This book examines how democracy influences state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004.

Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy and the Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. He previously taught at Ohio State University and has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the US Agency for International Development, and the Bloomberg Foundation. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia (2000), which won the 2001 Hewett Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. His articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings, the American Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, among others.

Introduction; 1. The political logic of economic and institutional reform; 2. Political polarization and economic inequality; 3. The pace and consistency of reform; 4. Political polarization and economic growth; 5. Polarization and policy instability: the view from the firm; 6. Nationalism and endogenous polarization; 7. Russia: polarization, autocracy and inconsistent reform; 8. Bulgaria: polarization, democracy and inconsistent reform; 9. Poland: robust democracy and rapid reform; 10. Uzbekistan: autocracy and inconsistent gradualism; 11. Conclusion.