predominance. To demonstrate my theory, I trace the process through which some leaders succeeded while others failed to embody the founder’s legacy across three charismatic movements: Argentine Peronism, Venezuelan Chavismo, and Peruvian Fujimorismo.

Incumbent legislators in some developing countries are often thought to face an electoral disadvantage relative to challengers. This article traces this effect to high levels of centralization within the political parties and governments of these countries. In political systems dominated by party leaders, legislators face substantial formal and informal constraints on their ability to influence policy, stake positions, and control patronage, which in turn reduce their ability to build up personal votes. This theory is tested on a dataset of Indian national elections since 1977, using a regression discontinuity design to measure the effects of incumbency. Candidates less affected by centralization—those from less-centralized political parties and from parties not affected by restrictions on free parliamentary voting—have a low or non-existent incumbency disadvantage.

Civilians living in areas of rebel control have a variety of tools through which they may challenge rebel rule. While studies have examined how civilians violently resist the rule of armed groups, few have examined non-violent challengers. By examining instances of non-violent opposition to rebel rule by civilians living under rebel control in “Eelam,” the areas of Sri Lanka controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, this article develops a conception of agency that reveals far more about the civilian/rebel relationship. Drawing on original interviews with key participants, we focus on two modes of “oppositional agency” in which women and clergy non-violently challenged the rebel government regarding its detention and recruitment practices, with some success.

Crackdowns on informal vendors are a common form of violence against the poor in many cities in developing countries. This article uses a media events database to examine crackdowns of informal vendors in Accra, Dakar, and Lusaka from 2000 to 2016. During this period, Accra demonstrated consistently high levels of violence towards vendors, while violence increased in Dakar and decreased in Lusaka. The article argues that these trends are driven by differences in political decentralization for municipal authorities, variations in their administrative mandates over vending, and the degree of influence vendors hold as an electoral constituency. Through a structured comparison of the governance of informal vendors across multiple cities, the article demonstrates how state violence manifests through everyday battles over access to public space.

Radical populists in the Andes have combined a populist program and a multicultural agenda. However, while populism centralizes power in the hands of the leader and emphasizes the unity of the people, multiculturalism grants cultural rights that strengthen societal autonomy, generating an inherent tension between these two modes of incorporation. How are populist governments able to combine unity and fragmentation as well as centralization and autonomy? This article develops the concept of populist multiculturalism, focusing on the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia, which has supported autonomy rights while simultaneously curtailing their implementation. Specifically, it examines the implementation of indigenous autonomous governments and prior consultation and the relationship between indigenous organizations and the ruling party. The article also extends this concept to Ecuador and Venezuela.

Sideways concessions to protest are policy reforms that decrease grievance among potential protesters, without being directly linked to the stated demands of the protest. By avoiding both the backlash effect of repression and the inspirational effect of direct concessions, they are theoretically powerful tools for quelling unrest. This article evaluates the effectiveness of sideways concessions at reducing individual mobilization potential using a survey experiment conducted in Kyrgyzstan in October 2015. The evidence shows sideways concessions are effective among respondents who were dissatisfied with the government and not optimistic about the future of the country. The article also demonstrates the plausibility of these results in other settings, drawing on observational data from the 2014 Gezi Park protests in Turkey and the 2013 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine.

Research on political accountability emphasizes elections and popular control, but often neglects how ordinary people hold their leaders to account in the context of daily life. Dominant scholarly approaches emphasize the logic of electoral sanctioning and removal, missing the importance of mutual respect between representatives and citizens. This article introduces a new logic of democratic accountability based on the social practices, daily political behaviors, and public deliberation between representatives and citizens. Using urban Ghana as a study site, this article uncovers the mechanisms through which a theory based on respect works in practice. By reconciling theories of political representation with deliberative democracy, the article places the voices of urban Ghanaians in conversation with Western political thought to broaden understandings of accountability in African democracies.

What explains variation in local health services? Comparative scholarship highlights economic factors, electoral competition, and partisanship to account for service disparities. Employing an original data set and qualitative case studies of health service provision in thirty-three metropolitan municipalities in Argentina between 1995 and 2015, we find that mayors are likely to provide more services when they are not aligned with the governor. Unable to access the discretionary resources and electoral support from governors that aligned mayors enjoy, non-aligned mayors exploit automatic provincial revenue-sharing health transfers, which reward municipalities that provide more services and have more infrastructure, in order to build territorial power. These findings highlight the importance of non-alignment and the conditions under which formula-based transfers encourage local service provision.

Can economic development retard democracy, defying expectations of classic modernization theorizing? If so, under what conditions? Our article addresses the puzzle of poor democratic performance in highly urbanized and industrialized post-communist states. We assembled an original dataset with data from Ukraine’s local and national elections and constructed district- (rayon) and region- (oblast) level indices of electoral quality. Regions and districts that score higher on developmental indices also score lower on electoral quality, including in Ukraine’s Western regions conventionally considered more democratic than the predominantly Russian-speaking Eastern regions. We explain these outcomes with reference to the peculiarities of Soviet industrial development, which facilitated the emergence of “oligarchs” in territories housing Soviet-era mega-industries. Our research contributes to comparative debates about the links between economic development and democracy.

When do electorally dominant parties lose power in democracies? Drawing on the experiences of India’s states during the period of Indian National Congress dominance, we argue that single-party dominance is less likely to endure under two conditions: first, when one of the opposition parties possesses a longstanding and robust party organization and, second, when there is a single social cleavage dividing the political class into two main cleavage groups. Both conditions contribute to the demise of a dominant party system by encouraging a previously fragmented opposition to consolidate behind one large party capable of challenging the dominant party. We provide support for our argument with evidence from across India’s states and with more in-depth case studies of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh.

Which electoral losers become the most disillusioned with democracy following the first free and fair elections? Exploiting surveys before and after founding elections in post-Arab Spring Egypt and Tunisia, we find that the most disillusioned losers were those residing in areas where the losing parties were strongest. We argue that expectations matter. Losers whose parties are strong locally tend to overestimate their popularity nationally and thus become more disillusioned after the first elections. Beyond these attitudinal results, we find that these areas witnessed a greater increase in support for candidates from former autocratic regimes in subsequent elections. These findings clarify subnational variation in electoral losers’ attitudes towards democracy. They suggest that decentralization may keep otherwise disillusioned losers invested in democracy.

This article investigates the electoral constraints on the inter-party mobility of candidates. We argue that the prevalent mode of interactions among candidates, voters, and parties in local, district-level electoral markets shapes the strategic constraints faced by potential party switchers. We suggest that strong linkages between voters and political parties reduce the market value of the candidates outside of their political parties, thereby constraining their inter-party mobility. These expectations are evaluated using candidate- and district-level data from Pakistan from 1988–2013. The results show that the strength of voter-party linkages in an electoral district, as measured by the lack of electoral volatility and the extent of straight-ticket voting in national and provincial elections, has a positive effect on the propensity of candidates to switch parties.

Regulation concerning GM crops around the world range from total prohibition to full openness and state-wide promotion. The Andean countries in Latin America provide an interesting setting to analyze the possible causes for this variation. Despite having similar conditions to plant GM crops, Colombia and Bolivia allow GM crop cultivation, while Ecuador and Peru do not. Interestingly, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s leftist president, could not ban GM crop production, and Alan Garcia (2006–2011) in Peru, despite his pro-GM stance, failed to adopt a permissive regulation. We argue that two factors explain these divergent outcomes regarding GM seed sowing and reform efforts in Andean countries: (i) the time in which regulatory measures were attempted, and (ii) the quick structural change that GM seeds generate once introduced into a country.

Twenty years after the first democratic elections in South Africa, organizations representing key voting constituencies—youth and the economically marginalized—are becoming major forces of opposition to the ANC-led government while explicitly framing their activities as non-political. They prefer instead to talk in terms of “rights” and “activism.” Drawing from fieldwork and online publications of three opposition organizations—#RhodesMustFall, Abahlali baseMjondolo, and Afriforum— this article argues that the abandonment of “politics” is more than rhetorical positioning. By framing their actions as non-political, these groups engage in a deep-seated critique of the possibilities presented by democratic politics and a lack of perceived efficacy or legitimacy of institutionalized contestation. Perhaps more importantly, it means that opposition politics are occurring in an environment without institutional incentives for cooperation.

Why have growth rates diverged between India and Pakistan since the 1990s? This article argues that differences in perceptions of political instability through the locations of political violence in the two countries have impacted growth through investment decisions. In Pakistan, kidnapping and terrorism in major cities has led to the domination of rent-implicated investment, thus limiting growth. In India, by contrast, political violence in the periphery or targeting minorities remains socially distant to the perspectives of investors, leading to more productive investments, and thus higher growth. The article provides a new set of explanations for differences in growth among middle-income countries by highlighting political instability and the salience of violence, the demand for rents as investments, and the limits of institutional explanations for growth outcomes.

To remain competitive in the global marketplace, states have increasingly been forced to supplement their domestic labor resources with foreign manpower. However, their admission policies for low-skilled workers exhibit puzzling cross-national variation. What determines this policy divergence among advanced economies that share many structural and institutional properties? This article offers a statist explanation. It argues that this variation is, at base, caused by two interrelated factors: the state’s perception of security risks involved in admitting particular ethno-national groups of labor migrants and inter-ministerial bargaining over policy authority within the state apparatus. This argument is developed through a comparison of the contrasting and empirically underexplored cases of foreign labor policy formation in Japan and Taiwan.

Levies imposed on the export earnings of natural resource producers provide the armed forces with sizeable off-budget revenue not subject to oversight or scrutiny. Why do some nations succeed at reforming or eliminating these levies, while others do not? This article argues that outcomes have to do with the balance of coalition strength between civilians and the armed forces. In the contemporary period, the military can no longer go at it alone, relying on tactics of coercive intimidation. Like civilians, it must find political party allies who can compete legislatively on its behalf. How coalitions congeal, come unraveled, or fail to develop is assessed through a small-N comparative study of Ecuador and Chile.

In light of the alleged democratic recession in recent years, comparative democratization research is now taking a turn to more party-political, agency-centered, and historically contingent explanations of democratic backsliding. I review three recent books that represent this trend to varying degrees. Based on a historical-institutional approach, I assess whether the theoretical propositions of these books are fruitful for explaining the gradual backsliding to competitive authoritarianism and illiberalism in recent decades. I find that the propositions in How Democracies Die in particular risk leading to excessively voluntarist conclusions that are insensitive to historical path dependencies. The other two books better capture the ways in which domestic institutional legacies have shaped democratic backsliding around the globe. I end the review by specifying two models that explain backslidings as institutional responses to 1) international “exogenous” shocks or 2) “endogenous” demands unleashed by dynamics of the democratic transition itself. I show that these two models provide a more comprehensive understanding of a diverse set of the most infamous recent backslidings in the United States, Venezuela, Hungary, and Turkey.

The state occupies a central place in the study of a range of political, economic, and social outcomes. This article brings into dialogue literature on the state and emerging research on criminal politics through a study of protection rackets. Conceiving of criminal protection rackets as institutional arrangements of extraction and domination, I develop a political economy framework to explain variation in forms of resistance to rackets. The framework shows that distinct configurations of economic and political resources influence the type of resistance available to subordinates. I illustrate the framework’s utility using micro-level data on resistance to rackets in Latin America. Attention to how resource endowments shape patterns of resistance to projects of extraction and domination provides a novel window into the bottom-up dynamics of state building.

To what extent can comparative methods and ethnographic inquiry combine to advance knowledge in political science? Ethnography is becoming an increasingly popular method within political science. Yet both proponents and detractors often see it as a technique best suited for producing in-depth knowledge about a particular case or for explicating the meaning of a particular political behavior. This article argues that comparative ethnography—ethnographic research that explicitly and intentionally builds an argument through the analysis of two or more cases—can be of particular value to political scientists, and to scholars of comparative politics in particular. The approach can hone our theoretical models, challenge existing conceptual categories, and help develop portable political insights. This article has two goals: (1) to show that comparative ethnographic research deserves a prominent place in the repertoire of qualitative methods and (2) to elaborate the logics of inquiry behind such comparisons so that scholars will be better equipped to use them more frequently. Two or more cases are not always better than one, but comparative ethnography can yield new and different insights with important implications for our understandings of politics.

Intense polarization can birth enduring political parties. Yet, whereas civil war and authoritarian repression often produce two parties, populist mobilization more often produces one: a populist, not an anti-populist, one. Why not anti-populist parties? The article argues that successful populism, by its nature, inhibits anti-populist party building. Because successful populists discredit a wide array of elites and institutions, anti-populists, who come from these discredited elite and institutions, are unpopular and lack cohesion. Where populists govern over a decade, anti-populist party building remains difficult, but conditions become less unfavorable: populists inevitably lose popularity, and the opposition commits to elections and undergoes leadership renovation. The article compares four countries: three where no anti-populist party-building has occurred (Bolivia, Ecuador, and Thailand) and one where an anti-populist party almost took root (Venezuela).

Latin America is viewed as a region that has embraced a strategy of “open economy industrial policy” (OEIP). However, the region’s transition to OEIP has been neither complete nor irreversible. In this article, we argue that economic development concepts and instruments introduced during Brazil’s previous import-substitution industrialization regime still influence the country’s industrial policy. By tracing the evolution of local content requirements (LCR) in the Brazilian oil and gas sector, we show that conflicts between inward-oriented and outward-oriented forms of industrial development have been the main source of recent policy changes in the country. In addition, we show how institutional structures affect the implementation of economic ideas. The country’s centralized policymaking facilitated significant changes in the orientation of the LCR policy during the last twenty years.

This study builds on relational approaches to social mobilization and organizational ecology to explain local variations in protest frequency in the newer democracies of the developing world. I introduce the concept of keystone organizations, or organizations that justify protest and build influential networks that catalyze protest activity, to explain the localized growth of protest. I contribute to the literature on clientelism by showing that the networks that fuel political clientelism monopolize the organizational environment and discourage protest politics. I test my arguments statistically using an original dataset of protest events in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Yucatan, Mexico, during the 2000 to 2012 federal election seasons that I coded from local newspaper reports.

The theory argues that female presidents are more likely to (1) mobilize women on the basis of gender identity (core constituency); and (2) network with elite feminists (personal constituency). Only presidents who meet both conditions are most likely legislate on behalf of women. Controlled case studies illustrate the theory: Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil attempted to mobilize women on the basis of gender identity, but only Bachelet succeeded. Furthermore, only Bachelet maintained extensive ties with elite feminists. Original evidence shows that Bachelet, but not Rousseff, legislated in ways that statistically differed from her co-partisan male predecessor. Bachelet’s constituencies incentivized and enabled some of her pro-women proposals while a lack of expertise from feminists inhibited Rousseff’s pursuit of pro-women change.

In elections around the world, candidates seek to influence voters’ choices using a variety of intermediaries and by relying on either positive electoral inducements or coercive strategies. What explains candidates’ choices among different forms of clientelism? When do candidates incentivize voters using positive inducements and when do they choose coercive strategies? This article proposes a new typology of clientelism and tests two families of explanations for why candidates would choose to use state versus non-state brokers, and inducements versus coercion, as private incentives to voters. First, existing theory predicts that political conditions such as incumbency or co-partisanship with the national party should enable the use of public over private brokers and resources. In addition, we conjecture that clientelism carries programmatic signals, such that the choice between inducements and coercion depends on local political conditions. We test our predictions using a post-electoral survey fielded in 2014 in ninety rural Hungarian communities. We find little evidence that local political conditions are related to the choice between state versus non-state brokers, but significant support for the prediction that programmatic signals explain the choice between inducements and coercion.

In this review article, I review four recent books that deal with various aspects of post-Communist political economy and argue that they represent a major shift in the research orientation of this subfield. Early scholarship mostly analyzed the causes of the diverging transitional paths that the post-Communist economies took, while highlighting the impact of Soviet legacies, the political pressures that the reformers faced, and the role of Western influences. Recent work shifts focus to the consequences of the divergent transition paths. It seeks to understand how economic development is possible in the post-Communist world, where state agents are predatory, where civil society organizations are weak, and where regulatory mechanisms are underdeveloped.