Political parties, party systems and economic reform: Testing hypotheses against evidence from postcommunist countries

Numerous scholars whose research focuses on the developed OECD countries, as well as the democratizing states of Latin America and East Asia, have attempted to answer the question "How do institutional structures affect political and economic performance in free-market, democratic societies?" These inquiries have yielded a rich and useful body of literature. By contrast, surprisingly few scholars have produced useful comparisons of political institutions and regime performance in postcommunist countries. Studies comparing postcommunist institutional performance usually suffer from an inadequate empirical treatment of cases. When studies are empirically rich and accurate, they tend to focus on a single case, and thus lack the insight of comparison. Testing hypotheses from the literature on political institutions and the political economy of democratic transitions against recent evidence from postcommunist cases allows us to gauge variations in the institutional correlates of reform in democratic systems in different regions at different levels of development. Analysis of evidence from postcommunist dual transitions, specifically from Poland and the Czech Republic, also forces us to consider the possibility that variables and causal patterns driving outcomes in one group of cases may be systematically different than variables and causal patterns in another.