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In the early 1990s, the discipline of Political Science departed from rather different starting points in the various countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) (see, e.g., Eisfeld and Pal, 2010a). For instance, Hungarian social sciences had already opened to Western influences in the late 1970s (Szabó, 2002), which fostered extensive data collection exercises,1 and thus created opportunities for broad cross-national comparisons. Similarly, Slovenian scholars benefited from the early establishment of Political Science departments in the 1960s and a very low ideological control, compared with other countries in the region (Klingemann, 2002; Fink-Hafner, 2002). In sharp contrast, Romanian Political Science never gained autonomy from the Communist Party's official dogma, not even in the short liberalisation period of the mid-sixties (Barbu, 2002). The general assessment - especially when compared to the West - seems to be that Political Science in CEE, while improving, faces considerable challenges in terms of institutional legacies, funding, coordination, and in several countries, an increasingly difficult political setting in the form of 'regime hybridization' (Eisfeld and Pal, 2010a).
This article focuses on Comparative Politics (CP) as one important sub-discipline of Political Science and here, in particular, on CP publications in major journals from eleven countries in the region. We do so based on a new data set on CP publications in CEE, which we introduce in Section 1. In Section 2, we analyse various dimensions along which CP publications can vary, both within countries over time and across countries. First, we compare the share of CP articles in major Political Science journals. Second, we analyse the topics addressed in CP studies. Third, we differentiate CP articles in terms of their data and methods used. Fourth, and related, we investigate the temporal scope, wondering how much of history is taken into account in CP publications in CEE. Fifth, we analyse the geographical scope of CP articles. Finally, we aim at unravelling who the authors of CP articles are.
Several trends characterise CP publications from all countries under study. First, only a small fraction of published Political Science articles in CEE can be classified as CP. Second, CP articles are dominated by a neo-institutionalist perspective, the most studied topics being political parties, elections, voting, and electoral rules, followed by citizens' attitudes and political...