Review of Democracy and Its Alternatives: Understanding Post-Communist Societies, by Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Christian Haerpfer.
About the Author
Krzysztof Jasiewicz is professor of sociology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. In the 1990s, he was the founder of electoral studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
In severely divided societies, ethnic cleavages tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Power-sharing institutions can ameliorate this problem, but attempts to establish such institutions, whether based on a consociational or…
The recent "color revolutions" in the former Soviet Union should lead us to reassess the idea of revolution and also to consider the weaknesses of the concept of "democratic transition.
