The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change

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Abstract
Analysts of democratization and marketization in post-Communist societies have tended to treat the countries of the former Soviet bloc as an undifferentiated whole, hindering successful theorizing about the sources of institutional change in particular cases. In this light, Ken Jowitt's insightful argument about the deleterious effects of the Leninist legacy in Eastern Europe must be refined in two ways. First, the degree of proximity of different post-Communist societies to established capitalist markets should be taken into account. Second, the Leninist legacy itself must be broken down into ideological, political, socioeconomic, and cultural components.