Negotiating the Institutions of Democracy: Contingent Choices and Strategic Interactions in the Hungarian and Polish Transitions

整个东欧共产主义政权的垮台以及向民主和私营企业的过渡，是近几十年来最引人注目和最重要的政治和经济发展之一。除了具有明显的国际意义外，这些发展民主体制和市场机制的努力还提供了独特的机会，可以更好地了解民主和市场是如何产生的，它们如何生存或为什么失败，以及它们之间的关系。该奖项支持创新研究，旨在通过对匈牙利和波兰正在进行的转型进行有控制的比较，更好地理解从专制和社会主义政权向民主和私营企业的过渡。具体来说，这个项目测试了民主发展的两种理论。传统的或结构决定论理论认为，民主的发展总是需要存在各种社会和经济先决条件，例如相对较高的经济发展水平和已建立的中产阶级。另一种最新的理论认为，有许多不同类型的民主，实现民主的途径也有许多不同。这种社会互动主义观点同意社会结构是重要的，但认为社会结构的影响取决于所发展的政治制度的类型和政治行为者在过渡时期所做出的战略选择的类型。​为了检验这些选择，我们将比较匈牙利和波兰向民主过渡的过程。匈牙利和波兰代表着两个社会结构截然不同的国家，它们遵循了类似的谈判而非革命性变革进程，但产生了截然不同的制度和政策结果。因此，它们提供了一个不同寻常的机会来评估社会结构对民主体制和市场机制发展的影响。该项目的首席研究员是一位非常有才华的年轻学者，他以前在匈牙利的工作提供了丰富的数据集，这将极大地促进这项重要研究的完成。

The fall of communist regimes throughout eastern europe and the transition to democracy and private enterprise, there, rank among the most dramatic and important political and economic developments of recent decades. In addition to their obvious international significance, these efforts at developing democratic institutions and market mechanisms offer unique opportunities to better understand how democracies and markets arise, how they survive or why they fail, and how they are related. This award supports innovative research designed to better understand the transition from authoritarian and socialist regimes to democracy and private enterprise through controlled comparisons of the ongoing transitions in Hungary and Poland. Specifically, this project tests two theories of the development of democracy. The traditional or structural determinist theory holds that the development of democracy invariably requires the existence of a variety of social and economic preconditions such as relatively high levels of economic development and an established middle class. An alternative and more recent theory holds that there are many different types of democracy and many different paths to their achievement. This social interactionist view agrees that social structure is important but believes that the effects of social structure are contingent upon the types of political institutions that develop and the types of strategic choices which political actors make during the period of transition. To test these alternatives, the transitions to democracy in Hungary and Poland will be compared. Hungary and Poland represent two nations with very different social structures which have followed similar processes of negotiated rather than revolutionary change but producing very different institutional and policy outcomes. Thus they provide an unusual opportunity to assess the effects of social structure on the development of democratic institutions and market mechanisms. The Principal Investigator for this project is a highly talented young scholar whose previous work in Hungary has provided a rich data set that will greatly facilitate completion of this important research.