Authors

Discussion

Since the early 1990s, the development of new states in Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia was expected to be guided by ideas of democracy and the rule of law. However, the political regimes in the nations established on the ruins of the Soviet Union were very diverse: they varied from liberal democracy in the Baltic region to seasoned autocracies in Central Asia. By comparing the cases of Estonia (stable liberal democracy), Ukraine (oscillating from partly free to partly non-free in the recent thirty years), Russia (autocracy with some democratic phase in the past), and Uzbekistan (stable autocracy that survived the change of autocratic leader), I would like to demonstrate which democratic and autocratic outcomes were achieved in the region by 2025. In this report, I offer a kind of balance sheet for the period of 1991-2025: What exactly was achieved in terms of meaningful democratic and autocratic institutional outcomes?

In doing so, I will use empirical data and develop generalizations based on these data to elucidate the results achieved. For my comparative analysis, I will apply indices that include (1) the Division of Power, (2-3) the Legislative and Judiciary Constraints on the Executive Branch, (4-6) the Electoral, Liberal, and Deliberative Components of Democracy, (7) the Freedom of Expression and Alternative Sources of Information, and (8-9) the Mobilization for Democracy/Autocracy. I will also use the data on patronal political development to zoom in on informal power networks in these states.

I would like to conclude with a general overview of how the variety of results constituted different fragments/regions that sprang off from the once-common Soviet area: the EU member states in the Baltic region, the “autocratic belt” from Minsk and Moscow to Ashgabat and Baku (with the tendency to merge further south with Iran, Türkiye etc.), and unstable democracies (Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine).