Tuesday, April 12, 2016
3pm
Gambrell Hall
Room 431
University of South Carolina

Sponsored by: European Studies Program

The democratization of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 stands in marked contrast to the political travails seen in the region during the 1920s and 1930s. An obvious difference between the two periods is the vastly more conducive and supportive environment for democratization that existed following the collapse of communism, not least through the existence of the European Union and other international organizations. While this observation is self-evident to any casual observer of the region’s history, trying to actually pinpoint these differences has so far rested largely on narrative-historical comparisons. This lecture therefore undertakes this challenge by scrutinizing the structure of democracy across these countries and during the two periods in question by using the recently released Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset.