“Explaining Eastern Europe”is the principal theme of the July issue of the Journal of Democracy, which features a cluster of articles on “Explaining Eastern Europe.” The cluster includes four authors affiliated with NDRI member institutes:
Peter Kreko (Political Capital, Hungary) and Zsolt Enyedi focus on “Orban’s Laboratory of Illiberalism;”- Grigorij Meseznikov (Institute for Public Affairs, Slovakia) and Olga Gyarfasova discuss the political turmoil following a journalist’s murder in Slovakia in “Slovakia’s Conflicting Camps;”
- Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (Romanian Academic Society) unpacks “Romania’s Italian-Style Anticorruption Populism;” and,
- Ivan Krastev (Centre for Liberal Strategies, Bulgaria) and Stephen Holmes analyze Eastern Europe’s desire to “be like the West” in “Imitation and its Discontents.”
In tandem with the Journal of Democracy cluster on Central and Eastern Europe, the International Forum for Democratic Studies (US) asked five leading experts for their views on “What is the Root Cause of Rising Illiberalism in Central and Eastern Europe?”
The V-Dem Institute (Sweden) has issued a call for Country Experts for its January 2019 dataset update. During these updates, most Country Experts work on one country, observed over the past several decades, and on one or two clusters of questions, e.g.: (1) elections and political parties, (2) the executive, the legislature and deliberation, (3) judiciary, civil liberty and sovereignty, and (4) civil society, media freedom and political equality. The coding procedure is entirely web-based. The default language for the online surveys is English but the survey also available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian. The Institute is searching for a Country Coordinator on Brunei.
