After Communism: Perspectives on Democracy (p)

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Donald R. Kelley
University of Arkansas Press, 2003 - 304 pages

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Contents

What Is to Be Done?
1
The Complexity of Democratic Consolidation
7
Comparative Democratization
31
A Decade of Change but Not Much Progress
61
Taming Vlast
89
Social Relations and Political Practices in PostCommunist Russia
119
Russia in the Middle State Building and the Rule of Law
143
Democracy and Counterinsurgency in Central Asia
161
Institutionalizing Electoral Democracy in PostCommunist States
187
A Decade of Nonnationalism? Regime Change As Surrogate for Identity Change
221
Consolidation As a Work in Progress
239
Notes
253
Contributors
295
Index
297
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Page 8 - And we define: the democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote.
Page 258 - Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Page 82 - Russians a strong state is not an anomaly which should be got rid of. Quite the contrary, they see it as a source and guarantor of order and the initiator and main driving force of any change.
Page 14 - Civil society is conceived here as the realm of organized social life that is voluntary, self-generating, ˇlargely} self-supporting, autonomous from the state, and bound by a legal order or set of shared rules.
Page 7 - Behaviorally, a democratic regime in a territory is consolidated when no significant national, social, economic, political, or institutional actors spend significant resources attempting to achieve their objectives by creating a nondemocratic regime or by seceding from the state.
Page 125 - The precise specification of space and function that characterize modern institutions, the coordination of these functions into hierarchical arrangements, the organization of supervision and surveillance, the marking out of time into schedules and programs, all contribute to constructing a world that appears to consist not of a complex of social practices but of a binary order: on the one hand individuals and their activities, on the other an inert "structure" that somehow stands apart from individuals,...
Page 10 - political culture" thus refers to the specifically political orientations — attitudes toward the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system.
Page 288 - Uncertainty in the Transition: Post-Communism in Hungary," East European Politics and Societies 1 (Spring 1993), 240-75.
Page 262 - State power in the Russian Federation is exercised on the basis of the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers. Bodies of legislative, executive and judicial power are independent.

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