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Institutional Change After Socialism and the Rule of Law
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Institutional Change After Socialism and the Rule of Law
Leszek Balcerowicz*
The rule of law has been studied by political philosophy, law, political science, sociology and economics. The representatives of these social sciences have used various approaches (including various mixtures of conceptual and empirical analyses), for the study of this important problem. This also applies to research on post-socialist transformation which provided a unique and powerful natural experiment for students of institutions. In this paper I attempt to place the rule of law within a broader context, that of institutional change after socialism. This is why I start with a stylized description of this system and of what has happened to it after the collapse of socialism in the former Soviet bloc (second section). Then I try to link institutional change after socialism to the rule of law (third section). This requires a minimal clarification of this concept. In the fourth section, I discuss the rule of law after socialism in the light of empirical studies, mainly by economists. The final section sums up the main findings: changes in the legal framework take less time than institutional changes, including the transformation of the enforcement apparatus. As a result, widespread implementation gaps have emerged even in the most reformed transition countries.
Introduction1
The rule of law has been studied in political philosophy, law, political science, sociology and economics. The representatives of these social sciences have used various approaches (including various mixtures of conceptual and empirical analyses), for the study of this important problem. This also applies to research on post-socialist transformation which provided a unique and powerful natural ex-
* Professor and head of the International Comparative Studies Institute at the Warsaw School of Economics, Chairman of Breugel a European think tank in Brussels, member of the Group of Thirty founded by Paul Volcker. Former Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, former Governor of the Polish Central Bank. E-mail: [email protected].
1 I am grateful to Magda Cikowicz for her research assistance in preparing his paper, and to Paulina Chyliska and Agnieszka Kowalczyk for their help in editing it.
Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, 1: 215240, 2009 2009 T.M.C.ASSER PRESS and Contributors doi:10.1017/S1876404509002152