Valerie Jane Bunce | |
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Nationality | American |
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Valerie Jane Bunce is an American political scientist, currently the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and a Professor of Government at Cornell University. She studies democratization, international democratic movements, ethnic politics, and governance in communist and post-communist states.
Bunce obtained her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Michigan. [1] She earned her BA in political science and psychology in 1970, and her MA and PhD in 1973 and 1976, respectively, both in political science. [2]
After completing her PhD, Bunce became a professor at Lake Forest College, and then from 1977 until 1991 was a professor at Northwestern University, before joining Cornell University in 1991. [2] She has also been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, The University of Zagreb, The University of Washington, and the Central European University, and was the director of the Institute for European Studies. [2]
Bunce has been the solo author of two books. Her first book, Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy Under Capitalism and Socialism, was released in 1981. Bunce argued that both communist and democratic countries exhibited a similar cycle of policy innovation, in which rapid policy innovations occur whenever a new leader assumes power, followed by a period of incremental or no change until the next leadership transition. [3] [4] Thomas Baylis noted that an important corollary of this theory is that secession crises in Communist regimes therefore must serve a functionalist purpose, which he viewed as a counterintuitive but fundamental claim. [5]
Bunce's second book, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Collapse of Socialism and the State, was published in 1999. Bunce explains the near-simultaneous collapse of Europe's major communist regimes in terms of their fundamental designs: that they necessarily divided the powerful and strengthened those without power, while also hampering economic performance, a design which was exacerbated by the particular context of the 1980s. [6] In a review written in 2000, Michael Bernhard called Subversive Institutions one of the two "most important books on developments in Europe east of the Elbe since 1989", [7] while Robert Legvold wrote that it "tackles the transcendent questions of an age" with impressive brevity. [6]
In addition to highly cited [8] journal articles in venues like Comparative Political Studies [9] and World Politics , [10] Bunce was also a coauthor of the book Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (2011) and a co-editor of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World (2009). [2]
In 2019, a citation analysis by the political scientists Hannah June Kim and Bernard Grofman listed Bunce as the 37th most cited woman who is currently an active political science faculty member at an American university. [1] Bunce's work has also been referenced in major media outlets like The New York Times, [11] The Washington Post, [12] Foreign Affairs, [13] and The New Republic. [14] In 2010, she was inducted in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. [15]
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The CCP leads eight other legally permitted subordinate minor parties together as the United Front. The CCP was founded in 1921, mainly by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, with the help of the Far Eastern Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Far Eastern Secretariat of the Communist International. The party grew quickly; by 1949 the Nationalist Government of the Kuomintang (KMT) had been driven from mainland China to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War, leading to the establishment of the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian political economist. He was born in Moravia, and briefly served as Finance Minister of German-Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology which was the main communist movement throughout the 20th century. It was the formal name of the official state ideology adopted by the Soviet Union, its satellite states in the Eastern Bloc, and various self-declared scientific socialist regimes in the Non-Aligned Movement and Third World during the Cold War as well as the Communist International after Bolshevisation. Today, Marxism–Leninism is the ideology of several communist parties and remains the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam as unitary one-party socialist republics, and of Nepal in a multiparty democracy. Generally, Marxist–Leninists support proletarian internationalism and socialist democracy, and oppose anarchism, fascism, imperialism, and liberal democracy. Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism. A vanguard party, organised hierarchically through democratic centralism, would seize power "on behalf of the proletariat", and establish a communist party-led socialist state, which it claims to represent the dictatorship of the proletariat. The state controls the economy and means of production, suppresses the bourgeoisie, counter-revolution, and opposition, promotes collectivism in society, and paves the way for an eventual communist society, which would be both classless and stateless. Due to its state-oriented approach, Marxist–Leninist states have been commonly referred to by Western academics as Communist states.
A political party is an organization that coordinates candidates to compete in a particular country's elections. It is common for the members of a party to hold similar ideas about politics, and parties may promote specific ideological or policy goals.
Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership or control of the means of production. It includes the political theories and movements associated with such systems. Social ownership can be public, collective, cooperative, or of equity. While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element. Socialisms vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, on the structure of management in organizations, and from below or from above approaches, with some socialists favouring a party, state, or technocratic-driven approach. Socialists disagree on whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change.
State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises. The definition can also include the state dominance of corporatized government agencies or of public companies such as publicly listed corporations in which the state has controlling shares.
A communist state, also known as a Marxist–Leninist state, is a one-party state that is administered and governed by a communist party guided by Marxism–Leninism. Marxism–Leninism was the state ideology of the Soviet Union, the Comintern after Bolshevisation and the communist states within the Comecon, the Eastern Bloc and the Warsaw Pact. Marxism–Leninism remains the ideology of several communist states around the world and the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam.
The Rose Revolution or Revolution of Roses was a change of power in Georgia in November 2003. The revolution was brought about by widespread protests over the disputed parliamentary elections and culminated in the ousting of President Eduard Shevardnadze, which marked the end of the Soviet era of leadership in the country. The event derives its name from the climactic moment, when demonstrators led by Mikheil Saakashvili stormed the Parliament session with red roses in hand.
Socialism with a human face is a slogan referring to the reformist and democratic socialist programme of Alexander Dubček and his colleagues, agreed at the Presidium of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in April 1968, after he became chairman of the KSČ in January 1968. The first author of this slogan was Radovan Richta, and it was a process of moderate democratization, economic modernization, and political liberalization that sought to build an advanced and modern socialist society that valued democratic Czechoslovakian tradition, while still allowing the Communist Party to continue governing. Socialism with a human face was a key force in initiating the Prague Spring, a period of national democratization and economic decentralization, which was however rolled back by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968.
In political science and in international and comparative law and economics, transitology is the study of the process of change from one political regime to another, mainly from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones.
Communism is a philosophical, social, political, and economic ideology and movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, namely a socioeconomic order structured upon the ideas of common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money, and the state. Communism is a specific, yet distinct, form of socialism. Communists agree on the withering away of the state but disagree on the means to this end, reflecting a distinction between a more libertarian approach of communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers' self-management, and a more vanguardist or Communist party-driven approach through the development of a constitutional socialist state.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest, and social welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm, and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism, as well as the reformist wing of democratic socialism.
Grzegorz Ekiert is Professor of Government at Harvard University, Director of Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. His teaching and research interests focus on comparative politics, regime change and democratization, civil society and social movements, and East European politics and societies.
Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political liberalism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as socialist and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, habeas corpus and freedom of expression, either due to fear of the counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends. Several countries, most notably the Soviet Union, China and their allies, have been described by journalists and scholars as authoritarian socialist states.
Democratic socialism is a political philosophy that supports political democracy within a socially owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and workers' self-management within a market socialist economy, or an alternative form of decentralised planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realisation of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support either revolutionary or reformist politics as means to establish socialism. Democratic socialism was popularized by socialists who were opposed to the backsliding towards a one-party state in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century.
State socialism is a political and economic ideology within the socialist movement advocating state ownership of the means of production, either as a temporary measure or as a characteristic of socialism in the transition from the capitalist to the socialist mode of production or communist society. Aside from anarchists and other libertarian socialists, there was, in the past, confidence amongst socialists in the concept of state socialism as being the most effective form of socialism. Some early social democrats in the late 19th century and early 20th century such as the Fabians claimed that British society was already mostly socialist and that the economy was significantly socialist through government-run enterprises created by conservative and liberal governments which could be run for the interests of the people through their representatives' influence, an argument reinvoked by some socialists in post-war Britain. State socialism went into decline starting in the 1970s, with the ocurrence of stagflation during the 1970s energy crisis, the rise of neoliberalism and later with the fall of state socialist nations in the Eastern Bloc during the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union.
A socialist state, socialist republic, or socialist country, sometimes referred to as a workers' state or workers' republic, is a sovereign state constitutionally dedicated to the establishment of socialism. The term communist state is often used synonymously in the West specifically when referring to one-party socialist states governed by Marxist–Leninist Communist parties, despite these countries being officially socialist states in the process of building socialism. These countries never describe themselves as communist nor as having implemented a communist society. Additionally, a number of countries that are multi-party capitalist states make references to socialism in their constitutions, in most cases alluding to the building of a socialist society, naming socialism, claiming to be a socialist state, or including the term people's republic or socialist republic in their country's full name, although this does not necessarily reflect the structure and development paths of these countries' political and economic systems. Currently, these countries include Algeria, Bangladesh, Guyana, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.
Margaret Keck is an American political scientist and Brazilianist, currently an Academy Professor and professor emeritus of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Keck studies the Politics of Brazil, environmental politics, international activist movements and networked advocacy.
Judith L. Goldstein is an American political scientist. She is the Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication and chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies international political economy, with a particular focus on international trade policy.