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Map of Europe |
CIAO DATE: 08/07
A word from the editor
Expaining the end of a myth
Alina Mungiu Pippidi
The article reviews the results of 2004 Romanian local elections and provides an analysis and a forecast for the general elections. Authors conclude that despite an undecided result in the local elections, the larger gains belong to the anticommunist alliance, which managed to reverse a trend primed by government surveys and, as a consequence, to end the myth that Romania has again a party-state and no authentic opposition.
Romanian local governments: the unfinished reform
Sorin Ioniþã
How should the local governments be reformed, irrespective of who wins elections? Which are the methods of creating a functional public administration? This is not an easy task because Romania needs to change not only people, but also institutions and processes in order to allow local authorities fulfill their mandate from citizens. Bottom line, the following article identifies the main problems the local administration faces during the reform process and the main solutions the Romanian stakeholders have to apply in order to increase the efficiency of these units.
Political institutions and the democratization of post-communist Eastern Europe
Svetlozar A. Andreev
A decade since the post-communist transformation in Eastern European, the newly established political regimes have opted for diverse combinations of institutional formats. Huge differences in the institutional setting have been observed not only among subregions, but also among neighbouring countries within the former Communist Bloc. This paper attempts to analyse the various institutional choices made by the political elites and tries to see how they affect the consolidation and quality of democracy. Its main hypothesis is that the selection of a particular kind of executive structure (presidential, semi-presidential or parliamentary), of legislature (single or double chamber), of political parties (massbureaucratic and electoral-professional, and their effective number in parliament) and of electoral system (majoritarian, mixed or proportional), as well as the combination between these institutions, would influence the general performance and stability of political democracies in the region and world-wide.
Social partners and captors. The role of non-state actors in economic policy-making in Eastern Europe
Heiko Pleines
Post-communist states in Central and Eastern Europe inherited a high rate of trade union membership. After 1989 many of these non-state actors lost their influence over state actors or institutions. In this general context, the paper looks at the capacity of current non-state actors in this area (Poland, Czech, Ukraine and Russia) to influence official decisions. These are not lobby activities because they are unstructured and cannot be defined as such, but the strategies used are very similar. There are two identifyable instruments - cooperation and pressure - which lead to different types of relations: tripartite (formal agreement, legal capture strategy) and social networks (informal agreements, illegal capture). The paper then analyzes the strategies of non-state actors in Central and Eastern Europe to influence the state.
Formal and informal institutions: on structuring their mutual co-existence
Hans-Joachim Lauth
The article deals with the relationship between formal and informal institutions. Firstly, informal institutions are defined in contrast to formal institutions. Informal institutions are also distinguished from culture and informal politics. In the second step various types of informal institutions are differentiated in order to structure the analysis of their relationship with democracy (and with the formal institutions of democracy). This analysis shows that informal institutions may support democracy, if they are provided with universalistic norms. Strong particularistic institutions, however, can imperil democracy and rule of law a great extent. The consideration of informal institutions is necessary for understanding the consolidation of democracies and creation of defective democracies.
A cultural aristocracy? Romanian intellectuals and their critics
Cosmina Tãnãsoiu
This paper uses the pretext of a book review to examine the performance of Romanian intellectuals as public actors. It sets to analyse the reasons behind the latest controversy to emerge within the Romanian intellectual community. This paper identifies two main causes behind the conflict: the personalisation of the argument through the use of a case study and the resemblance between the matrix used to explain the perpetuation of an intellectual group dominance with the matrix used by intellectuals to criticise the Communist Party's policies and the post-communist ruling elite's techniques to maintain control over Romanian politics. The paper considers these causes within the wider context of Romanian postcommunism. This paper also investigates the presence of "prestige groups" within the Romanian intellectual community and their ability to dominate the Romanian cultural world and the market of ideas. It considers the mechanisms that make cultural dogmas acceptable. As such, the paper reflects upon the role of intellectuals in post-communist societies, examines their political culture and the public discourses they produce. This paper deals primarily with ideas and language and applies a discourse analysis approach. In analysing written texts, this paper considers them within the nexus of social relations where they were created. The paper argues that the aftermath of the publication of "Boierii Mintii" confirms the thesis of Romania being a status society and the perpetuation of the "them/us" dichotomy as the instrument applied to understand the world.