Embodying Democracy analyzes the politics of electoral reform in eight post-communist states including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia and Ukraine. By exploring the multiple factors that shaped the design of electoral institutions during the first ten years of post-communist transition, it accounts for an important element of the post-communist reform process and illuminates general features of institutional design in post-transition states.
List of Tables
List of Party Acronyms
Preface
Explaining the Design and Redesign of Electoral Systems
Poland: Experimenting with the Electoral System
Hungary: The Politics of Negotiated Design
The Czech and Slovak Republics: The Surprising Resilience of Proportional Representation
Romania: Stability without Consensus
Bulgaria: Engineering Legitimacy through Electoral System Design
Russia: The Limits of Electoral Engineering
Ukraine: The Struggle for Democratic Change
Conclusion: Embodying Democracy
Bibliography
Glossary
Index
SARAH BIRCH is Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. She is the author of Elections and Democratization in Ukraine and a number of articles on Ukrainian politics and post-communist studies.
FRANCES MILLARD is Reader in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. Her books include Polish Politics and Society and The Anatomy of the New Poland. She has written widely on communist and post-communist political and social developments, particularly in Poland.
MARINA POPESCU was Research Officer for the ESRC-funded Project on Political Transformation and the Electoral Process in Post-Communist Europe from 1999 to 2002 after which she resumed her work as a full-time PhD student at the University of Essex.
KIERAN WILLIAMS is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. He is the author of The Prague Spring and its Aftermath: Czechoslovak Politics, 1968-1970 and co-author (with Dennis Deletant) of Security Intelligence Services in New Democracies: The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania.