There Is No Tabula Rasa : the effect of varieties of communism on organizational formation rates in pre-transition interest group populations

Abstract

The data on the formations and dissolutions of Czech, Hungarian, Polish and Slovenian national-level healthcare, higher education and energy policy interest groups show that there were relatively large organizational populations in these countries already at the outset of post-communist transition in 1990. In other words, there was no tabula rasa – the evolution of interest organizations did not start completely anew. There was, however, a substantial variation between policy fields and countries in the sizes of these pre-transition populations. What explains this variance? The chapter explores in detail the formation rates across the four countries and three policy fields through time. In their explanation, the authors focus on the nature of the communist regime, its overall repressiveness, the periods of political and economic liberalizations and the political mobilization and fragmentation in the period leading up to regime change. On the basis of the Hungarian sub-sample, where such data are reliably available, the chapter also compares the mortality rates of organizations founded before and after transition. The findings shed new light on the debates on civil society development and democratization in post-communist societies. The chapter also draws attention to the importance of the proper operationalization of fundamental political changes to the polity in population ecology theory in general, and in the energy–stability–area model of organizational density in particular.