Transition to (and from?) democracy: an overview

The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition

Author

Affiliation

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

Published

April 25, 2026

Defining Central and Eastern Europe

The term “Central and Eastern Europe” (CEE) is widely used in academic and political discourse, but its boundaries are often contested. Geographically, the region stretches from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Adriatic and Black Seas in the south, and from the eastern borders of Germany and Austria in the west to the borders of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine in the east. Politically, the label has shifted over time. During the Cold War, the region was usually called simply “Eastern Europe”, a term that reflected the division of the continent into Western and Soviet spheres of influence. After 1989, many countries in the region – especially those of the Visegrad Group (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) – actively sought to distance themselves from “Eastern Europe”, preferring “Central Europe” to emphasise their historical and cultural ties with the West and to signal their aspirations for European integration.

For the purposes of this course, “Central and Eastern Europe” refers collectively to those countries from the former European communist world which have made some progress along the path to democracy. This includes:

the Visegrad countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary);
the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania);
south-eastern Europe and the Balkans (Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro);
the post-Soviet states of Moldova and Ukraine.

Belarus, which has not undergone a democratic transition, is excluded from most of the analysis but remains an important reference point. This definition is necessarily imprecise: the degree of progress towards democracy varies enormously across these countries, and some – such as Serbia and Bosnia – occupy an ambiguous position between democratic and authoritarian governance. The diversity of the region is one of its most valuable characteristics for comparative analysis, allowing us to examine how different historical legacies, transition paths and institutional choices have shaped social-psychological outcomes.

The dispute over regional labels is not merely academic. When Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were invited to join NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, the strategic use of “Central Europe” framed these countries as natural members of the Western European community rather than as post-Soviet periphery states. Meanwhile, the persistence of “Eastern Europe” in everyday Western discourse has long been a source of frustration for citizens of the region, who see it as a marker of backwardness and marginality.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century state formation

Central and Eastern Europe has always been a mosaic of different nationalities, each with its own languages, religions and cultures. For most of their histories, the peoples of this region did not have their own states. Instead, they were subject to the great empires of Europe, whose differing styles of rule left durable legacies for the institutional and political development of the successor states.

The three empires and their legacies

Empire	Territories under its rule	Character of rule and legacy
Ottoman Empire	Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Albania, parts of Romania and Croatia	Loose, minimalist rule; the millet system granted limited religious autonomy but little economic or institutional development. Ottoman withdrawal during the nineteenth century left behind weak, underdeveloped states riven by ethnic and religious tensions.
Russian Empire	Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), eastern Poland, parts of Ukraine	Pursued Russification: suppression of local languages, religions and political institutions. Generated intense resentment and fuelled national consciousness among the subject peoples.
Austro-Hungarian Empire	Czech Lands, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, part of Poland, Western Ukraine	The most liberal of the three empires; granted greater freedoms, encouraged industrial development and local governance. The 1867 dual monarchy gave Hungary substantial autonomy. Czech Lands and Austrian provinces developed advanced industrial economies and civil society institutions.

Countries emerging from Austro-Hungarian rule generally had stronger institutional foundations for democratic governance than those emerging from Ottoman or Russian rule – a difference whose effects would persist through the twentieth century.

World War I and the birth of new nation-states

World War I marked the end of imperial dominance in the region. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires, combined with Woodrow Wilson’s principle of national self-determination as a guiding principle of the post-war peace settlement, led to the creation of a series of new nation-states. Poland was reconstituted as an independent state after more than a century of partition between Russia, Prussia and Austria. Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) were created as multi-ethnic states bringing together peoples with very different histories, cultures, economies and levels of development. The Baltic States achieved independence for the first time. Romania expanded significantly, incorporating Transylvania from Hungary.

The process was hastened by the 1917 Russian Revolution and by attempts to spread revolution beyond Russia. However, the new borders drawn at the Paris Peace Conference rarely corresponded neatly to ethnic boundaries, creating large minority populations within many of the new states and sowing the seeds of future conflict. The creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, for example, brought together the highly industrialised and predominantly Catholic Czech Lands – among the most economically advanced parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – with predominantly rural and less developed Slovakia, which had been governed as part of the Hungarian Kingdom. These structural differences would persist throughout the inter-war period and the communist era, ultimately contributing to the peaceful dissolution of the country in 1993.

The inter-war rise and fall of democracy

The inter-war period began with high hopes of building stable democratic states from the ruins of the old empires. The new constitutions adopted across the region were, on paper, among the most progressive in Europe, establishing universal suffrage, parliamentary government and guarantees of civil liberties. However, the reality proved far more challenging than the aspiration. The leaders of the new states faced the daunting task of creating unified polities from peoples who came with very different histories, resources and – often – conflicting historical memories of mutual conflict and resentment.

The disintegration of democracy

With the notable exception of Czechoslovakia, the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe quickly disintegrated into various forms of authoritarian rule. Parliamentary governments proved unable to manage the deep ethnic, economic and social divisions within their societies. Political fragmentation – with numerous small parties representing specific ethnic, regional or class interests – made the formation of stable governing coalitions extremely difficult. In this context, strong leaders drawn from the military or the bureaucratic elite stepped in to impose order, progressively restricting political pluralism, outlawing opposition parties and channelling citizens into movements or parties loyal to the government.

Key examples include:

Poland: Marshal Józef Piłsudski staged a coup in 1926 and established a semi-authoritarian regime.
Hungary: Admiral Miklós Horthy presided over a conservative authoritarian state.
Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and the Baltic States: all moved towards authoritarian governance during the 1920s and 1930s.

Failed modernisation and persistent agrarianism

Again with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia, these countries remained largely agrarian societies. Despite aggressive attempts to industrialise, none succeeded in developing their infrastructures, building up their industries or becoming competitive on world markets to the extent needed to sustain modernisation. Economic conflict over land distribution and ownership – a particularly acute issue in societies where large estates coexisted with masses of landless or smallholding peasants – exacerbated ethnic tensions, as land reform often became entangled with questions of national identity. The bureaucracies inherited from the imperial period proved incapable of managing the processes of urbanisation and social change that modernisation demanded.

The end of the inter-war system and World War Two

The inter-war system came to an end through the actions of outside powers and the onset of World War Two. Nazi Germany’s expansionism progressively dismembered the states of the region, beginning with the annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and culminating in the invasion of Poland in September 1939. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided the region into German and Soviet spheres of influence, with the Baltic States, eastern Poland and Bessarabia falling under Soviet control. The vulnerability of the inter-war states to external aggression was, however, partly a consequence of their internal weaknesses: their leaders’ inability to resolve old ethnic conflicts or to deal with the demands of modernisation had left them fragile and divided.

World War Two proved devastating for the region. Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia and the Baltic States all suffered enormous loss of life and physical destruction. Poland alone lost approximately six million citizens – roughly 17% of its pre-war population – including three million Polish Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The physical infrastructure of major cities, particularly Warsaw, was reduced to rubble. Elsewhere, although physical damage was sometimes less severe, the destruction of the political and social leadership was dramatic, as elites were killed, exiled or co-opted by the occupying powers. In the post-war peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam, Britain and the United States effectively agreed to allow the Soviet Union a dominant role in the territories east of Berlin, sealing the fate of the region for the next four decades.

The case of Czechoslovakia is instructive as both the exception and the confirmation of the general pattern. Inter-war Czechoslovakia was the only country in the region to maintain a functioning democracy throughout the 1920s and 1930s, benefiting from a relatively advanced industrial economy, a strong civic culture inherited from the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and capable political leadership under Tomáš Masaryk and Edvard Beneš. Yet even Czechoslovakia was unable to resist external pressure: the Munich Agreement of 1938 – in which Britain and France acquiesced to Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland – effectively destroyed the country’s sovereignty and demonstrated the impotence of the democratic powers in the face of authoritarian aggression.

The post-war transition to communism

In the immediate post-war era, the countries of CEE quickly found themselves under the Soviet sphere of influence. The process by which communist regimes were established, however, varied significantly across the region.

Varieties of communist takeover

Mode of takeover	Countries	Characteristics
Direct incorporation into the USSR	Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania	Full loss of sovereignty
Soviet-backed imposition	Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary	Soviet occupying forces supported local communist parties and suppressed opponents through manipulation, intimidation and force
Indigenous communist revolution	Yugoslavia, Albania	Communist partisan movements (Tito in Yugoslavia, Hoxha in Albania) came to power largely through their own wartime efforts; Soviet role negligible

The difference between Soviet-imposed and indigenous communism mattered for what followed. Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union in 1948 and Albania’s later alignment with Maoist China in the 1960s both reflected the greater autonomy that indigenous revolutions afforded their regimes.

The communist seizure of power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 – in which a well-organised Communist Party exploited a governmental crisis to establish a monopoly of power – was particularly dramatic, as it occurred in the one country in the region with a genuine democratic tradition. It illustrated the “salami tactics” described by Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi, in which opponents were eliminated slice by slice. Within months, the Communist Party had established a single-party state, nationalised industry and begun the purging of non-communist elements from public life. The death of Jan Masaryk – the non-communist foreign minister found dead beneath the windows of his apartment in March 1948 in circumstances that remain disputed – became a powerful symbol of the destruction of Czechoslovak democracy.

Consolidating communist control

Once in power, communist governments rapidly consolidated control over all aspects of political, economic and social life. They seized control of the economy, the military and the police, installing party loyalists at all levels. Non-communist political forces – including social democrats, agrarian parties and liberal parties that had participated in immediate post-war coalition governments – were progressively repressed, co-opted or outlawed. Societies were subjected to purges that targeted intellectuals, workers and others deemed unreliable because of their connections with the West, their associations with the pre-war regime or their criticism of the emerging socialist state. These purges were often brutal, involving imprisonment, forced labour, show trials and in some cases execution. In Czechoslovakia alone, roughly 200,000 people were imprisoned for political reasons during the Stalinist period of the early 1950s.

Rebuilding and collectivisation

Alongside political repression, communist rulers had to address the practical task of rebuilding after the devastation of the war. In some cases, particularly Poland, this meant reconstructing entire cities and industrial infrastructure from scratch: Warsaw, systematically destroyed by retreating German forces in 1944, had to be rebuilt almost entirely. In all cases, there was a need to create functioning economies capable of providing for the basic needs of the population. This process involved:

the collectivisation of agriculture, transforming individual farms into large cooperative enterprises – often violently resisted, particularly in Poland, where peasant attachment to private land ownership was deeply rooted and the authorities ultimately compromised by leaving most Polish agriculture in private hands;
rapid industrialisation of predominantly rural economies, drawing millions of young people from the countryside to the cities, creating a new urban working class but also severing traditional ties of rural community life.

The communist regimes of the region

Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe was founded on the principle that the Communist Party should exercise a “leading role” in all aspects of political, economic and social life. No sphere of activity was to be excluded from party supervision and direction. The logic of this totalising ambition was rooted in Marxist-Leninist ideology: the party, as the vanguard of the working class, was uniquely qualified to guide the process of social, political and economic transformation leading from capitalism, through socialism, to the ultimate goal of communism. The state, rather than private capitalists, would develop and own the means of production, and the working class would be transformed into the ruling class. In most cases, however, the Soviet model was not implemented by the population but imposed from above, coming into conflict with underlying conditions, values and traditions.

Political organisation: democratic centralism

The political organisation of the communist system was based on “democratic centralism”. In theory, decisions were arrived at through democratic discussion within the party before being implemented uniformly by all members. In practice, decisions made at the top of the party hierarchy – by the Presidium (or Politburo) led by the First Secretary (or General Secretary) – were to be supported and carried out by all party members without question.

The party was organised hierarchically:

party cells in workplaces and neighbourhoods;
district and regional committees;
the central apparatus, culminating in the Presidium.

Party leaders supervised and directed every state institution – government, legislature, judiciary, military, police and security services were all subordinate to the party. A system of mass organisations – ranging from trade unions and women’s organisations to youth movements and children’s organisations such as the Pioneers – served as what Lenin called “transmission belts”, carrying the party’s directives to the population and mobilising citizens in support of party goals.

Economic organisation: central planning and state ownership

The economic dimension of communist rule was equally comprehensive. Centrally planned economies relied on a large planning apparatus, directed by the party, to decide what would be produced, in what quantities, where and for whom. All significant parts of the economy – agriculture, heavy industry, retail trade, social welfare, education, healthcare, the arts – were owned and operated by the state. Private enterprise was either prohibited entirely or restricted to marginal activities. Economic strategy followed the Stalinist model of rapid industrialisation, with particular emphasis on heavy industry – steel, coal, machinery, armaments – at the expense of consumer goods and services. Five-year plans set production targets for the entire economy, and factory managers were rewarded or punished based on their ability to meet these targets, often regardless of the quality or utility of goods produced.

Growth, welfare and inefficiency

The communist model did, in its early decades, produce rapid growth and urbanisation, particularly in the least developed countries of the region. The population received cradle-to-grave welfare provision, including:

free healthcare and education;
low-cost housing;
guaranteed employment;
subsidised prices for basic goods.

For many citizens – especially those from rural backgrounds who benefited from new opportunities for education and urban employment – the early decades of communist rule represented genuine social advancement.

However, the centralised command economy was doomed by fundamental inefficiencies that became increasingly apparent over time. The impossibility of centrally planning a modern economy led to chronic misallocation of resources, with some goods overproduced and others persistently scarce. Shortages of basic consumer goods, poor-quality services and long queues became defining features of everyday life. Worker morale declined in the absence of meaningful material incentives, producing low rates of productivity and the attitude captured by the popular saying: “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” A lack of emphasis on innovation and technological development meant these economies fell further behind the West, unable to compete on world markets. Informal exchange networks and black markets emerged in response to chronic shortages, fostering a culture of corruption and personal connections with lasting consequences.

Conformity, loyalty and the collective

The communist system also demanded public conformity and loyalty. Social change initially helped achieve this: the transformation of the class structure, the provision of education and social mobility, and the creation of new hierarchies based on party membership all helped to bind significant segments of the population to the system. Political leaders also used education, art and culture, media and leisure activities as instruments of ideological socialisation, aiming to create the “new socialist person”. Anti-religion campaigns sought to undermine the influence of the churches as rivals to the party’s ideological authority. The emphasis on subordination to “the collective” – the workplace, neighbourhood, nation and broader socialist community – was a persistent theme, reinforced through rituals, ceremonies and the pervasive propaganda apparatus.

Yet the contrast between formal equality and the reality of a deeply stratified society structured around party privilege was a persistent source of popular cynicism. In Poland, the term “nomenklatura” referred to the system by which key positions in all areas of public life were allocated to individuals approved by the party, creating a new elite class with access to special shops, housing, healthcare and travel opportunities unavailable to ordinary citizens. This visible hypocrisy undermined the regime’s legitimacy and fuelled resentment that would eventually contribute to its downfall.

Transition from communism

The political, economic and social system of communism in CEE was founded on what can be described as a vicious circle. In an economy of chronic shortages, workers had little incentive to be productive, since additional effort did not translate into access to better goods or services. As productivity dropped, less became available, deepening shortages and increasing public alienation. As shortages persisted, those with power and connections used their positions to claim as much as they could for themselves, widening the gap between elite and ordinary citizens. The decisive importance of corruption and personal connections in accessing scarce resources undermined the egalitarian ideology that was supposed to legitimise the system, producing widespread cynicism and disillusionment.

Reform attempts and their suppression

Successive generations of reformists – both within the party and in wider society – attempted to expose and fix the dysfunctional elements of the system:

Hungary: the New Economic Mechanism introduced in 1968 sought to introduce market elements into the centrally planned economy.
Czechoslovakia: the Prague Spring of 1968 saw reformist communists under Alexander Dubček attempt to create “socialism with a human face”, combining communist rule with greater political and cultural freedom.
Poland: the emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement in 1980 represented the most serious challenge to communist authority in the region, as ten million workers joined an independent organisation demanding fundamental political and economic reforms.

These reform attempts were rebuffed by hardline communists whose positions of power and privilege were under threat. The Soviet Union intervened militarily to crush the Prague Spring in August 1968, and the Polish communist authorities declared martial law in December 1981 to suppress Solidarity. For a time, hardliners were kept in place by the threat – or reality – of Soviet intervention, the ultimate guarantee of regime survival across the region.

The weakening of Soviet control

By the 1980s, this guarantee was weakening. The Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, who came to power in 1985, embarked on its own programme of reform – glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) – signalling a new willingness to tolerate change in the satellite states. Gorbachev’s explicit repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine – the principle that the USSR had the right to intervene militarily to maintain communist rule in its sphere of influence – removed the ultimate prop of the hardline regimes. As pressures for reform continued unabated from below, and Soviet willingness to support the status quo diminished from above, a space opened up for fundamental change.

Four patterns of transition

The end of communism, when it came, was remarkably rapid but varied in its character across the region. Four main patterns of transition can be observed:

Pattern	Countries	Characteristics
Negotiated transition	Poland, Hungary	Reformist elements within the communist establishment engaged in dialogue with opposition forces. Poland’s Round Table Agreement (April 1989) led to partially free elections in June.
Citizen protest	Czechoslovakia, Romania	Mass popular mobilisation drove the collapse of the old order – peaceful in Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, violent in the overthrow of the Ceaușescu regime in Romania.
Two-stage transition	Bulgaria, Albania	Reformist communists initially took over from hardliners, only to be replaced by non-communist forces in subsequent elections.
Breakup and reconstitution	Yugoslavia, Baltic States, Ukraine	Transition entangled with dissolution of existing state structures and creation of new independent states – peaceful in the Baltic States, catastrophically violent in Yugoslavia.

The speed and diversity of the transition process was captured memorably by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, who remarked that what took ten years in Poland, took ten months in Hungary, ten weeks in East Germany, ten days in Czechoslovakia, and ten hours in Romania.

Transition to democracy

Regardless of their path from communism, each country in the region faced a set of enormous and interrelated challenges. Scholars have called this a “triple transition”, because three transformations had to be pursued simultaneously:

creating or re-creating democratic political institutions, values and practices, often from scratch or from fragmentary remnants of pre-communist democratic traditions;
undertaking profound economic reforms, transforming centrally planned economies into market economies through privatisation, price liberalisation and the construction of new legal and regulatory frameworks;
re-orienting foreign policy, breaking free from the Soviet sphere and pursuing integration with European and Euro-Atlantic institutions, particularly the European Union and NATO.

Three types of post-communist regime

The deregulation of the political, economic and social monopoly of the Communist Party did not necessarily lead to democratic politics. By the mid-1990s, three broad types of political regime could be identified in post-communist CEE:

Regime type	Characteristics	Examples
Democratic	Free and fair elections, rule of law, protection of civil liberties	Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia
Authoritarian	Lack of meaningful political competition, individual rights and procedural consistency	Croatia (under Tuđman), Serbia-Montenegro (under Milošević)
Hybrid	Formal institutional features of democracy (multiparty elections, constitutional rights) combined with unfair elections, extensive corruption and irregular recognition of civil liberties	Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia (under Mečiar), Ukraine

Convergence, new states and democratic decline

From 1996 onward, three significant trends were observable:

The emergence of new states in the region. Montenegro declared independence from Serbia in 2006, and Kosovo declared independence in 2008, adding to the sovereign states of the post-communist space.
The growing homogenisation of regime types, as early democratic adopters consolidated their institutions and many hybrid or authoritarian regimes gradually liberalised. Slovakia’s democratic trajectory improved dramatically after the defeat of Mečiar in 1998; Croatia democratised after Tuđman’s death in 1999; Romania and Bulgaria made sufficient democratic progress to join the European Union in 2007. The pull of EU accession was a powerful incentive for reform, as accession conditionality compelled candidates to meet stringent standards of democratic governance, human rights and the rule of law.
A counter-trend of declining democratic performance in several countries, most notably Ukraine, Hungary and Poland.

Democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland

The cases of Hungary and Poland have raised particularly acute concerns about the stability of democracies after transition, since both were once considered “front-runners” of democratisation.

Hungary: Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party, which won a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority in 2010, used this mandate to rewrite the constitution, pack the constitutional court, bring the media under government control, restrict the operations of civil society organisations and reshape the electoral system to entrench its advantage. Orbán explicitly embraced the concept of “illiberal democracy”, arguing that liberal values were incompatible with national sovereignty and cultural identity.
Poland: the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which won an outright parliamentary majority in 2015, pursued a similar programme of institutional capture, most controversially through its efforts to subordinate the judiciary to political control and through its attacks on media independence and civil liberties.

In both countries, parliamentary majorities were used to attack the pluralistic foundations of liberal democracy by:

undercutting civil liberties and political rights;
purging the judiciary and bureaucracy;
exerting more state control over media and civil society;
deploying extremist rhetoric in the service of culturally conservative and nationalist agendas.

These developments have prompted intense debate about whether the democratic gains of the post-1989 period can be taken for granted, or whether the transition to democracy is a more fragile and reversible process than was once assumed.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, based at the University of Gothenburg, provides a comprehensive set of democracy indices that track multiple dimensions of democratic governance over time. V-Dem data for the CEE region show a clear pattern:

a dramatic improvement in democratic quality across all dimensions following the transition from communism in 1989;
a period of consolidation in the 1990s and 2000s;
in some countries, a notable decline beginning around 2010.

Country-level V-Dem data illustrate these trajectories vividly. Poland’s liberal democracy and deliberative democracy indices show a sharp deterioration after 2015, while the Czech Republic’s indices have remained relatively stable. Croatia’s trajectory shows a steady improvement from a low base in the 1990s. Romania’s data show gradual improvement alongside persistent concerns about the rule of law and corruption. These data provide a valuable empirical tool for tracking and comparing democratic trajectories across the region and will be used repeatedly throughout the course.

Key terms and concepts

Term	Meaning
Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)	Former European communist countries that have made progress towards democracy
Millet system	Ottoman arrangement granting limited autonomy to non-Muslim religious communities
Russification	Russian imperial policy of cultural, linguistic and religious assimilation
Self-determination	Wilsonian principle that each nation has the right to its own state
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact	1939 agreement between Nazi Germany and the USSR dividing CEE into spheres of influence
Yalta / Potsdam	1945 post-war conferences that consigned CEE to the Soviet sphere
Democratic centralism	Communist principle requiring unified execution of decisions made at the top of the party
Nomenklatura	System of party-approved appointments creating a privileged elite class
“Transmission belts”	Lenin’s term for mass organisations carrying party directives to the population
Salami tactics	Gradual elimination of political opponents “slice by slice” (Rákosi)
Glasnost / Perestroika	Gorbachev’s policies of openness and restructuring
Brezhnev Doctrine	Soviet claim of the right to intervene militarily to maintain communist rule
Solidarity	Polish independent trade union (from 1980); the largest challenge to communist authority in the region
Velvet Revolution	Peaceful citizen-led transition in Czechoslovakia (1989)
Triple transition	Simultaneous political, economic and foreign-policy transformation after 1989
Hybrid regime	Mixed regime combining democratic institutional forms with authoritarian practices
Illiberal democracy	Term embraced by Orbán to describe majoritarian rule divorced from liberal pluralism
V-Dem	Varieties of Democracy project; multidimensional indices of democratic quality

Questions for discussion

What are the implications of how we define “Central and Eastern Europe” for the kinds of comparisons and generalisations we can make about the region? Does the shared experience of communism provide sufficient common ground to justify treating these very different countries as a single analytical category?
How did the different experiences of imperial rule shape the political cultures and institutional capacities of the countries that emerged after World War I? In what ways do these differences continue to matter for the region’s political development today?
What factors explain why Czechoslovakia was able to maintain democracy during the inter-war period while every other country in the region succumbed to authoritarianism?
How did the different modes of communist takeover – Soviet imposition versus indigenous revolution – shape the character of the communist regimes that were established?
How did the comprehensive nature of communist rule shape the psychological experiences and dispositions of citizens in CEE countries? In what ways might the legacies of this all-encompassing system differ from those of more limited forms of authoritarian rule?
How did the different modes of transition from communism shape the subsequent political, economic and social development of the countries concerned?
What does the experience of democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland tell us about the conditions necessary for democratic consolidation? Are social-psychological factors – trust, identity, values, intergroup relations – relevant to understanding why some democracies prove more resilient than others?