What do we know about civil society and regime change thirty years after 1989?
Abstract
This essay discusses the lessons of thirty years of postcommunist politics for our understanding of the relationship between civil society and regime change. It identifies four different modalities of civil society – insurgent, institutionalized, uncivil and firewall – and discusses each in detail with illustrations from post-communist politics. It shows how the politics of the region has been a fertile field of study for innovation in contemporary understandings of civil society in comparative politics.
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For socially conservative groups, unlike liberal progressive groups, partnerships with confessional parties do not diminish their credibility.
“For them-unlike liberal progressive groups that inherited from the communist experience a legacy of antipartisanship-such partnerships do not diminish their credibility (cf.Bernhard 2020; Greskovits 2020).”
From Varieties of Illiberal Backlash in Central Europe (2023) · cites this paper as Bernhard 2020
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- Authors
- Bernhard, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Florida (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bernhard, Michael
- ORCID
- Bernhard, Michael
- Venue
- East European Politics
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2020-07-02
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 341-362
- ISSN
- 2159-9165 (ISSN-L)
- 2159-9173
- OpenAlex
- W3040868475
- Cited by
- 104
- References
- 128
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 10
- FWCI
- 22.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- East European Politics (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Florida Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Eastern European Communism and Reforms
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Political Theory and Democracy
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Political Conflict and Governance
- Keywords
- civil society, regime change, post-communist politics, democratization, post-communist transition
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