7 The Eastern European Transitions: A Survey of the Research

Ever since the events of 1989, the scholarly interest in the Eastern European transition processes has been enormous, resulting in a huge body of literature, which tries to describe and explain what is going on in the region. Following the breakdown of the Communist rule, the 27 post-communist countries have taken different political and economic trajectories, which have resulted in consolidated democracy and market economy in about one third of the countries, in unconsolidated democracy or transitional regimes and economies in about a dozen and authoritarian regimes and consolidated statist economies in the rest (Nation in Transit, 2002 & 2004. See appendix for details). In accordance with the project’s purpose, this chapter focuses on the scholarly attempts to explain the huge variation in political and economic outcomes of the transition processes in the post-communist countries. Although good in-depth descriptive studies are prerequisites for subsequent theory-driven research, this strand of transition literature is left out in this survey. It should be noted, however, that each chapter contains further elaborations on more specific aspects of transition research. As was discussed in the previous chapter, one of the core ideas of the project is to stud