This article makes a plea for a more explicitly intentional and political-strategic analysis of post-communist public policy pathways. The author analyses a set of social and labour-market policies implemented in the Czech Republic (pro-active job loss prevention) compared to Hungary and Poland (large-scale non-elderly retirement), and indicates why, far from being fully constrained by structural or external variables or by international pressures, political elites were able to design policy packages that served to reduce anti-reform protests. Once enacted at a formative historical turning point, these early policies fundamentally reshaped the subsequent operational space of post-communist politics throughout the 1990s. They crystallised the distinct pathways of post-communist welfare regimes, and they enabled early, and irreversible, democratic and market reform progress. While seemingly inefficient, and definitely costly in public-fi-nance terms, these policy packages contained a degree of political rationality, as they contributed to the making of the great Czech, Hungarian, and Polish transition success stories, in an otherwise highly heterogeneous population of postcommunist transition cases.
This paper contributes to Contradictions’ “Conceptual Dictionary” by exploring the history, theory, and practical implications of the notion of “ecosocialism”. The first part of the text follows the historical and ideological development of ecosocialism and examines its broad and diverse anarchist, feminist, and Marxist roots. This part of the text also introduces key authors of ecosocialism and their work. The subsequent part identifies critical ideas and offers a theoretical overview of scholarly and political debates about the relationship between ecosocialism and other environmental and socio-critical approaches. Finally, the text further explores the practical and political vision of the concept and reflects on the future of ecosocialist strategy.
The article describes the Czech party system and its development over time using data from the annual financial reports of political parties and seeks to contribute to the domestic debate on the transformation of Czech political parties since 1989. The article distinguishes three factors that caused political party budgets to change – the economy, regulation, and strategy – and proposes a simple theoretical model with which to interpret and understand data obtained from the accounting books of political parties. It also presents a new three-dimensional typology of political parties based on the size of a party budget and the structure of party revenue and expenditures. The article concludes by arguing that understanding how all three of the aforementioned factors intersect could be useful for predicting the future development of party competition in the Czech Republic and facilitate the application of the ideas proposed herein to party systems abroad.