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When Informal Institutions Change: Institutional Reforms and Informal Practices in the Former Soviet Union. By Aliyev Huseyn. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. 296 p. $80.00 cloth.
How do democratic institutional reforms influence informal practices? Several scholars theorize that the greater transparency and regularity of democratic institutions will replace or reshape informal elite practices and economies (e.g., see Henry Hale, Patronal Politics, 2014; Alena Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favours, 1998 and Can Russia Modernize? 2013; and Paul D’Anieri, Understanding Ukrainian Politics, 2006). Huseyn Aliyev’s new book is a comparative analysis that supports this thesis and expertly adds to the growing literature on informality and postcommunism by illustrating democratization’s contingent effects on informal practices beyond elites and economies.
Aliyev begins with a thorough and cross-disciplinary discussion of informality, effectively illustrating its importance across communist and postcommunist Europe and Eurasia. His discussion of informality covers several fields in economics, the humanities, and social sciences, and he employs them in identifying a fascinating compilation of region-specific terms (e.g., Poland’s zalatwic’ sprawy (“to arrange something”), Bulgaria’s vruzki (“connections”), or “greasing the wheels” in the United States and United Kingdom). Next, he utilizes the comparative literature on communist totalitarianism to illustrate how Soviet communism failed to formally provide many basic needs, leading the population to rely upon informal practices to govern and function in society. For instance, with the Soviet bureaucracy backlogged and store shelves empty, favor-based blat emerged to help people obtain an apartment or act as currency (p. 43). Aliyev then leverages the comparative literature on communist legacies to bolster his analysis. When the Soviet...