While the European Union (EU) professes a commitment to liberal democracy, in recent years it has allowed some member governments to backslide toward competitive authoritarianism. The EU has become trapped in an “authoritarian equilibrium” underpinned by three factors. First, the EU's...

Pension reform is an important topic, high on the agendas of most European countries, where countries are profoundly affected by an aging population, the result of lower fertility, and increased life expectancy, changes in family structure, and the effects of globalization. The book presents...

Since 2008, Hungary and Poland have developed a distinctive populist economic program, which has begun to spread to other Central and East European Countries (CEECs). This article develops a theory of the political economy of populism in CEECs, arguing that these countries' dependence on foreign...

Pension reform is an important topic, high on the agendas of most European countries, where countries are profoundly affected by an aging population, the result of lower fertility, and increased life expectancy, changes in family structure, and the effects of globalization. The book presents...

This publication brings together original sociological research, evaluations of programs, and the first comparative cross-country household survey on ethnicity and poverty. It finds that Roma poverty is multi-faceted and can only be addressed by a comprehensive policy approach that attends to...

The author examines the political and institutional processes that produced fundamental pension reform in three post-communist countries: Hungary, Kazakhstan, and Poland. He tests various hypothesis about the relationship between deliberative process and outcomes through detailed case studies of...

In the years since the demise of the Soviet Union, the process of democratization never started or, if it did, stalled and went into reverse in most of the non-Baltic post-Soviet states. While a good deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to the impact of transnational and international...

This manuscript examines the rapid spread of pension privatization and the flat tax in former communist countries in order to understand why new policy ideas take hold and to better understand the role played by material resources in the diffusion of new policy ideas. Unlike previous...