ABSTRACT
The “third wave” transitions, to use Huntington’s term (1991), have prompted a renewed interest in problems of democratisation. The fall of communism encouraged political scientists to look again at the theoretical literature on democratisation and to compare the current transitions in the post-communist world with earlier transitions in Latin America and Southern Europe (Burnell 2006; Grugel 2006). The insights garnered in the study of the democratisation process elsewhere provide a theoretical framework to study the problem of the reconstitution of central political authority on principles of popular sovereignty, democratic accountability and liberal freedoms (Haerpfer et al. 2009). They also help us understand the decay of authoritarian regimes and the processes of change to new political orders. The early classic works on democratisation retain important insights on processes of comparative regime change (O’Donnell et al. 1986). However, whether this third wave literature has much to offer when political regime change is accompanied by post-communist economic transformation, state and nation building, and societal reconstruction remains a moot point (Bunce 1995). Certainly, the early works on post-communist transition were strongly ideological and prescriptive, and at the same time imbued by an ethos of capitalist triumphalism (for an exception, see Bryant and Mokrzycki 1994). These works may well have grasped the demands of the early stage of transformation, but it is less clear whether they are of great value as the post-communist region became increasingly diverse, regime trajectories ever more complicated and the international system less unipolar.
