Post-Socialist Societies

This article concerns the extent to which corrupt behavior is dependent on the organizational power structure and the resources available for illegal exchange. This qualitative study is based on 42 in-depth interviews with organizational actors in different organizations in Hungary. Four core themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews: (a) isolated corruption at the bottom, (b) the middle level’s own corruption, (c) “technicization” when middle-level professionals and expert groups are used to legalize the corruption of the dominant coalition, and (d) “turning-off controls” when organizational elites intentionally deactivate internal and external controls to avoid detection.

"    Statistical analyses of the voting results from all national parliamentary and presidential elections held between 1991 and 2006 and survey data concerning attitudes towards major historical issues confirm the existence of strong and persistent regional cleavages in post-Soviet Ukraine. Western Ukrainian regions, which differ significantly in terms of their historical legacies
from regions in Eastern Ukraine, are much more supportive, compared to Eastern Ukraine, of pro-nationalist and pro-Western parties and politicians, and they are much less supportive of pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and politicians.
        Similarly, Eastern Ukrainians, compared to Western Ukrainians, express much more favorable attitudes towards the incorporation of Eastern Ukraine by Russia in the seventeenth century, the Bolshevik Revolution, the whole period of Ukraine’s inclusion in the Soviet Union, the past Communist political system, Russian tsars, and Soviet political leaders. People from Western Ukraine are much more likely than the residents of other regions to
regard the artificial famine of 1932/1933 as a result of deliberate Soviet policy directed against ethnic Ukrainians. Western Ukrainians demonstrate much more favorable views than their Eastern Ukrainian counterparts towards the UPA and historical Ukrainian nationalist and pro-independence leaders.
        Regression analysis shows that historical legacies, linked to different historical experiences before Soviet unification, have the largest effect, compared to other factors, on electoral behavior and on attitudes towards historical issues. Keeping other factors, such as ethnicity and the level of economic development constant, the history of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule is the biggest determinant of the regional pro-nationalist/pro-Western vote index, the pro-Communist/pro-Russian vote index,  and individual attitudes towards the past Soviet political system. Catholic religion and Ukrainian ethnicity also affect the regional electoral behavior indexes but to a lesser extent and less consistently than the historical legacy does. Age, education, Catholic religion, and gender are significant
determinants of attitudes towards the Soviet political system. However, their effects are weaker compared to the effects of historical legacy variables.
    This study concludes that the regional political cleavages in post-Communist Ukraine reflect primarily cultural differences that emerged as a result of distinct historical experiences in Ukrainian regions in the periods before World War I and World War II. These findings imply that the regional differences in electoral behavior and attitudes towards major historical issues will not disappear in Ukraine in the near future.
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The international organizations involved in peacebuilding, democratization and peacekeeping in the Yugoslav successor states have employed thousands of locally recruited workers as project officers, language intermediaries and support staff. This makes them a distinct employment sector within these post-socialist and in several cases post-conflict economies, most significantly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. This paper evaluates arguments in favour of regarding this workforce firstly as a group of workers suffering precarity and secondly as a privileged social elite. While there are good grounds for recognizing them as a distinctive social group, this distinctiveness has not led to a widely expressed social identity based on the commonalities of their employment.

This paper examines the influence of historical archetypes, foreign constitutional law and external consulting on the post-socialist constitution-making processes in Bulgaria and Romania (1990/91). In particular, three hypotheses are holded: First, both the Bulgarian and the Romanian constitutions of 1991 follow in their basic structures and the formulation of many norms historical archetypes from their own constitutional histories. In the Bulgarian case, this somewhat surprisingly is the socialist constitution of 1971 but not the so-called "Tărnovo Constitution" of 1879. In Romania, in contrast, the pre-socialist constitutions of 1866 and 1923 have had exerted the strongest influence. Second, the autonomous perception of Western democratic constitutional law played an important role in both cases. In Bulgaria, it was particularly the constitutions of Spain (1978) and Italy (1947) that took strong effects. Romania oriented itself mainly at the French constitution of 1958, although this orientation decreased markedly during the course of the constitution-making. Third and finally, Western consulting is shown to have had no measurable impact on both constitution-making processes.

""Access to paid employment has conspicuous economic, political, cultural and social implications, for both personal autonomy and gender equality. Eight most advanced post-socialist countries that entered the European Union in 2004 have boasted comparatively high full-time employment rates for women since the socialist period. However, the proportion of women who withdraw from paid employment when they care for pre-school children differs significantly among these countries. Why women’s employment rates drop so sharply subsequent to childbirth in some of the post-socialist countries, but not the others. This chapter seeks to answer this question by exploring childcare policies. The main research question is whether, and how, these policies shape mothers’ employment in the eight countries.
The author first analyzes the emancipatory potential of national policies on childcare leave and formal childcare service provision between 2000 and 2008, in order to determine whether or not childcare policies provide options for carers to engage in paid employment. It finds that among eight post-socialist countries Slovenia and Lithuania create conditions for women’s continuous employment, while Hungary, the Czech Republic and Estonia provide financial incentives for women to retreat from the labour force for a longer period after childbirth, whereas parents in Poland, Slovakia and Latvia are left nearly without public support.
Drawing upon maternal employment data, the author finds evidence in favour of the childcare policies explanation. In countries with gender-neutral leave of moderate duration and affordable, adequate and accessible formal childcare services the employment rates for mothers with pre-school children are significantly higher than in other countries. Educational attainment and the income needs of households suppress rather than rival the childcare policies explanation, and the unregulated service markets and day care by other family members account for mothers’ employment in countries with limited state support.
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This qualitative study examines the role of clients in petty corruption by analyzing actual corrupt exchanges between ordinary citizens and low level public and private employees in post-communist Hungary. Using a grounded theory approach, interviews reveal how clients from different social strata deal with low-level agents in corrupt situations. Findings suggest two contrasting forms of low-level corruption: transactions where the client and the agent do not have a prior relationship and where external factors dominate the relationship; and cases with stronger social ties between the actors, where the client has more freedom to structure the transaction. However, a client's social background frequently determines the form of corrupt transaction and the form of resources illegally exchanged in the deal.

"Ilya Rabinovich began photographing the museums of Chişinău to reclaim a personal identity, lost when he migrated from Moldova to Israel at the age of eight. Rabinovich’s personal quest eventually led to this collaboratively authored book project that questions the moral role of museums in creating national identities. The book
is built around 65 striking color photographs, taken in seven different museums, accompanied by detailed captions that lead the reader on a virtual tour of the exhibits.Four separately authored chapters precede the photographs to introduce the project and photographer, and another two essays conclude the volume. One of these concluding essays contextualizes the exhibits with regard to Moldova’s recent political history; the second questions the general capacity of museums to adapt newer, more inclusive, modes of representation. In design, the book is an appealing souvenir that presents an attractive overview to a handful of Moldova’s museums, but it is probably best read by specialists in regional history, ethnography, and cultural studies, who are equipped to engage in an “intense reading process . . . to unravel the Moldovan identity puzzle” (17). The truly ideal audience would include those responsible for creating the exhibits. But because the book’s format creates the appealing atmosphere of a treasure hunt, it could also be used productively in courses on identity, nationalism,or east European history."

What would a high speed collision between feminism, queer theory and accelerationism look like? Has it already happened? Or, if it hasn’t yet, what kind of futures might an accelerationist feminism/queer theory promise in a world seemingly without promises?