Trajectories of Post-Communist Regimes: A Comparative Framework

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly gained dominance of liberal democracy as a political regime was accompanied by a new dominance of liberal democracy as a descriptive language. Concepts of political science, sociology, and economics which had been developed for the analysis of Western-type regimes were applied to the various phenomena in the newly liberated countries of Central Europe and the post-Soviet region. In The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes (CEU Press, 2020), Bálint Magyar and Bálint Madlovics propose a systematic renewal of this descriptive vocabulary, shifting from Western-centered perspectives to authentic, context-rich conceptualizations. In his talk, Madlovics presents a six-regime typology of two democracies, two autocracies, and two dictatorships. This typology, developed into a 3D illustrative model, is used to visualize the development trajectories of the regimes of post-communist countries like Russia, Ukraine, and Hungary.

Speaker

Bálint Madlovics is a junior research fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute. He holds an MA in political science (2018) from Central European University and has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and a book on post-communist regimes. Madlovics is a visiting professor at Corvinus University of Budapest. Formerly, he was a research fellow at the Financial Research Institute in Budapest (2018–2019), and visiting professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest (2021–2022).

Moderator

Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Director of the Central Asia Program; Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program; Co-Director of PONARS Eurasia; and Research Professor of International Affairs at The George Washington University. She works on political, social, and cultural changes in the post-Soviet space. Marlene’s research explores the transformations of nationalist and conservative ideologies in Russia, nationhood construction in Central Asia, as well as the development of Russia’s Arctic regions.