East European Politics and
Societies and Cultures
Volume 29 Number 2
May 2015  366­–378
© 2015 Sage Publications
10.1177/0888325415577864
http://eeps.sagepub.com
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http://online.sagepub.com
Conceptualizing Historical
Legacies
Jason Wittenberg
University of California, Berkeley
In the nearly quarter century since the collapse of communism, a great many outcomes
in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, from patterns of democratic consolidation
to state–society relations, have been attributed to legacies of the past. Yet despite the
common goal of understanding the influence of the past, there is little consensus on
how to conceptualize historical legacies. Through a focus on post-communist outcomes
and their relation to prior outcomes and causal precursors, this article assesses what
counts as a historical legacy and how legacies differ from non-legacies.
Keywords: Post-communism; historical legacy; Eastern Europe; persistence; continuity
In the nearly quarter century since the collapse of communism, a great many outcomes
in East Europe and the former Soviet Union, from patterns of democratic
consolidation and electoral behavior to state–society relations and cultural attitudes,
have been attributed to legacies of the past. Some of these outcomes, such as a mistrust
of politics or the dominance of the state sector, are attributed to legacies from
the communist past. Others outcomes, such as nationalist conflict or enduring support
for rightist parties, are traced back to the interwar period and beyond. What
unites this research and related efforts to explain events in other parts of the world
is an abiding sense that to fully understand the present it is necessary to take account
of the past. Yet beyond this common goal there is little consensus on what a historical
legacy is or much appreciation of the ways in which the past might not inform
the present.
This essay has two goals. The first, introduced in the second section of this paper,
is to offer a preliminary assessment of what counts as a historical legacy. Although
existing research on historical legacies in the post-communist region is empirically
rich, it has shed relatively little light on the structural features of legacy-type arguments.
What do such arguments share, and how are legacy arguments made? It
identifies three basic components of a legacy-type argument: an outcome, an antecedent,
and a candidate mechanism linking outcome and antecedent. The second
goal is to provide a heuristic framework whereby the variety of legacy-type arguments
can be understood as variations on a few basic archetypes. As we shall see in
the third section, this framework clarifies a crucial distinction between legacies and
non-legacies.
577864EEPXXX10.1177/0888325415577864East European Politics and SocietiesWittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies
research-article2015
Wittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies  367
Legacy Arguments
Researchers of post-communism have identified a vast number of communist
legacies. Some of these can be labeled cultural, encompassing attitudes, beliefs, and
knowledge inculcated during the communist period. Examples include a “ghetto”
political culture, where the population views politics as dangerous and something to
avoid;1 the skills to successfully navigate politics;2 the hybrid of nationalism and
socialism that proved inimical to liberal values;3 economic beliefs;4 and trust in
political parties.5 Others might be termed material, such as the lack of infrastructure,
the destruction of the environment, the dominance of the state sector, and excessive
focus on heavy industry.6 Still others could be called institutional, encompassing the
persistence of old regime institutions, organizations, and elites throughout the
economy, polity, and society. Examples include the bloated welfare system;7 weak
party systems;8 communist-era constitutions;9 and centralized economic planning.10
This list is by no means exhaustive. Indeed, there have been some factors, such as
ethnic fragmentation and natural resource endowment,11 that do not easily fit into the
above categories, and there are certainly many other potential legacies.12
Another important albeit less popular research area has been on pre-communist
legacies. For example, Kitschelt et al. note how the choice of post-communist political
institutional arrangements across East Europe is conditioned, ultimately, by the
level of social and administrative modernization before communism.13 Shugart illustrates
how countries with a history of parliamentary governance tend to put greater
authority in parliaments during the post-communist period than countries with no
such history, which tend to center authority in the presidency.14 Pop-Eleches reports
evidence of the importance of interwar statehood for post-communist democratic
success.15 Darden links variation in pre-communist political socialization parts of the
former Soviet Union with later patterns of nationalist conflict and voting behavior.16
Kashin and Ziblatt trace the roots of depressed voter turnout across former East
Germany to the presence of large landed estates in the nineteenth century.17
Wittenberg shows how in Hungary post-communist patterns in support for parties of
the Right resemble patterns established before communism.18 For Bunce, the power
of post-communist nationalism is a legacy of imperial rule in the region.19 Jasiewicz
traces the contemporary importance of religiosity in Polish voting behavior to processes
set in motion in the nineteenth century.20
Abstracting away from the particulars of individual studies, including whether or
not any given study has successfully made its case for the existence of a legacy, we
can identify three components of a legacy-type argument.21 One is an outcome (or
pattern of outcomes) that appears inexplicable, or at least not fully explicable, given
circumstances contemporaneous with that outcome. For example, why should populations
in Eastern Europe after 1989 have been so mistrustful of politics and political
parties?22 One would not necessarily expect this given the fact that most of the parties
were new, and that after roughly four decades of dictatorship the citizenry finally had
368  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
an opportunity to determine its own fate. Jowitt argues that the mistrust was due to a
Leninist legacy inherited from the past. Similarly, the propensity of some peoples to
resist Soviet occupation more than others is likewise not readily explainable by reference
to any obvious distribution of social or economic characteristics.23 Darden argues
for national cohesion, a result of earlier literacy campaigns. The puzzling patterns of
both voter turnout in the former German Democratic Republic24 and post-communist
democratization25 have likewise been attributed to historical legacies.
A second component is a purported antecedent to the outcome that is identified as
either a cause or a correlate of that outcome. The antecedent might take the form of
a measurement of the outcome at a prior period, in which case it is claimed that the
outcome has persisted. For example, Wittenberg found high correlations between
post-communist support for rightist parties across Hungarian municipalities and
electoral results from the last democratic national parliamentary election before the
advent of state-socialism.26 In the case of interwar anti-Jewish discrimination in
Germany, Voigtländer and Voth report a correlate in the pattern of anti-Jewish violence
that occurred during the fourteenth-century Black Death epidemic, in which
Jews were blamed for spreading disease.27
The identified antecedent might be a potential causal factor rather than a correlated
outcome. For example, Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya link differences in contemporary
support for conservative religious parties across Polish territories to whether the territory
had once belonged to the Habsburg or to the Russian empire.28 Likewise, Becker
et al. find that there is greater mass trust of public institutions in areas governed by the
Habsburg Empire than in neighboring areas ruled by either the Ottoman or Russian
empires.29 Peisakhin argues that Ukrainians on the formerly Habsburg side of the longdefunct
border between the Habsburg and Russian empires have more antipathy to
Russia (and greater sympathy for Ukrainian nationalism) than their Ukrainian neighbors
who happen to live on the formerly Russian side, even though those areas had
been in the Soviet Union (and undergone Soviet socialization) for decades.30
Athird component is a mechanism (or at least a purported or hypothesized mechanism)
that fills in the links leading from the antecedent to the outcome to be explained.
For example, Voigtländer and Voth claim that medieval anti-Semitism disappeared in
those German towns where trade openness raised the cost of discrimination against
outsiders, and persisted into the interwar period, where such openness never took
root.31 Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya contend that support for religious parties in regions
of Poland formerly in the Habsburg Empire can be traced back to Austria’s more
tolerant attitude to the Roman Catholic Church, which led to higher church attendance
and ultimately more conservative politics.32 Likewise, Wittenberg maintains
that pre-communist attachments to right-wing parties were more likely to survive
state-socialism where the communists failed to destroy local church institutions.33
Peisakhin finds that pre-Soviet Ukrainian historical identities were transmitted even
through the ideologically hostile Soviet regime if parents were consistent enough in
the political messages they telegraphed to their children.34
Wittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies  369
To summarize, researchers construct legacy-type arguments with three components:
an outcome that is not fully explainable from causes contemporaneous with
that outcome, a cause or correlate that existed prior to the outcome, and potential (or
at least speculative) links between the antecedent and the outcome. Whether or not
the existence of a legacy has been established in any particular study depends, of
course, on the quality of that study’s argument. How believable is the claim that the
antecedent is correlated with or is causally related to the outcome? How plausible are
the purported links between the antecedent and the outcome? By what criteria do we
establish believability or plausibility? These are important questions whose answers
are beyond the scope of this essay. What is important for present purposes is not the
difficulty of identifying an antecedent or clarifying the mechanism but that outcomes,
antecedents, and mechanisms form the scaffolding of legacy arguments.
Considering the three components together, we can identify two further characteristics
of legacies. First, what we call the “legacy” is the outcome to be explained, not
the antecedent or the mechanism linking antecedent and outcome. Contemporary
Polish electoral behavior is, for Jasiewicz, a legacy of the nineteenth-century partitions.35
For Wittenberg, patterns of support for conservative parties in Hungary are a
legacy of pre-communist partisanship.36 But an outcome qualifies as a legacy only if
it cannot be fully explained except by reference to an antecedent cause or correlate.
As a direct consequence of this temporal structure, all legacy arguments must feature
at least an implicit division between a past period (when the antecedent cause or correlate
are identified) and a later period (when the outcome occurs). Statements asserting
legacies of the past in post-communist politics can thus always be stated in the
form that some post-communist outcome (say, conservative voting behavior in
Poland) is a legacy of some cause or correlate prior to post-communism (say,
Habsburg policies toward the Roman Catholic Church prior to World War I). The
label we give the legacy refers to the past period. We would say that post-communist
conservative voting in Poland is a Habsburg or pre-war legacy. Although the lion’s
share of work on historical legacies in post-communism features periods defined by
different political regimes (e.g., Habsburg, Czarist, communist, Stalinist), nothing in
the definition of a legacy requires that the periodization refer to regimes. We could
just as plausibly identify a (prior) period of central planning and a (later) period of
market allocation and investigate the legacies of central planning on later market
practice.
Second, in cases where the antecedent is a cause (rather than a correlate), an outcome
qualifies as a legacy only if that explanatory factor ceased to directly operate
at some point before the outcome is observed. In the phrasing of Stinchcombe, the
outcome must have “historical” causes, causes that produce the outcome at an earlier
point in time but that do not reproduce that outcome over time.37 An example of such
an explanatory factor is the religious policy of the Habsburg Empire, which Grosfeld
and Zhuravskaya argue is indirectly related to post-communist support for conservative
parties.38 Initially the policy directly increased support for religious parties in
370  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Habsburg Galicia. But with the passing of the Dual Monarchy there ceased to be a
Habsburg policy, so there could have been no direct effect. Rather, support for conservative
parties persisted even after the policy disappeared. Similarly, arguments
about the contemporary lack of trust in post-communist political parties rely on
Soviet-era factors such as state repression and domination of the public sphere that
no longer exist (at least in much of Eastern Europe).39 Thus, although a legacy connotes
continuity with the past, it cannot exist without a discontinuity of causal factors.
A legacy can be characterized as an aftereffect of an antecedent cause that no
longer operates.40
Legacies and Non-legacies
When is an outcome not a legacy? For arguments where the antecedent is a causal
factor this is a troublesome question. Consider an outcome of interest. Suppose a
researcher investigates a potential antecedent and finds no evidence that it is related
to the outcome. That researcher is warranted in concluding that the outcome is not a
legacy of the (potential) antecedent cause. For example, if the outcome were postcommunist
popular demand for high welfare expenditures and the potential antecedent
were, say, the coming to power of Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, then the
researcher would conclude that demand for welfare expenditures is not a legacy of
Leonid Brezhnev’s coming to power. But it would not be correct to conclude that
demand for welfare expenditures is not a historical legacy at all. The reason is that
any conceivable outcome is a product of some prior causal factor, though that factor
may well be incredibly difficult to identify. After all, what else could an outcome be
a product of? There is of course a value in identifying which causal chain leads to
an outcome. To continue with the example, it would be important to know that
demand for welfare expenditures is rooted in popular experience with the statesocialist
nanny state rather than, say, interwar Church–State relations. But this is a
matter of distinguishing among different legacies rather than the existence of a legacy
per se. In short, all outcomes are legacies in the context of antecedent causes.
The only question that makes sense to ask is what the outcome is a legacy of.
Non-legacies make more sense when the antecedent and the outcome are instantiations
of the same phenomenon measured at two different periods of time. Where the
outcome is correlated with the antecedent then we can say the phenomenon persisted
and that the outcome is at least a potential legacy (of itself at an earlier period of time).
For example, Jowitt argues that the popular post-communist view of politics as something
to avoid was inherited from the state-socialist period.41 Where there is no correlation
between outcome and antecedent, or where the outcome is new and thus has no
phenomenologically equivalent antecedent, then there is discontinuity and a legacy can
be excluded. An example of such a post-communist non-legacy would be free and fair
elections, for which in parts of the former communist world there was no historical
Wittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies  371
precedent. Unless otherwise noted, all legacies referred to in the remainder of this
essay are of the persistence rather than the causal chain form.
Outcomes in post-communism may thus be divided into those that are potential
legacies and those that are new, having never appeared in the past. But these two
possibilities do not exhaust the possibilities for understanding post-communism in a
historical perspective. Research on historical continuity to post-communism has
given short shrift to phenomena that existed before post-communism but have not
persisted into post-communism.42 Examples would be the cult of personality or show
trials, which existed under state-socialism but have failed to materialize in post-communism
(at least in Eastern Europe). Such phenomena, which might have become
historical legacies but did not, prove that the past, however large it looms, does not
necessarily have to be a prologue. They are aborted legacies.
Pathways to Post-Communism
The temporal structure of continuities and discontinuities between post-communism
and the past may be visualized in Table 1, which exhibits the relationship
between the presence or absence of a phenomenon in different historical periods
and the legacies and non-legacies of the past. The rightmost three columns in this
table represent the conventional time periods from the post-communist legacies
literature: pre-communism, communism, and post-communism. I employ this particular
periodization and labeling for convenience only; the argument would work
just as well with a different periodization as long as there are three periods. An “X”
in a particular column means that a phenomenon of interest was present during that
period. Each row represents a potential pathway to post-communism for a phenomenon
of interest. Rows in which an “X” appears in both post-communism and at
least one prior period are potential legacy pathways because those are instances in
which something that existed before post-communism continued into post-communism.
The table refers to potential legacies because although persistence of a pheTable
1
Pathways to Post-Communism
Pre-Communism Communism Post-Communism
Uniquely Post-Communist X
Potential Communist Legacy X X
Potential Pre-Communist LegacyA X X X
Uniquely Communist X  
Pre-Post-Communist X X  
Uniquely Pre-Communist X  
Potential Pre-Communist LegacyB X X
372  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
nomenon across at least two time periods that include post-communism is necessary
for the post-communist outcome to be a legacy, it may not be sufficient. The postcommunist
phenomenon would still need to be inexplicable given post-communist
circumstances.
The top path (“Uniquely Post-Communist”), with an “X” only in the postcommunism
cell, represents features of a post-communist polity that are new in
the sense that they had never appeared before the fall of communism. As noted
above, for most countries in the region such novelties include free and fair elections.
With the exception of interwar Czechoslovakia and perhaps the royal elections of
the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, no country in East Europe could boast of
having had very many fully democratic elections before 1990. In many countries
of the region, constitutionally guaranteed freedoms appeared for the first time
after 1989.
The second path (“Potential Communist Legacy”) describes phenomena that
came into existence during the communist period and also exist in the post-communist
period, more commonly referred to as communist or Leninist legacies. For
example, many of the steel factories built during communism would qualify
because they were built during communism and continued to exist right into the
post-communist period. We need not even qualify them as potential legacies. They
exist in post-communism because they existed at the end of communism and were
not dismantled. Post-communist circumstances did not (re)create them. Another
example, mentioned above, is the excessive popular expectation of the willingness
and ability of the state to provide for social welfare. Such expectations surely did
not exist before the communist period, when states were too weak and too poor to
provide the cradle-to-grave welfare that came to be seen under communism as a
right rather than a privilege.
“Potential Pre-Communist LegacyA” in path three portrays features of the region
that existed before communism, during communism, and after. One example of this
is “backwardness.” As Janos notes, Eastern Europe as a whole has been economically
marginal vis-a`-vis Western Europe for centuries.43 Another example would be
ethnic fragmentation, which began with the fall of the Habsburg and Ottoman
empires at the end of World War I and has continued, if more attenuated, until the
present day. Some of the phenomena researchers have identified as Leninist legacies
are in fact pre-communist phenomena of this type. For example, attitudes inimical to
liberalism, a “ghetto” political culture, and deference to authority, while undoubtedly
features of communism, were also prominent in pre-communist East Europe. The
same might be said of étatist developmental strategies.
The fourth path (“Uniquely Communist”) describes features of communism not
present in either the pre- or post-communist phases. From the standpoint of postcommunism,
this path represents an aborted legacy, a phenomenon that might have
become a legacy but failed to do so. Many such features can be identified depending
on the country in question, including the fusion of Party and State,44 the soft budget
Wittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies  373
constraint,45 and features of Stalinism such as the cult of personality and central
planning.
The fifth path captures what is awkwardly termed “Pre-Post-Communist.” It illustrates
a feature that is present until the collapse of communism, but is extirpated
under post-communism. Rigged elections would fall into this category for the many
post-communist countries that experienced liberal democracy for the first time only
after 1989. National sovereignty would be another for those states that first gained
independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. From the standpoint of postcommunism,
this trajectory represents another aborted legacy. However, if we shift
our reference period from post-communism to communism, then our interpretation
changes. Specifically, for an observer in the communist period, the pre-communist
phenomenon is a potential historical legacy. An example of this in most countries in
Eastern Europe would be authoritarian rule, which certainly existed prior to communism
and continued into the communist period. Some outcomes, such as peripheral
status in the world economy, are potential pre-communist legacies for both the
communist and post-communist periods.
The sixth path represents a “Uniquely Pre-Communist” pathway. In this category
would be features of pre-communist systems that were wiped out under communist
rule and have not been revived. Examples for Eastern Europe include the political
power of the land-owning class and the economic influence of the Churches. The
communists relegated, seemingly permanently, both the large landowners and the
Churches to a political status far inferior to what they had enjoyed before the advent
of communism.
The seventh path (“Potential Pre-Communist LegacyB ”) represents features of
these polities that are present in both the pre-communist and post-communist periods
but not during the communist period itself. Many such candidate legacies have
been offered, usually as “revivals of the past” or “return of history.” One example
might be the so-called “frozen conflicts” that raged before the communists came to
power and then reemerged after the fall of communism. Another example could be
the post-communist revival of political parties that competed in elections before
the communists assumed power. Metaphysically speaking this is the most controversial
path because it is not clear what it means for a phenomenon to disappear
and then come back. How do we know that the phenomenon in the post-communist
period is the same phenomenon as the one that existed before communism. What
do we mean by “the same”? Addressing these questions is beyond the scope of this
paper.46
The utility of Table 1 is that its categories are exhaustive. Its columns cover all
periods of a former communist country’s history, and its rows cover all possible
pathways to post-communism.47 As noted earlier, there is nothing sacred about the
“pre-communist”–“communist”–“post-communist” categorization. Indeed, from
a descriptive perspective, it is quite flawed. The pre-communist era is composed
of multiple regimes, in some countries including fascist, traditional dictatorship,
374  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
and monarchy. Moreover, with the entry of much of Eastern Europe into the EU
and NATO and the even more recent return of Russia as a great power, we have
arguably entered the “post-post-communist” era. The discussion has also ignored
(and not even labeled) the transitional periods themselves, which we know can
leave their own legacies on the subsequent regime.48 However, for purposes of
understanding the temporal structure of legacies, nothing is gained by employing
more than three periods. The three basic trajectory types are those in which an
outcome appears in only one period (those paths prefaced with “Uniquely”), originates
in one period and appears again in the successive period (“Potential
Communist Legacy,” “Pre-Post-Communism,” and “Potential Pre-Communist
LegacyA”), or originates in one period and reappears after an absence (“Potential
Pre-Communist LegacyB ”). More complicated trajectories resulting from the
addition of additional periods can be broken down into one of these three fundamental
pathways.
Table 1 highlights other important features of legacies. First, we can see that
scholarly focus on legacy pathways misses more than half of the trajectories leading
from pre- to post-communism. Of the seven paths in Table 1, only three involve
phenomena that exist in post-communism and were carried over from at least one
prior period. Three involve phenomena that historical precedent suggests might
have existed in post-communism but never appeared (the “Uniquely PreCommunist,”
“Pre-Post-Communist,” and “Uniquely Communist” pathways), and
one pertains to phenomena new to post-communism. An interesting and relatively
unexplored research question is why some outcomes become legacies whereas others
do not.
Second, the number of time periods in which a phenomenon exists has a bearing
on how the corresponding legacy should be temporally labeled. For phenomena
that exist in only two time periods, there is no ambiguity about how to label a
potential legacy. Suppose, for example, the historical record were divided into a
post-1989 period and a pre-1989 period (that included the events of 1989 themselves).
If there were historical legacies in post-1989 politics then those could (by
construction) only be pre-1989 legacies. But if there are more than two periods
when the phenomenon exists, then the potential legacy should be labeled according
to the period in which the phenomenon is first identified. Consider once again
the avoidance of political involvement (“ghetto political culture”), which Jowitt
argued as being an important communist (“Leninist”) legacy in post-communist
politics.49 As noted earlier, it was also an important phenomenon of pre-communist
regimes, and should therefore be labeled a pre-communist rather than a communist
legacy.
Third, historical legacies are not merely out there in the empirical world waiting
to be discovered, but also conditional on how researchers choose to periodize history.
This is trivially true in the sense that how we label a period will determine the
labeling of the legacy. But it is also true in a less trivial way. Consider popular
Wittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies  375
post-communist demands for welfare transfers, widely considered to be a legacy
inherited from the communist period. If we were to reperiodize history in such as
way as to merge the communist and post-communist periods into one longer
period, then there would no longer be a legacy because the phenomenon would
only exist within one period, analogous to the paths with only one “X” in Table 1.
A similar logic works if instead of merging two periods into one, we break one
period into two. For example, one might argue that the recent reemergence of rightwing
populism in Eastern Europe is a legacy of hardships endured and compromises
made on the road to qualifying for membership in the European Union. In
effect, this argument is making an implicit distinction between different phases of
the post-communist period, demarcated by the point at which EU entry became
inevitable. Such a legacy is not visible in Table 1, where post-communism is not
further subdivided.
Conclusion
This article illustrates that a great deal can be learned from an analytic rather
than empirical approach to the study of historical legacies. Although for expository
purposes the focus was on the former communist world, the arguments apply to
legacy arguments more broadly. The big takeaway concerns how we conceptualize
and identify legacies, about which there is scholarly disagreement. Historical legacies
come in two flavors. One is as the endpoint of a causal chain that began at
some point in the past. Understood this way, all outcomes are historical legacies
because any outcome can be conceived as the end of a causal chain beginning in
the past. Within this causal chain branch of research, the key question is thus not
whether or not an outcome of interest is a legacy, but what kind of historical legacy
an outcome is.
Another kind of legacy researchers identify is a phenomenon that persisted from
the past. Understood this way, a phenomenon qualifies as a historical legacy under
two conditions. One is that it has to exist in at least two historical periods, at a minimum
a “past” and a “present.” Phenomena unique to one historical period cannot be
historical legacies unless that period is itself divided into at least two subperiods. The
other condition is that in the most recent of the periods in which the phenomenon
exists, the phenomenon should not be explainable with contemporaneous causal factors.
Further research is needed on how we know whether it is the same phenomenon
that appeared in each time period, particularly in regard to legacies that represent
so-called revivals of the past.
The article has also drawn attention to the importance of non-legacies. These are
not merely phenomena that exist in only one historical period. They are also phenomena
from earlier historical periods that did not persist into later periods. Why
some outcomes become legacies and others do not remains a tantalizing question.
376  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Acknowledgment
Thanks to Michael Bernhard, Tim Büthe, Giovanni Capoccia, Fotini Christia, Zsuzsa Csergő, Tiago
Fernandes, Anna Grzymała-Busse, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Markus Kreuzer, Danielle Lussier, Valerie
Morkevicius, Harris Mylonas, Tom Remington, Alfred Rieber, Joshua Tucker, Daniel Ziblatt, and participants
at prior conference panels and invited lectures for comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
  1. Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
  2. Anna Grzymała-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003); Anna Seleny, “Communism’s Many Legacies in East-Central Europe,” Journal of Democracy 18,
no. 3 (July 2007): 157–70.
 3. Jan Kubik, “Cultural Legacies of State-Socialism: History Making and Cultural-Political
Entrepreneurship in Postcommunist Poland and Russia,” in Capitalism and Democracy in Central and
Eastern Europe: Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule, ed. Grzegorz Ekiert and Stephen Hanson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 317–51.
 4. Phineas Baxandall, Constructing Unemployment: The Politics of Joblessness in East and West
(Aldershot, United Kingdom: Ashgate, 2004).
 5. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker, “Communist Legacies, and Political Values and
Behavior: A Theoretical Framework with an Application to Political Party Trust,” Comparative Politics
43, no. 4 (2011): 379–408.
  6. Zoltan Barany and Ivan Volgyes, eds., The Legacies of Communism in Eastern Europe (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
  7. Tomasz Inglot, “Historical Legacies, Institutions, and the Politics of Social Policy in Hungary and
Poland, 1989-1999,” in Ekiert and Hanson, Capitalism and Democracy, 210–47.
 8. Barbara Geddes, “A Comparative Perspective on the Leninist Legacy in Eastern Europe,” in
Liberalization and Leninist Legacies: Comparative Perspectives on Democratic Transitions, ed. Beverly
Crawford and Arend Lijphart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 142–83.
 9. Allison Stanger, “Leninist Legacies and Legacies of State-Socialism in Postcommunist
Central Europe’s Constitutional Development,” in Ekiert and Hanson, Capitalism and Democracy,
182–209.
10. Crawford and Lijphart, Liberalization and Leninist Legacies.
11. Grigore Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change,” Journal of
Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 908–26.
12. “For excellent conceptual analyses and reviews of the literature see Mark Beissinger and Stephen
Kotkin “Historical Legacies of Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe,” (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014); and Jody LaPorte and Danielle N. Lussier, “What is the Leninist Legacy?
Assessing Twenty Years of Scholarship,” Slavic Review 70:3, Fall 2011, 637-54.
13. Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gábor Tóka, Post-Communist
Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
14. Matthew Soberg Shugart, “Politicians, Parties, and Presidents:An Exploration of Post-authoritarian
Institutional Design,” in Crawford and Lijphart, Liberalization and Leninist Legacies, 40–90.
15. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies.”
16. Keith Darden, forthcoming, Resisting Occupation: Mass Schooling and the Creation of Durable
National Loyalties (New York: Cambridge University Press).
Wittenberg / Conceptualizing Historical Legacies  377
17. Konstantin Kashin and Daniel Ziblatt, “A Missing Historical Variable? The Long Run Effects of
Nineteenth Century Landholding Patterns on Contemporary Voting in Central Europe, 1895-2009,”
unpublished manuscript, Department of Government, Harvard University, June 2011.
18. Jason Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and Electoral Continuity in
Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
19. Valerie Bunce, “Imperial Legacies and Post-Socialist Pathways,” East European Politics &
Societies 19, no. 3 (2005): 406–42.
20. Krzysztof Jasiewicz, “‘The Past Is Never Dead’: Identity, Class, and Voting Behavior in
Contemporary Poland,” East European Politics & Societies 23, no. 4 (2009): 491–508.
21. A previous version of the remainder of this section appears in Jason Wittenberg, “What Do We
Mean By Historical Legacy?,” Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, APSA Newsletter, Fall 2013, 11:2,
pp. 7-9.
22. Jowitt, New World Disorder.
23. Darden, Resisting Occupation.
24. Kashin and Ziblatt, “A Missing Historical Variable?”
25. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies.”
26. Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty.
27. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of
Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics (2012), doi: 10.1093/qje/
qjs019.
28. Irena Grosfeld and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, “Persistence Effects of Empires: Evidence from the
Partitions of Poland,” unpublished manuscript, February 2012.
29. Sascha O. Becker, Katrin Boeckh, Christa Hainz, and Ledger Woesmann, “The Empire Is Dead,
Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy,” discussion
paper no. 5584, Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany, March 2011.
30. Leonid Peisakhin, “Long Run Persistence of Political Attitudes and Behavior: A Focus on
Mechanisms,” paper prepared for the 2013 American Political Science Association Meeting, Chicago, IL,
28 August–1 September 2013.
31. Voigtländer and Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated.”
32. Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya, “Persistence Effects of Empires.”
33. Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty.
34. Peisakhin, “Long Run Persistence of Political Attitudes and Behavior.”
35. Jasiewicz, “‘The Past Is Never Dead.’”
36. Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty.
37. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Constructing Social Theories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
38. Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya, “Persistence Effects of Empires.”
39. E.g., Pop-Eleches and Tucker, “Communist Legacies.”
40. See Stephen Kotkin and Mark R. Beissinger, “The Historical Legacies of Communism: An
Empirical Agenda,” in Beissinger and Kotkin, Historical Legacies, 1–27.
41. Jowitt, New World Disorder.
42. For an exception, see Timothy Frye, “The Limits of Legacies: Properties Rights in Russian
Energy,” in Beissinger and Kotkin, Historical Legacies, 90–110.
43. Andrew Janos, “Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe: Strategies of Post-Communist
Politics,” East European Politics & Societies 8, no. 1 (1994).
44. Valerie Bunce, “The Political Economy of Postsocialism,” Slavic Review 58, no. 4 (1999).
45. János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
46. For an initial attempt to grapple with some of the complications, see Jason Wittenberg, “What is
a Historical Legacy?,” prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, 29 August–1 September 2013.
378  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
47. I leave out the pathway in which no “X” appears anywhere. This pathway would identify those
features that could have appeared at some point during history but never have.
48. See, e.g., Robert M. Fishman, “Democratic Practice after the Revolution: The Case of Portugal
and Beyond,” Politics and Society 39, no. 2 (2011): 233–67; Robert M. Fishman and Omar Lizardo,
“How Macro-Historical Change Shapes Cultural Taste: Legacies of Democratization in Spain and
Portugal,” American Sociological Review 78, no. 2 (2013): 213–39.
49. Jowitt, New World Disorder.
Jason Wittenberg is associate professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
His research focuses on electoral behavior and ethnic and religious conflict in Eastern Europe. His most
recent article is “How Similar Are They? Rethinking Electoral Congruence,” Quality & Quantity 47:3,
April 2013.