Addresses the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism s collapse in Europe.

This volume presents a shared effort to apply a general historical-institutionalist approach to the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism s collapse in Europe. It brings together a number of leading senior and junior scholars with outstanding reputations as specialists in postcommunism and comparative politics to address central theoretical and empirical issues involved in the study of postcommunism. The authors address such questions as how historical legacies of the communist regime be defined, how their impact can be measured in methodologically rigorous ways, and how the effects of temporal and spatial context can be taken into account in empirical research on the region. Taken as a whole, the volume makes an important contribution to the growing literature by utilizing the comparative historical method to study key problems of world politics.

About the contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson
Part I. Postcommunist Transformations and the Role of Historical Legacies: 1. Time, space and institutional change in central and eastern Europe Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson
2. Accounting for postcommunist regime diversity: what counts as a good cause? Herbert Kitschelt
Part II. Postcommunist Europe: Continuity and Change in Regional Patterns: 3. Patterns of postcommunist transformation in central and eastern Europe Grzegorz Ekiert
4. Postcommunist spaces: a political geography approach to explaining postcommunist outcomes Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly
Part III. Institutional Redesign and Historical Legacies: Case Studies: 5. Redeeming the past: communist successor parties after 1989 Anna Grzymala-Busse
6. Leninist legacies and legacies of state socialism in postcommunist central Europe's constitutional development Allison Stanger
7. Historical legacies, institutions and the politics of social policy in Hungary and Poland, 1989-1999 Tomasz Inglot
8. Postcommunist unemployment politics: historical legacies and the curious acceptance of job loss Phineas Baxandall
9. 'Past' dependence or path contingency? Institutional design in postcommunist financial systems Juliet Johnson
10. Cultural legacies of state socialism: history making and cultural-political entrepreneurship in postcommunist Poland and Russia Jan Kubik
Epilogue: from area studies to contextualized comparisons Paul Pierson
Index.