Not surprisingly, the Czech Republic and Hungary come out on top, though the authors continually point out the remaining weaknesses that could undermine institutional stability. Bulgaria and the Slovak Republic are described as politically and institutionally unstable, facing a potential future of unstable governments, intensive political infighting, erratic coalitions, and low levels of cooperation and trust, all of which could lead to a regression to populist, authoritarian rule. The authors develop a synthetic approach that allows for a complex interaction among three levels of analysis legacies, institutions, and decisions. Legacies refer to the path dependency associated with the past, including the communist past and the deep past of the precommunist era. Institutions refer to the configuration of actors and rules that emerged on the scene in the short period after the breakdown of the old regime, as well as the mode of breakdown itself.
Decisions refer to the strategic actions of key political and economic actors.
The interaction among these levels can be based on both forward and backward linkages. In the former, structures dominate by selecting the agents and initial institutional settings, which, in turn, shape choices and decisions. In the latter, transitions enable strategic choices that put new agents and institutional settings in place that can, in turn, alter the influence of structural legacies rooted in the past and even replace them with new legacies. Thus the authors try to navigate among structural, institutional, and strategic models not only to explain the variation in the trajectories of the four countries but to propose a new approach to analyzing transition. The book is brimming with interesting ideas and illuminating insights.