Divide and Pacify: Strategic Social Policies and Political Protests in Post-Communist Democracies

1. Introduction

CHAPTER 1 Introduction Transitions to democracy, especially when accompanied by deep economic reforms, have often led to massive strikes and protests. Periods of expanding political opportunities have historically been conducive to large-scale protest cycles and to the emergence of more disruptive and violent protest repertoires (Tarrow, 1989; Tilly, 2003). Generally speaking , democracies can be expected to be more protest-prone than authoritarian systems because they allow their citizens greater freedoms of expression . For instance, strikes have been almost three times as frequent in democracies as in authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century, and demonstrations and riots almost twice as frequent (Przeworski et al., 2000). In Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “systemic” shift from communist one-party states and planned economies towards competitive democracies and market economies has been accompanied by heavy social costs. The political opportunities for reform losers to protest against these costs were definitely larger than under communism. And yet, there have been comparatively few violent and disruptive labor strikes and reform protests in the new East European democracies . This book offers an in-depth discussion of the Hungarian, Polish and Czech cases. Although I venture on occasion into the present century , my main concern is with the uncertain, exhilarating and fastchanging first seven years of the post-communist transition, 1989 to 1996. In developing social policy-based explanations of post-communist protests, this book follows the lead of influential work on the links between labor militancy and (neo)corporatist institutions, class, and labor market strategies.1 It marries two venerable research traditions: the poli- 2 Divide and Pacify tics and sociology of contention2 and the comparative political economy of welfare states.3 Since Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s seminal The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), political economists have increasingly understood the need to study welfare states as embedded within society ’s larger model of democratic capitalism. The unit of interest should be welfare regimes; “inter-causal triads” composed of the labor market, the household level, and the welfare state. Rather than inquiring how political and social cleavages shape welfare states, Esping-Andersen made the case for analyzing welfare states in their role of independent, causal variables. Different types of welfare states, he argued, systematically influence social and political behavior in advanced capitalism. He showed that national welfare states have crystallized during the course of the twentieth century into three distinct “worlds” that differ qualitatively in the social rights packages which they offer to their citizens: the neoliberal regime (the Anglo-Saxon world), the conservative–corporatist regime (Continental Europe) and the social–democratic regime (the Nordic countries). These regimes will on various occasions serve as a benchmark for comparison with Central and East European cases, while my discussion of the collective action capabilities of reform losers will be centered on the causal influence of labor market and welfare program constellations . This book is also part of a rich and voluminous literature on the politics and political economy of democratic transitions and economic reforms .4 In line with this literature, I view incumbents as assessing welfare spending primarily in terms of how well it serves their short-term political objectives (Greskovits, 1996; 1998). While post-communist economic reforms such as those pursued after 1989 were likely to improve aggregate welfare in the long run, there was a serious risk that many citizens were not willing, or able, to make the necessary inter-temporal trade-offs to see these reforms through. In Haggard and Webb’s (1993, 158) words: “From a long-term perspective, the social benefits of reform outweigh the costs. The political issue is whether adequate mechanisms exist to marshal support among winners and to neutralize or compensate losers within a time frame that is relevant to a politician.” As the literature on reforms has specified, politicians are likely to face strong resistance to reforms whose benefits are dispersed and whose costs are concentrated, whereas they are more likely to be able to pursue reforms with concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Especially if dispersed -benefit/concentrated-cost type reforms are intense or protracted, Introduction 3 aggrieved reform losers will want to stall or reverse the reforms before their positive effects have started to manifest themselves. However, social policies can accomplish more than accommodate exogenously given groups of reform winners and losers. They can be used in an effort to prevent the articulation of political opposition into disruptive...