To understand the political dimension of dissident legacies, we need first to understand the components that “made” the dissidents and follow their reconfiguration after 1989, leading to initial empowerment followed by gradual demise of the liberal post-dissident elite. Dissidence in the form that first appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s in central and eastern Europe constituted a particular

During the 1980s, Catholic dissidents in Slovakia constructed divergent modes of moral reasoning. While national democratic Catholic dissidents looked to universal Catholic morality, nationalist Catholic dissidents anchored their moral reasoning in nationalized ethics. Their respective modes of moral reasoning were crucially formed in the making of national Catholic memory. If both appreciated Slovak

This article’s central question is how former dissidents and their engagement in post-1989 nascent democratic politics contributed to the emergence of what was later retrospectively labelled the “liberal consensus.” I look at the earliest stages of this consensus before it started to lock in the conditionality of the EU accession process. To this end, I first discuss the “liberal consensus” from a

A playwright, philosopher, and president, Václav Havel was well known at home and abroad for all his “careers” and contributions. This article compares and contrasts the recognition accorded to Havel at home and abroad, examining differing assessments and aspects of his legacy—his key contributions to politics, history, and the history of ideas. Within the Czech Republic, we refer to processes and

Several central and eastern European countries have experienced democratic erosion of different kinds. While the Czech Republic and Poland have faced democratic backsliding, for example, others, such as Bulgaria and Romania, are better characterized as struggling with democratic stagnation. Regardless of the type of democratic erosion, robust protest movements have challenged democratic erosion. What

The aim of this article is to research the economic preparedness for EU integration—or “integration maturity”—of Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, the three countries that have signed Association Agreements with the European Union. A major part of these is the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreements, which offer significant access to the EU single market and provide a pathway to deeper economic integration

If third-wave democratization propelled gains in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, asexual, and pansexual (LGBTQIAP) empowerment globally, does the contemporary wave of democratic backsliding imperil those gains? To what extent does the potential threat from such institutional erosion depend on the presence of right-wing populists in government, i.e., backlash? Can both threats

The paper analyses the impact of local demography on the electoral strategies of ethnic political parties. We focus on Hungarian parties in Slovakia and their tactics of fielding candidates in the 2014 and 2018 mayoral elections in 4,461 municipalities with competitive elections. We find that local demography is an essential explanatory factor concerning the strategies of ethnic parties. Our results

The main problem addressed in the paper is the relation between politics and administration. The authors try to answer if independent administration exists at the sub-national level in Poland. In a more detailed manner, the question is whether an acceptance of independent administration has been fostered by the dispersion of political power and the experience of participation in important decision-making

This article investigates the use of sound at mass rallies during World War II, a topic that has not been explored in depth. By using the concepts of sound memory and soundscape, the article examines how contemporary literature represents past war events, specifically focusing on how national groups and individuals are portrayed in relation to other people, places, events, and axiological systems.

This paper presents a comparative study of cities’ migration policies. By comparing four bigger and four smaller Polish cities and their approaches towards Ukrainian war refugees, we show the differences in support offered by bigger and smaller towns. Polish cities wholeheartedly and spontaneously welcomed Ukrainians fleeing their country after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. While

Compared to the scholarship on general political trust, relatively little attention has been paid to institutional trust. Research on the subject tends to treat political institutions as single entities, ignoring the fact that different institutions can enjoy, in the long term, very different levels of trust. This paper builds on the assumption that institutional trust may be formed differently depending

This article asks if the measures of human capital, ethnic diversity, and gender equality from 1930 explain current levels of human capital in Romania, while also assessing the role of macro-regional differences in the manifestation of historical legacies. We focus on human capital, measured by educational attainment and by conscientiousness, a personality trait we estimate using a behavioral measure

hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines was not particularly high in Romania at the beginning of the vaccination campaign. Nevertheless, the country became one of the laggards in the European Union in terms of vaccination rates. We aim to provide an empirical explanation for this phenomenon based on a representative survey conducted in November–December 2021. We test the influence of various factors on

The study examines whether kumivstvo, godparenthood, with its, with its moral and spiritual cultural heritage in Ukrainian society, provides normative power from the bottom up rather than top down for maintaining solidarity in a polyethnic society in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A mixed methodology is employed, carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. The

This article introduces and validates a Political Antagonism Scale (PAS) aimed at capturing politically motivated antagonism among people in survey research. Recent trends indicate a rise in politically motivated polarization across various countries. This polarization often transcends mere ideological distance, fostering an identity-based “Us” versus “Them” political perspective. Consequently, this

In what ways do amicus curiae or friend of the court briefs shape the decisions of constitutional courts outside of the United States? Using a unique data set of more than nine hundred briefs from ...

This article examines Polish underground publications (samizdat) interpreting Ukraine’s role in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920. The research analyzes a large number of underground journals, newspape...

The aim of this article is to analyse the archival collection of the memoirs of officers of the Polish security forces (Security Office and Citizens’ Militia) on their service in the Warsaw voivode...

The aim of this article is to study the translation of Polish literature into Slovene to shed light on Polish literary (and cultural) diplomacy in Slovenia. Being acquainted with the culture of ano...

This article addresses the candidate selection process for realistic list positions with regard to multiple-office holding and personal characteristics in flexible-list proportional representation ...

In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. ...

This article shows how Forum Against Depression,1 an online platform devoted to depression, creates awareness on depression in Poland. This qualitative study uses critical discourse analysis to int...

Bosnians show little faith in their state-level institutions, and with good reason, as the country ranks poorly on measures of corruption, regulatory quality, and government efficacy. However, the ...

At the end of the nineteenth century, European social democracy founded acceptance among some circles of the Bulgarian intelligentsia. However, the social base of this new ideology, including indus...

As the importance of right-wing populist parties (RPPs) has grown significantly in Europe, with some even forming governments, the attendant political and policy programs are attracting greater att...

Academics usually look for constitutional conventions in Westminster-style democracies, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. Nevertheless, growing evidence from practice shows that con...

Despite the significant body of literature on migrations after the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, including on social remittances, a subcategory—political remittances—is only now...

National fragmentation of Slavic Muslims in the Montenegrin area of the Sandžak region into Bosniaks and national Muslims was recorded in the last two population censuses in Montenegro, with minor ...

This article explores Western donors’ support for the decentralization reform in post-Euromaidan Ukraine prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, with a focus on the re...

In this article, we investigate what kind of institutions affect bank ownership transformations in a post-transition economy. We use statistical data concerning mergers and acquisitions in the Poli...

Even if political parties have new labels, they often can be perceived as a continuation of an earlier existing grouping. The main goal of this article is to discuss how to assess party novelty and...

The existing research on contextual sources of support for populist parties has revolved around two factors: the unemployment rate and the size of immigrant groups. Conceived as residential charact...

In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944–1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroye...

The extant literature on rebel governance takes the political institutions that rebels develop to rule a civilian population as an indivisible entity. As a result, it cannot answer the question, wh...

The shrinking of civil society—a problematic trend in a growing number of countries—often involves enacting legal measures to curtail the activity of civil society organizations and vilifying and/o...

This paper reassesses Russia’s policy vis-à-vis the Western Balkans in terms of its pursuit of status. The region has been historically significant to Russia. It saw centuries of interaction betwee...

Autobiographies frequently feature the author’s understanding of home as an anchoring ground for the creation of the self. While home in such texts often invokes childhood and family, in the contex...

Focusing on coexistence in towns and villages of the former Šariš Zemplín County during World War II, our article exposes the shifting meanings assigned to belonging in what was a multiethnic borde...

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Biographies of Belonging in the Holocaust”, guest-edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová.This article argues for using personal accounts in recon...

This introduction highlights the analytical potential of “belonging” for those studying the social processes of Jewish exclusion in the Holocaust. It does so by proposing a tripartite definition of...

“This was my rudest awakening that I was Jewish. I was not Polish, I was horrified!” Cesia Honig, from Tarnów, perceived herself as a Polish patriot until 1938, when she was insulted for being a Je...

Life under Stalinism in the 1930s challenged Jews, particularly the young, with innumerable compromises to their religious and ethnic identity, yielding unexpected responses during World War II and...

This article focuses on a cluster of institutions rooted in Polish rural life that were co-opted by the German authorities into the lowest level of rule in occupied Poland from 1939-1945. It identi...

This article examines the advantages and limits of late non-Jewish witness testimonies in Holocaust research. Grounding my conclusions in more than 150 biographical interviews conducted in small co...

This article reconstructs the events leading up to the killing, on the night of 26 May and early morning of 27 May 1945, of Jewish survivors who returned to their home town of Przedbórz near Radoms...

The article shows the results of empirical research conducted among members of advisory councils operating in Polish cities. The study covers five types of councils: councils of NGOs, senior citize...

This article aims at finding a relationship between the degree of fiscalism and innovation in eleven countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The article uses clustering algorithms to divide ...

This article studies the party alignment bias in Poland. Relying on quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design and 2006–2019 data for over 2,400 municipalities, we aim to establish whether ...

This article explores Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s largely forgotten travel diary “A Journey to Burma.” It argues that the strategy Herling-Grudziński employed to describe the postcolonial world was...

While social trust is seen as an essential factor in political, economic, and social progress in the world, its country-specific mode of formation remains underresearched. Considering Ukraine as a ...

Symbols of the past influence the present, very often in the way dependent on the will of those who currently “weave the story,” to use the expression coined by Olga Tokarczuk.1 This applies in par...

Since the Euromaidan revolution, Ukrainian cinema has been experiencing a renaissance, associated with both the wave of civic and creative activity and the policy of the post-Maidan authorities sup...

Based on a systematic analysis of three databases of court decisions and a comprehensive overview of out-of-court use of cultural expertise in dispute resolution across various institutional contex...

Most issues that come before the Council of the European Union are decided without any recorded opposition. Constructivist literature explains that informal norms encourage state officials to condu...

The Prespa Agreement concluded between (North) Macedonia and Greece in June 2018 is hailed as a major success for the European Union’s (EU) policy of promoting conflict resolution through in the Ba...

This article examines Russian citizens’ support for and participation in civic activism today, nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically, we consider how activism has evolved over time in two key issue sectors—environmentalism and women’s rights. We draw on a recent nationally representative survey that challenges existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic and/or

Qualitative studies featuring in-depth research have recently pushed back against characterizations of citizens in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as passive. After mobilizations in 2014, ho...

Both political parties and differentiated integration (DI) play an ambivalent role in regard to democratic backsliding. Parties’ positioning towards democratic backsliding has not always been straightforward, and DI has been seen as facilitating it. We analyse whether party actors view democratic backsliding as a problematic issue for the EU, if they think DI facilitates it, and how they consider the