Browsing by Author "Pettai, Vello"

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Balancing between consolidation and cartel. The effects of party law in Estonia.
(Routledge, 2017) Pettai, Vello
Over the last decade the institutionalist study of political parties has taken a new turn. The turn has been toward the in-depth study of party law and party regulation. Such institutions ostensibly operate as uniform determinants of behavior, regardless of population size. Hence, the case of Estonia, while being small in size and population, is interesting because it has been one of the more successful post-communist party systems to consolidate over the last 20 years. The argument in this chapter is therefore that this outcome has been a combination of increasing regulation in five particular domains: constitutional provisions, electoral rules, party registration requirements, parliamentary rules, and party finance. These are profiled as they appear across a chronological overview of changes in party law and party regulation over the last 20 years.
Dealing with the Past: Transitional Justice and De-communization
(Routledge, 2017) Pettai, Eva-Clarita; Pettai, Vello
This chapter reviews the literature around the study of post-communist transitional justice. It begins by comparing how different scholars have conceptualized transitional justice, particularly the range of empirical phenomena that authors have decided to encompass when they have dealt with truth and justice issues. Secondly, the chapter shows how, depending on an author’s empirical delineation of the phenomenon, the independent variables chosen across time or across countries have also varied. Thirdly, the chapter turns the methodological equation around and examines those (albeit far fewer) scholars who have examined transitional justice as a causal phenomenon and sought to answer what transitional justice actually brings to society. Lastly, the overview presents a set of sub-themes in the field of post-communist transitional justice, namely the comparative study of institutions devoted to TJ, the growing importance of international influences on TJ, and the place of specifically post-conflict TJ in the context of former Yugoslavia.
The development of political systems in post-communist countries
(Routledge, 2018) Pettai, Vello
The political development of post-communist Europe has generally been seen as a relatively successful march toward democracy. This chapter seeks to flesh out this understanding by examining the region through the prism of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset. V-Dem allows us to look at many underlying dimensions of democratic development, including its liberal, participatory, egalitarian and deliberative components. The chapter therefore examines the main post-communist countries of the EU across various V-Dem indices and measures, and discusses what is new in the dataset that enhances our existing narrative about democratic change in the region. While unsurprisingly V-Dem displays some of the same cross-national differences (between e.g. Czech Republic and Slovakia) that we see in other indices, it also shows more precisely where these gaps actually lie. The chapter concludes with reflections on how V-Dem’s institutionalist approach to democracy needs to be coupled with attitudinal measures in order to understand the latest phase of democratic backsliding in post-communist Europe.