After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, more than 400 million people suddenly found themselves in a new reality, a dramatic transition from state socialist and centrally planned workers' states to liberal democracy (in most cases) and free markets. Thirty years later, postsocialist citizens...

The postcommunist countries were amongst the most fervent and committed adopters of neoliberal economic reforms. Not only did they manage to overcome the anticipated domestic opposition to 'shock therapy' and Washington Consensus reforms, but many fulfilled the membership requirements of the...

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...

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...