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Disclaimer. Don't rely on these old notes in lieu of reading the literature, but they can jog your memory. As a grad student long ago, my peers and I collaborated to write and exchange summaries of political science research. I posted them to a wiki-style website. "Wikisum" is now dead but archived here. I cannot vouch for these notes' accuracy, nor can I say who wrote them.
Fish. 1998. The determinants of economic reforms in the post-Communist world. East European Politics and Societies (winter): 31-79.
For a nice summary of this article, see the beginning of Kopstein and Reilly.
Fish's main argument is that states that voted completely new faces into power in 1990 struck a sure course toward economic reform. States that did not allowed the communist-era rent seekers to remain in power, and they remain in a halfway house between communism and liberalism to this day. This is an argument of path dependence. He makes this finding through a multivariate analysis of just about every variable (except, according to Kopstein and Reilly, proximity to liberal states, which they think explains "the why of the why": it explain WHY some states voted new faces into power in 1990 and some did not).
See further notes under the entry for Kopstein and Reilly 1999.
Research on similar subjects
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Fish, Steven (author) • Comparative Politics • Post-Communism • Liberalization
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