Democratic Institutions and Authoritarian Rule in Southeast Europe

The Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito once warned "one should not hold on to the law like a drunken man holds on to a fence." A still-valid piece of popular wisdom, this statement acurately sums up the persistant problem of authoritarian rule and sham law in southeastern Europe. This volume investigates why the postcommunist democratic transition of southeastern Europe fell so short of initial expectations, connecting the failure of democratization to the dominance and interference of authoritarian parties in the processes of regime change. These parties established and implemented practices of nondemocratic governance that continue to subvert the rule of law more than twenty years after communism ended. In a rare move, this text empirically supports the argument that a double movement thwarted the post-socialist transformation of the region, in which nondemocratic practies of rule subverted the advance toward more formal democratic institutions. This conflicting development explains why improvements to formal democratic institutions failed to produce expected democratization outcomes.