Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post-Communist Countries

Valerie J. Bunce is Professor of Government and International Studies at Cornell University, where she served as chair of the Department of Government from 2001 to 2007. Since receiving her doctorate in political science at the University of Michigan in 1976, Bunce has taught, in addition to Cornell, at Lake Forest College, Northwestern University, the Central European University (Budapest) and the University of Zagreb. She recently served as the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and Vice-President of the American Political Science Association and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A leading expert on Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Bunce has focused her research since the fall of communism on four issues, all involving comparisons among the postcommunist states of Europe and Eurasia. She is the author of articles that have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, World Politics, International Organization, the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, the Slavic Review, Communist and Postcommunist Studies and East European Politics and Societies. She has written two books: Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy under Capitalism and Socialism and Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State. She is also the co-editor of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World. She has received grants from the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars, Smith Richardson Foundation, International Research and Exchange Board, the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation (Resident Fellowship at Bellagio), the International Cen

This book analyzes a remarkable run of electoral victories by the opposition in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia from 1998 to 2005.

Part I. The Puzzle: 1. Breakthrough elections: mixed regimes, democracy assistance, and international diffusion; 2. Electoral stability and change in mixed regimes; Part II. Case Studies: 3. The 1998 election in Slovakia and the 2000 election in Croatia: model solidifies and is transferred; 4. Defeating a dictator at the polls and in the streets: the 2000 Yugoslav election; 5. Ukraine: the orange revolution; 6. Georgia and Kyrgyzstan: fraudulent parliamentary elections, mass protests, and presidential abdications; 7. Failed cases: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus; Part III. Comparative Analyses: 8. Explaining divergent electoral outcomes: regime strength, international democracy assistance, and electoral dynamics; 9. The electoral model: evolution and elements; 10. The cross-national diffusion of democratizing elections; 11. After the elections: explaining divergent regime trajectories; 12. Conclusions: democratizing elections, international diffusion and US democracy assistance.