Working paper
Trajectories of Regime Transformation and Types of Stateness in Post-Communist Countries
The collapse of the socialist system prompted the former USSR countries to “re-invent” their stateness. The paper focuses on factors that impede or smooth stateness transformations in post-Soviet countries. First, the paper examines internal and external factors of state formation in selected countries. Next, it introduces empirical research tools and empirical findings that present alternative patterns of stateness and outcomes of state formation. The paper concludes with a detailed review of certain cases that may be considered prototypes of state formation for post-Soviet countries.
The book is comprised of 24 studies examining the changes in values throughout the process of transformation in the post-communist countries and, in general, the questions of values, their conceptualization and research as well as their role in the process of transformation and stratification. The studies present a new concept of empirical sociological study of values, cultural resources in class reproduction and ideology, problems of hedonism, social trust, cohesion, historical and cultural tradition and many other aspects of development of value structure in post-communist societies.
The purpose of the Mythologies of Capitalism and the End of the Soviet Project is to show that in order to understand popular disillusionment with democratization, liberalization, and other transformations associated with the attempts of non-Western societies to appropriate the ideas of Western modernity, one must consider how these ideas are mythologized in the course of such appropriations. Olga Baysha argues that the seeds of post-revolutionary frustration should be sought in pre-revolutionary discourses on democracy, liberalism, and other concepts of Western modernity that are produced outside local contexts and introduced through the channels of global communication and interpretations of politicians, activists, and experts
.http://www.amazon.com/The-Mythologies-Capitalism-Soviet-Project/dp/073918802X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1410656976&sr=8-1&keywords=baysha
The article was devoting a problem of research causation between stateness and political regime. The author worked within the structuralism approach and using econometric tools. He educed that political regime is determined of stateness.
The author elaborates that in the transition from a previous political system into a liberal democracy, there is an ever-present threat of the encroachment of authoritarianism into the democratization agenda. This chapter argues that the conditions for “authoritarian syndrome” can be found in the form that democratization takes and in the culture of a given transitional state. The focus here is on the latter and on the social, political, and economic dynamics that can lead a transitional society to reject democratization. Russia, a transitional state where echoes of authoritarianism and great power aspirations are always on the surface of politics, is presented as a case study.
The article examines the impact of culture on the formation of institutions of political democracy in transitional societies. Special attention is paid to the negative influence of authoritarian syndrome on the democratization process, to the conditions of activation of the authoritarian syndrome and ways to overcome it.
Russia is a country of great complexity—eighty-nine subject regions, ethnic diversity, economic variance across regions, the power struggle of Moscow versus the regions—and multiple realities—urban versus rural, rich versus poor, and cosmopolitan versus provincial, just to name a few. Fragmented Space in the Russian Federation explores Russia's complexity and the meanings of the country's internal borders, the future of its agricultural spaces, the development of its political parties, and the effect of its federal organization.
The contributors examine stratification, citizenship, federalization, democratization, the politics of culture and identity, and globalization. These essays show how political leaders within Russia and scholars and policymakers from outside must accept the country's complexity and view uncertainty as a positive development rather than a liability. The authors explore how Russian experience can enhance theory political science, sociology, geography, and economics.
Various forms of dictatorship have been a context in which SBS have been developing through most of the 20th century. Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe, Communist single-party states, military juntas in Latin America and elsewhere in the post-colonial world accompanied the crisis of tradition and development of modernity as an alternative to liberal democracy. Dictatorships have thoroughly affected the history of SBS pursuing a policy of repression and control and, sometimes, encouraging a growth of various social science disciplines. The lack of intellectual and institutional autonomy is generally endured, though to different degrees and in different aspects, by SBS under dictatorship.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.