The four Visegrad states — Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (until 1993 Czechoslovakia) and Hungary — form a compact area between Germany and Austria in the west and the states of the former USSR in the east. They are bounded by the Baltic in the north and the Danube river in the south. They are cut by the Sudeten and Carpathian mountain ranges, which divide Poland off from the other states. Poland is an extension of the North European plain and like the latter is drained by rivers that flow from south to north west — the Oder, the Vlatava and the Elbe, the Vistula and the Bug. The Danube is the great exception, flowing from its source eastward, turning through two 90-degree turns to end up in the Black Sea, forming the barrier and often the political frontier between central Europe and the Balkans. Hungary to the east of the Danube is also an open plain. The region is historically and culturally part of western Europe, but its eastern Marches now represents a vital strategic zone between Germany and the core of the European Union to the west and the Russian zone to the east.

Economy and Society

This book demonstrates that people's basic values and beliefs are changing, in ways that affect their political, sexual, economic, and religious behaviour. These changes are roughly predictable: to a large extent, they can be interpreted on the basis of a revised version of modernisation theory presented here. Drawing on a massive body of evidence from societies containing 85 percent of the world's population, the authors demonstrate that modernisation is a process of human development, in which economic development gives rise to cultural changes that make individual autonomy, gender equality, and democracy increasingly likely. The authors present a model of social change that predicts how the value systems play a crucial role in the emergence and flourishing of democratic institutions - and that modernisation brings coherent cultural changes that are conducive to democratisation.

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Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy: The Human Development Sequence

The recent trend toward democratization in countries across the globe has challenged scholars to pursue two potentially contradictory goals. On the one hand, they seek to increase analytic differentiation in order to capture the diverse forms of democracy that have emerged. On the other hand, they are concerned with conceptual validity. Specifically, they seek to avoid the problem of conceptual stretching that arises when the concept of democracy is applied to cases for which, by relevant scholarly standards, it is not appropriate. This article argues that the pursuit of these two goals has led to a proliferation of conceptual innovations, including numerous subtypes of democracy – that is to say, democracy "with adjectives." The articles explores the strengths and weaknesses of alternative strategies of conceptual innovation that have emerged: descending and climbing Sartori's ladder of generality, generating "diminished" subtypes of democracy, "precising" the definition of democracy by adding defining attributes, and shifting the overarching concept with which democracy is associated. The goal of the analysis is to make more comprehensible the complex structure of these strategies, as well as to explore trade-offs among the strategies. Even when scholars proceed intuitively, rather than self-consciously, they tend to operate within this structure. Yet it is far more desirable for them to do so self-consciously, with a full awareness of these trade-offs.

Democracy with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in Comparative Research

A Graph-theoretic perspective on centrality

Popular trust in political institutions is vital to democracy, but in post-Communist countries, popular distrust for institutions is widespread, and prospects for generating increased political trust are uncertain given disagreements over its origins. Cultural theories emphasizing exogenous determinants of trust compete with institutional theories emphasizing endogenous influences, and both can be further differentiated into micro and macro variants. Competing hypotheses drawn from these theories are tested using data from 10 post-Communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Aggregate data on economic and political performance are combined with survey data on interpersonal and political trust, political socialization experiences, and individual evaluations of national performance. Results strongly support the superiority of institutional explanations of the origins of political trust, especially micro-level explanations, while providing little support for either micro-cul...

What Are the Origins of Political Trust?: Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-communist Societies

Stable democratic regimes depend heavily on the "consensual unity" of national elites. So long as elites remain disunified, political regimes are unstable, a condition which makes democratic transitions and democratic breakdowns merely temporary oscillations in the forms unstable regimes take. Disunity appears to be the generic condition of national elites, and disunity strongly tends to persist regardless of socioeconomic development and other changes in mass populations. The consensually unified elites that are necessary to stable democracies are created in only a few ways, two of the most important of which involve distinctive elite transformations. After elaborating this argument, we examine the relationship between elites and regimes in Western nation-states since they began to consolidate after 1500. We show that our approach makes good sense of the Western political record, that it does much to clarify prospects for stable democracies in developing societies today, and that it makes the increasingly elite-centered analysis of democratic transitions and breakdowns more systematic.

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The Elite Variable in Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns

Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe: Introduction: elite transformations and democratic regimes

Chapter 1: Elites and Regimes Chapter 2: Disunited Elites and Unstable Regimes Chapter 3: Elite Settlements Chapter 4: Colonial Origins of Consensually United Elites Chapter 5: Convergences among Disunited Elites Chapter 6: Elites and Liberal Democratic Prospects

Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy

Efforts to reconceptualize elite structure and functioning in stable democracies, together with data from surveys of elite interaction networks in three democratic societies, suggest that the conventional power elite, ruling class and pluralist perspectives are only partly accurate and that fusing them in a more realistic model makes much sense. Using data from comparable surveys of national elites in the US, Australia and West Germany, we argue that the configurations of elite circles in these societies reveal tight integration, as in the power elite and ruling class models, together with representation of numerous, diverse groups, as in the pluralist model. We find comprehensive integration in each of the three national elites, with a funnel-like structure of communication networks that is inclusive of all sectors and heterogeneous in the social origins, attitudes and party affiliations of the several hundred most centrally located persons. We contend that an informal interaction structure providing all major elite groups access to decisionmaking is a precondition of any

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Elite integration in stable democracies: a reconsideration

Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: Elites and Classes: Bringing Elites Back In. 1. Why Class Theory has Overshadowed Elite Theory: A Matter of Coincidence. 2. Why Class Theory Should not have Overshadowed Elite Theory: A Matter of Democracy. Part II: The Autonomy of Elites and Western thought. 3. Democratic Elite Theory. 4. Other Theories: A Comparison. Part III: The Demo--Elite Perspective. 5. The Autonomy of Elites and Democracy. 6. Elite Autonomy Versus Co--operation and the Historical Development of Democracy. Part IV: The Autonomy of Elites and the Success (or Failure) of Democracy. 7. Stabilization Versus Breakdown of Democracy: The Cases of Britain and Germany. 8. Problems of Transition to Democracy in eastern Europe: The Cases of the Soviet Union and Poland. Part V: Meanwhile in the West: Problems and Potential of Democracy. 9. Elite Autonomy Under Siege and Problems of Western Democracy. 10. Social Protest Movements and the Potential of Western Democracy. Conclusion. References.

John Higley

Papers

The Elite Variable in Democratic Transitions and Breakdowns

Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe: Introduction: elite transformations and democratic regimes

Elite Foundations of Liberal Democracy

Elite integration in stable democracies: a reconsideration

The elite connection : problems and potential of Western democracy