2008 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize Winner
The AAASS Ed A. Hewett Book Prize, sponsored by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER), is awarded annually for an outstanding publication on the political economy of the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their transitional successors.
Anna Grzymala-Busse
The 2008 Ed A. Hewett Book Prize was awarded to Anna Grzymala-Busse for Rebuilding Leviathan: Party Competition and State Exploitation in Post-Communist Democracies, published by Cambridge University Press.
Anna Grzymala-Busse examines the sources of the variety of outcomes observed as post-socialist countries built new state administrations, political institutions, and regulatory mechanisms. Her remarkable insights offer fundamental lessons to all of those interested in party politics, state building, and the functioning of new democracies. She offers lessons that will reconstruct debates on how political parties behave in new democracies and how political institutions are shaped.
While political parties are in decline in many West European states, and as Russia is encumbered with a weak party system in which only pro-Kremlin parties have reasonable chances at significant representation, Grzymala-Busse focuses on the importance of parties in Eastern Europe and establishes two main points. First, she argues that parties should be seen as state builders, not just teams of office builders. As a result, parties had to establish electoral rules, constituency relationships, and functioning markets in nascent democratic polities. Second, she argues that political parties in several East European states were unconstrained by existing institutions in the early years of transition. Then, political parties found state exploitation more than usually tempting because of the absence of other avenues to generate the resources necessary to maintain party strength. But such exploitation was muted in some countries, where more effective formal institutions for constraining state exploitation were constructed.
What explains the differences between the experiences of East European countries and their different trajectories in party development? Grzymala-Busse focuses on the presence or absence of robust competition, where opposition parties provided strong criticism and clear and plausible governing alternatives. When the new democratic parties formed governments and faced such competition, they had the incentive to construct institutions that thwarted state exploitation in order to preserve their place within the new democracy when in opposition. Where robust competition was absent, state exploitation by ruling parties could proceed unhindered by thoughts of vulnerabilities while out of power. In other words, robust competition is seen as a constraint on state exploitation. And in perhaps the greatest paradox of all in the transition process, the most reliable source of robust competition in the early transition period was the reformed communist parties that had remade themselves into plausible governing alternatives.
Grzymala-Busse's book presents a powerful argument in support of this innovative thesis. Her argument forces analysts to reconceptualize party development, democratization, and indices of party competition. Her study also supports the argument that elections alone are a poor indicator of functioning democracies. Using novel sources of data, new interpretations of existing data, a masterful control of the relevant literature, and a variety of case studies, she marshals extensive evidence in support of her argument. This book will be required reading for all students of new democracies and of institution building, as well as for its natural audience those studying the post-socialist transition.
