Hanley, Seán; Cianetti, Licia; (2024) Central and Eastern Europe. In: Croissant, Aurel and Tomini, Luca, (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Autocratisation. (pp. 473-489). Routledge: Abingdon, UK.

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Abstract

This chapter traces and evaluates three decades of scholarly debate on the democratic development of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) from skepticism about the region's democratic potential in the immediate aftermath of the fall of communism, through the qualified optimism of the “return to Europe” period, to current fears of region-wide democratic backsliding. However, while much of the recent “backsliding paradigm” focuses on the extreme cases of Hungary and Poland, their pattern of autocratization through executive aggrandizement still remains the exception in CEE. Area studies literature, especially focusing on corruption and technocracy, suggests that elsewhere in the region other processes of democratic degradation may matter more. The chapter reviews the ways in which CEE's evolving political regimes have been studied to draw wider lessons for scholars of comparative autocratization. In particular, the authors argue, a closer look at CEE alerts us to the need to focus more on regional patterns and specificities; better distinguish processes of executive-led autocratization from other processes of democratic degradation; and be wary of searching for elegant but limiting universal causal models of autocratization.

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