Democracy and its Alternatives

Richard Rose is Director, Centre for the Study of Public Policy, at the University of Strathclyde. William Mishler is Professor of Political Science, at the University of Arizona.Christian Haerpfer is Scientific Director, at the Paul Lazarsfeld Society, Vienna.

• List of tables and figures. Part I: Competing Claims for Popular Support: .1. Competition between Regimes: A Problem of Supply and Demand.2. Democracy and Undemocratic Alternatives.3. Uncertain Dynamics of Democratization.4. Comparing and Contrasting Post-Communist Societies.Part II: Mass Response to Transformation:.5. Popular Support for Competing Regimes.6. Impact of Social Structure Old and New.7. Political Legacies and Performance.8. Reacting to Economic Transformation.9. How Much do Context, Countries and Sequence Matter?.10. Completing Democracy?.Appendices.References.Index.

"No challenge is more important to the democratic stability after the transition than building public support for democracy, and no recent study better illuminates the determinants of that support than this engaging, pathbreaking and methodologically innovative book. This is not just a book for specialists in public opinion or post-communist states: it should be read by anyone concerned with the fate of the new democracies of the "third wave"." Larry Diamond, Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University "After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we need to understand what is happening in the post-communist world. This book joins theory and a unique wealth of survey data from countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. There is no more timely book on democracy." Juan J. Linz, Sterling Professor of Politics and Social Science, Yale University"What makes people living under post-communism "buy" liberal democracy and reject its authoritarian alternatives? Starting with an original reading of Schumpeter and Churchill, Rose and his co-authors offer a number of fresh answers based on comparative survey analysis. The overall optimistic answer is that Central East European democracy is well on its way to completion and that this holds true even in the absence of economic miracles. A must for students of post-communist societies." Claus Offe, Professor of Political Science at Humboldt University, Berlin