Path of Democratization: Circuitous in Slovakia But Not in the Czech Republic

Students of political development have not always been good at understanding drastic political change (Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington, Understanding Political Development, Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994, 33). Kevin Deegan-Krause contributes to efforts to remedy this shortcoming. He seeks to answer a fascinating puzzle of post-communist transition: What can account for both the divergence and later reconvergence of democratic development in the Czech Republic and in Slovakia? Not all East European countries sped along a unidirectional path toward liberal democracy when they threw off Soviet-backed communist rule. The zig-zag path of democratization that some post-communist states, such as Slovakia and Ukraine, have taken is a particularly interesting and important aspect of the political transition in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike some of the cases in Latin America, the culprits for Slovakia’s and some neighbors’ regressions are not military leaders or economic downturns. Deegan-Krause adds to books, such as V.P. Gagnon’s The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005) that help to understand why some countries, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, actually regressed from the process of democratization before accelerating their progress toward democratic consolidation. Both resist blaming the attitudes of the general population for regression or showering the international community’s policies with praise for correcting them. They instead propose more complex models that focus on the dynamics of political competition in post-communist transitions. Deegan-Krause offers a convincing model that highlights the counterproductive role played in new democratizers by strategic politicians, who, when significantly challenged by the dynamics of political competition and weakly constrained by young democratic institutions, choose to exacerbate popular attitudinal differences in the name of accumulating power.