CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Grigore, Bogdan-Constantin |
|---|---|
| Title | The Selection of Executive Elites in New Democracies |
| Summary | The influence of political elites on democratic consolidation has long been an integral part of the field of consolidology, considering its actor-oriented approach. What this paper attempts to finds is whether the continuity of political elites matters for democratic consolidation, in other words, whether young democracies where the members of the pre-democratic elite continue to play a central role in the democratic political system have a worse chance at consolidating their democratic regime. In order to do so, I look at executive elites, namely cabinet members, in two post-communist countries, Poland and Romania. In order to prove the main hypothesis, that elite continuity is damaging to democratic consolidation, the paper first presents a comparative case-by-case study, followed by statistical analysis using data I compiled for this thesis. The latter part looks at both physical continuity of communist era elites in office, as well as the continuity of their socioeconomic background. The result is that, while a strong causal link from elite continuity towards democratic consolidation is hard to find considering the small sample size, a small effect can nonetheless be observed, allowing the conclusion that elite continuity, both in terms of direct, physical, continuity and in terms of the career backgrounds of political elites, is damaging for democratic consolidation. |
| Supervisor | Bozóki András |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/grigore_bogdan-constantin.pdf |
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