Varieties of Capitalist Democracy: What Difference Does East-Central Europe Make?

The establishment of capitalist democracies in East-Central Europe raises the question of whether existing accounts of varieties of capitalist democracy need to be revised. This article provides a systematic quantitative comparison of varieties of capitalist democracy in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland with other OECD countries. It finds that the East-Central European cases constitute a distinctive cluster; that they have much in common with Greece, Iberia and Ireland and that they are closer to the continental European than the liberal variety of capitalist democracy. These results have important implications for the internal politics of the European Union, prospects of an East-Central European repeat of the relative success of Ireland and the Mediterranean in the European Union, and debates about the influence of neo-liberalism on public policy. The collapse of European communism and the admission of East-Central European states to the European Union and OECD raises the question: how many varieties of capitalist democracy exist today? Given the sharp divergence between the communist states and the capitalist democracies for over years, the former communist states make an intriguing group for investigating the global diversity of capitalist democracy. Capitalism is an economic system in which ‘ the means of production and the capacity to work are owned privately and there are markets in both’. (Przeworski : ) Democracy is a political system in which the principal decision makers are ‘ elected [in] free, fair and frequent elections [in the context of] freedom of expression, alternative sources of information, associational autonomy and inclusive citizenship’. (Dahl : ) Notwithstanding important legacies from the socialist authori-tarian past, academics, international organisations, journalists, and citizens all accept that the countries of East-Central Europe, as capitalist democracies. Moreover, capitalist democracy has been consolidated i