Addresses the problem of assessing institutional change in the wake of communism's collapse in Europe.

About the contributors; Acknowledgments; Introduction Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson; Part I. Postcommunist Transformations and the Role of Historical Legacies: 1. Time, space and institutional change in central and eastern Europe Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen E. Hanson; 2. Accounting for postcommunist regime diversity: what counts as a good cause? Herbert Kitschelt; Part II. Postcommunist Europe: Continuity and Change in Regional Patterns: 3. Patterns of postcommunist transformation in central and eastern Europe Grzegorz Ekiert; 4. Postcommunist spaces: a political geography approach to explaining postcommunist outcomes Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly; Part III. Institutional Redesign and Historical Legacies: Case Studies: 5. Redeeming the past: communist successor parties after 1989 Anna Grzymala-Busse; 6. Leninist legacies and legacies of state socialism in postcommunist central Europe's constitutional development Allison Stanger; 7. Historical legacies, institutions and the politics of social policy in Hungary and Poland, 1989-99 Tomasz Inglot; 8. Postcommunist unemployment politics: historical legacies and the curious acceptance of job loss Phineas Baxandall; 9. 'Past' dependence or path contingency? Institutional design in postcommunist financial systems Juliet Johnson; 10. Cultural legacies of state socialism: history making and cultural-political entrepreneurship in postcommunist Poland and Russia Jan Kubik; Epilogue: from area studies to contextualized comparisons Paul Pierson; Index.