This paper addresses the question of the major challenges for the regulation of lobbying in the European Economic Area countries. It attempts to disentangle this complex question by focusing, step by ...step, on three specific issues. First, the problem of the definition of lobbying, or the lack of one, is considered. The paper argues that even though European countries started to regulate lobbying already two decades ago, they have still not managed to arrive at a useful definition of the field and activity of lobbying itself, which considerably hinders their pro-transparency regulatory efforts. Second, the paper looks at other anti-corruption legislation in Europe and its links with lobbying rules. The evidence is inconclusive as to whether the level of corruption is significantly affected by the presence or lack of lobbying regulation. Finally, the paper shows that there is a noticeable weakness in the existing lobbying regulations in European countries in terms of enforcement. Without strengthening the enforcement mechanisms of lobbying laws, there will be no significant shift towards a better-regulated and more transparent lobbying environment in Europe.
The effectiveness of property rights - and the rule of law more broadly - is often depicted as depending primarily on rulers' 'supply' of legal institutions. Yet the crucial importance of private ...sector “demand” for law is frequently overlooked. This book develops a novel framework that unpacks the demand for law in Russia, building on an original enterprise survey as well as extensive interviews with lawyers, firms, and private security agencies. By tracing the evolution of firms' reliance on violence, corruption, and law over the two decades following the Soviet Union's collapse, the book clarifies why firms in various contexts may turn to law for property rights protection, even if legal institutions remain ineffective or corrupt. The author's detailed demand-side analysis of property rights draws attention to the extensive role that law plays in the Russian business world, contrary to frequent depictions of Russia as lawless.
Guardians of Living History: An Ethnography of Post-Soviet Memory Making in Estonia interrogates how people engage with their violent past, both within their families and as members of a national ...community, when living in an extremely complicated society with a short history of independence and a desire to belong to Europe. In line with other scholarship on memory, this book shows that many Estonians desire an established collective story, as they live in a society where their national identity is quite regularly under threat. At the same time however, that same closure is perceived to pose a threat to the survival of Estonian culture and independence. Guardians of Living History provides an intimate insight into the lives of Estonians from the countryside, former deportees, young intellectuals, and memory activists, who all in their own ways act as guardians of a national history: a history which they wish to keep alive, apolitical, and as close to their family stories as possible.
The Romanian post-totalitarian recount of the communist past embraces various forms: from individual and civic actions to recollect the memories of the past and gather testimonies from the regime's ...victims, to institutionalized forms of memory and public memory discourse. The research described in this paper focused on the use of oral history as a mechanism to recollect the past and its effects at the level of the Romanian society: the creation of new institutions dedicated to researching the past, agents of memory, public memory discourse, political class reluctance, mass media, and the resulting politics of memory. The paper shows that this remembrance involves a permanent reconstruction of the past in which different agents of memory are involved, all of whom consequently project their own interests, ideas, and in some cases stereotypes onto their perceptions of the past. identifying different topics and approaches to past narratives, we argue that the permanent dialogue and openness to others' stories can offer valuable insights into the remembrance process, especially when traumatic events are involved.
Many of the world's conflicts today are self-sustaining and ongoing, making the application of transitional justice measures difficult. Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, namely Georgia and ...Ukraine, both of which have experienced regime changes in the twenty-first century and implemented lustration and vetting measures - the question of whether or not transitional justice will be successfully utilized is very much still under debate. My research explores the relationship between lustration and vetting policies and corruption in Ukraine and Georgia. Past studies of corruption in these countries have focused the extent of state exploitation of the forms through which corruption is expressed such as political appointments, and protection from prosecution. This research, by contrast, aims to study the relationship that corruption has with the particular transitional justice measure of lustration and vetting.
More than 20 years after the fall of the Communist regime, we are witnessing the unprecedented development of religious pilgrimage in Romania, a country where, according to the latest census, 84 ...percent of the population self-identify as Orthodox Christian. Apart from the pilgrimages to well-known destinations (Jerusalem, Rome, etc.) organized by the Romanian Patriarchy’s Pilgrimage Bureau, a separate category is the improvised, hybrid pilgrimages, both religious and touristic, organized by individuals using hired minibuses. This type of pilgrimage has been called “coach pilgrimage” in the touristic jargon and mass media. In Romanian Orthodoxy (and in Orthodoxy Church, at large), the “pilgrimage” is understood today as a long wait in a queue. The aim is to touch the shrine containing the relics of a saint. Pilgrimage, as a ritual, is not centered on walking, as in Compostela, for example—a major difference between Eastern and Western Christianity. This article offers an ethnographic description of such a pilgrimage. The focus is on the methods of recruitment of the pilgrims, the choice of the place to be visited, as well as the role of the memory concerning Communism in shaping the pilgrims’ touristic and religious behavior. The analysis of this type of pilgrimages points to new forms of blending of tourism and religious travel, outside established institutional frameworks, as well as to changing notions of pilgrimage, movement, religious practice, and piety. The emergence of new “guiding” patterns and the rise of a new category, the “pilgrimage organizing guides,” are also investigated here.
This study develops and tests two arguments for how repertoires of political action are reconfigured in post-communist Romania. Using multivariate statistical analysis, it examines whether citizens' ...engagement in post-communist politics is linked with generic socioeconomic and attitudinal traits or, alternatively, if it is connected with selective mobilisation opportunities provided by social networks and organisations. The findings reveal that while most Romanians are politically inactive two decades after the fall of communism, those who engage in politics do so selectively and their political action repertoires are largely influenced by four mobilising agents: trade unions; political parties; social networks; and civil society organisations.
This paper presents interdisciplinary methodological research concerning the emergence and dynamic behavior of elites in the democracies in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The ...research on political elites has been mainly guided so far by the interest in their origins, characteristics, functionalities, and political roles. These studies have raised several methodological questions concerning the collection of data on the political elite, and the validity and reliability of the survey data. Our approach focuses instead on a complexity-based approach by studying the social and political generative mechanisms which could illustrate elites' emergence and dynamics. To this goal, we introduce a research methodology based on simulation and agent-based modeling which (i) constructs an artificial polity, and (ii) investigates the elites' influence on the artificial polity's outcomes. This type of approach enhances the study of some issues which are too complex to be studied by classic analytical and empirical means, like the emergence and self-organization of (political) elites as context-dependent and path-dependent phenomenon in the Central and Eastern European post-communist societies. After the 1990s, the democratization processes in these countries have often been questioned for their poor capacity to overcome the privilege-generating mechanisms which have affected the newly-constructed democratic institutions. Our approach identifies the privilege-generative mechanisms aimed to obtain and retain power in the post-communist polities in Eastern and Central Europe. The methodological issues approached in this experimental setting are concerned with (a) the construction of the context as an artificial polity, (b) the generation of the elites, and (c) the study of their dynamics.
The European idea of uniting the countries of the European continent is the impetus for attracting and transformation of post communist societies. The process of harmonization of legislation is a ...systematic attempt at regulation of relations in society through the establishment of valuable principles and adoption of established standards in the management of states and economies. The dilemma is whether it is possible a sustainable development transformation by simply copying the institutional and legal system solutions from Europe, without involving moral value body of principles and standards in ruling the states? The purpose of the paper is to offer a reasoned response on ways how this collision to be resolved, whether the transition can be performed only in a systematic manner, institutionally and legally, or must go in parallel with social intervention in the cultural set and moral value corpus based on verified and approved ethical values, principles and standards.
The article is dedicated to peculiarities of social stratification in post-communist society. The nature of relations between the subjective social status and possession of property objects depends ...on the method of their acquisition. The expensive property objects, which often do not correspond to an individual’s financial position but are acquired on his or her own initiative, have the capacity for differentiating people by status indication. Instead, the unintentional acquisition of property under the effect of outer factors has no essential influence on the social status. In the course of privatization of state habitation and land, most Ukrainians became homeowners and landowners. However, property objects acquired on the initiative of government have not become the factors of social stratification. Only with real institutional transformations in economy, liberalization of land market, and legitimation of the institute of private property will the acquired property objects become full-value material assets affecting status characteristics of an individual.
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