Original citation:Lankina, Tomila V. and Getachew, Lullit (2006) A geographic incremental theory of democratization: territory, aid, and democracy in postcommunist regions. World politics, 58 (4 This document is the author's final manuscript accepted version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. Some differences between this version and the published version may remain. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. AbstractThe article examines the impact of geographical proximity to the West and Western aid on democracy in Russia's regions and advances a geographic-incrementalist theory of democratization. Even when national politicians exhibit authoritarian tendencies, diffusion processes and targeted foreign aid help advance democratization at the subnational level in post-communist states and other settings. We make this case by conducting process-tracing case studies of democratic institution-building in two Northwestern border regions, as well as statistical analysis of over one thousand projects that the European Union carried out in Russia's localities over fourteen years. We find that the EU shows commitment to democratic reform particularly in, but not limited to, regions located on its Eastern frontier. This over time positively affects the democratic trajectory of the respective regions even if they had been more closed to begin with compared to other regions.

Why are some former colonies more democratic than others? The British Empire has been singled out in the debates on colonialism for its benign influence on democracy. Much of this scholarship has focused on colonialism's institutional legacies; has neglected to distinguish among the actors associated with colonialism; and has been nation‐state focused. Our subnational approach allows us to isolate the democracy effects of key actors operating in colonial domains—Christian missionaries—from those of colonial powers. Missionaries influenced democracy by promoting education; education promoted social inclusivity and spurred social reform movements. To make our case, we constructed colonial and postcolonial period district datasets of India and conducted panel analysis of literacy and democracy variations backed by case studies. The findings challenge the conventional wisdom of the centrality of the effects of British institutions on democracy, instead also highlighting the missionaries’ human capital legacies.

The paper explores the long-term developmental legacies of Protestant missionary involvement in colonial India, specifically missionary effects on male-female inequalities in educational attainment. Our causal mechanisms draw on studies in the sociology and economics of religion that highlight the importance of the dynamics of religious competition for the provision of public goods. We argue that missionaries played a key role in the development of mass female schooling because of the competition among rival religious and secular groups that they spurred in education provision. We explore these causal mechanisms in a case study of the state of Kerala, and statistical analysis covering most of India's districts. For the statistical analysis, we assembled original district-level datasets covering colonial and post-colonial periods. Our data allow us to establish whether missionary effects hold after we account for other factors hypothesized to have a bearing on human development like British colonial rule, modernization, European presence, education expenditures, post-colonial democracy, Islam, caste and tribal status, and land tenure. Our analysis reveals that colonial-era Christian missionary activity is consistently associated with better female education outcomes in both the colonial and post-colonial periods.

The thirtieth anniversary of the fall of communism and the onset of democratisation across Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union represents a significant milestone. Democratic institutions and processes have now had sufficient time to mature, stagnate, degenerate, or be dismantled. Three decades provide sufficient time for fine-grained comparative analysis of post-communist countries. A decade or so ago, from the perspective of Orbán's Hungary or Kaczyński's Poland, the distinction between 'East' and 'West' looked to be more pronounced than ever. Today, the rise of the radical right and populism in Central and Eastern Europe show the extent to which parties in the region have been able to 'catch up' with the rest of Europe. At the time of writing, populist parties single-handedly or cumulatively gained above 30% of the vote in the last national elections in Slovakia, Poland, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, peaking above 60% in Hungary.However, the impact of the migrant crisis or economic austerity on the quality of democracy, on public policy, the stability of political parties and manifestations of protest within the former communist states is invariably distinct. Hardly surprising perhaps given that their transitions to liberal democracy, market economies, and their accession to the EU have all occurred under pretty unique circumstances, barely resembling that experienced by their western neighbours. However, the days of viewing these countries as laggards, locked into a perennial process of catch-up, has long since passed. As article after article in this journal has charted, events occurring in the countries of Eastern Europe are likely to represent a precursor for what is to follow further west; an extreme reaction at the periphery or a more rapid and far-reaching impact amongst countries that are more vulnerable to economic crisis or other existential threats. Whereas once we assumed the party systems of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were on a western trajectory, or that Bulgarian civil society or Romanian elections would function like their western counterparts, no such assertions are now made. Indeed, over the past decade the opposite has appeared to be the case.The four articles in our Anniversary Symposium capture the breadth of such a prolonged evolution. Our intention as editors was to use the anniversary as a pretext to provide space for scholarly reflection and for think-pieces on various topics related to post-communist politics, written by scholars that have been related to East European Politics. We were blessed to secure contributions from these five names. From various different perspectives they chart the specificity of what being 'post-communist' means today. They capture how the legacies of communism, post-communism, Europeanisation and the so-called 'illiberal turn' have cultivated civil societies that barely resemble their western counterparts, and political processes and institutions that function in ways that defy notions of transition or even...

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