This book intends to be a contribution to the varieties of capitalism paradigm. Our main question is to what extent the present system in Russia, the model of President Putin is a generic model for all post-communist capitalisms.

This book sets the experiences of former communist countries as they head towards capitalism against the 'varieties of capitalism' paradigm, and provides a framework for comparing transformation processes, demonstrating how differing heritages of communist and pre-communist pasts are leading to different kinds of capitalist economies.

The book provides an innovatory internationally comparative causal analysis of the variation in political and economic outcomes of post-communist transformations after the first decade, using multi-value qualitative comparative analysis and TOSMANA software. This analysis includes a critical revision of received dichotomies (e.g. on gradualism versus "shock therapy") about post-communist transformation, a discussion of the counterfactual scripts of post-communist transformation, and contributes to current debates on the varieties of post-communist capitalism. This conceptual framework is applied in case studies of the transformation in the Baltic States, with special consideration given to the possibility of alternatives to the Lithuanian way and the challenges of populism in this country's politics. Book jacket.

Offering a single, coherent framework of the political, economic, and social phenomena that characterize post-communist regimes, this is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. Focusing on Central Europe, the post-Soviet countries and China, the study provides a systematic mapping of possible post-communist trajectories. At exploring the structural foundations of post-communist regime development, the work discusses the types of state, with an emphasis on informality and patronalism; the variety of actors in the political, economic, and communal spheres; the ways autocrats neutralize media, elections, etc. The analysis embraces the color revolutions of civil resistance (as in Georgia and in Ukraine) and the defensive mechanisms of democracy and autocracy; the evolution of corruption and the workings of “relational economy”; an analysis of China as “market-exploiting dictatorship”; the sociology of “clientage society”; and the instrumental use of ideology, with an emphasis on populism. Beyond a cataloguing of phenomena—actors, institutions, and dynamics of post-communist democracies, autocracies, and dictatorships—Magyar and Madlovics also conceptualize everything as building blocks to a larger, coherent structure: a new language for post-communist regimes. While being the most definitive book on the topic, the book is nevertheless written in an accessible style suitable for both beginners who wish to understand the logic of post-communism and scholars who are interested in original contributions to comparative regime theory. The book is equipped with QR codes that link to www.postcommunistregimes.com, which contains interactive, 3D supplementary material for teaching.

In this book, Anca Pusca seeks to extend the aesthetic and cultural turn in international relations to an analysis of post-communist transitions in Central and Eastern Europe. Building on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Ranciere, the work investigates how post-communist film, photography, theatre, art, museumization and architecture have creatively re-engaged with ideas of revolution, communism, capitalism and ethnic violence, and how this in turn has helped people survive and reinvent themselves amongst the material and ideological ruins of communism. The work illustrates how popular culture has effectively targeted and re-interpreted the classical representations of the transition in order to question: • The origin – focusing on practices of re-staging, memorializing and questioning the 1989 revolutions. • The unfolding – focusing on the human and material consequences of significant changes in processes of production and consumption. • The potential end – focusing on the illusions and disillusions surrounding the 'transition' process. A unique take on the influence that popular culture has had and continues to have on how we understand the post-communist transitions, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of cultural and visual studies, eastern European politics and international relations.

The most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the successes and failures of 27 countries post-communism transformation. Looking at life after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, the book examines and contrasts why some countries have virtually completed their transformation to a liberal polity and economy, while others lag behind.

Applying the new economics of organisation and relational theories of the firm to the problem of understanding cross-national variation in the political economy, this volume elaborates a new understanding of the institutional differences that characterise the 'varieties of capitalism' worldwide.