In what ways do amicus curiae or friend of the court briefs shape the decisions of constitutional courts outside of the United States? Using a unique data set of more than nine hundred briefs from ...

This article examines Polish underground publications (samizdat) interpreting Ukraine’s role in the Polish–Soviet war of 1920. The research analyzes a large number of underground journals, newspape...

The aim of this article is to analyse the archival collection of the memoirs of officers of the Polish security forces (Security Office and Citizens’ Militia) on their service in the Warsaw voivode...

The aim of this article is to study the translation of Polish literature into Slovene to shed light on Polish literary (and cultural) diplomacy in Slovenia. Being acquainted with the culture of ano...

This article addresses the candidate selection process for realistic list positions with regard to multiple-office holding and personal characteristics in flexible-list proportional representation ...

In this article, the interrelatedness of contemporary populism and fear is analysed. It is argued that contemporary populism is burdened with the uncertainties and contingencies of late modernity. ...

This article shows how Forum Against Depression,1 an online platform devoted to depression, creates awareness on depression in Poland. This qualitative study uses critical discourse analysis to int...

Bosnians show little faith in their state-level institutions, and with good reason, as the country ranks poorly on measures of corruption, regulatory quality, and government efficacy. However, the ...

At the end of the nineteenth century, European social democracy founded acceptance among some circles of the Bulgarian intelligentsia. However, the social base of this new ideology, including indus...

As the importance of right-wing populist parties (RPPs) has grown significantly in Europe, with some even forming governments, the attendant political and policy programs are attracting greater att...

Academics usually look for constitutional conventions in Westminster-style democracies, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. Nevertheless, growing evidence from practice shows that con...

Despite the significant body of literature on migrations after the 2004 and 2007 enlargements of the European Union, including on social remittances, a subcategory—political remittances—is only now...

National fragmentation of Slavic Muslims in the Montenegrin area of the Sandžak region into Bosniaks and national Muslims was recorded in the last two population censuses in Montenegro, with minor ...

This article explores Western donors’ support for the decentralization reform in post-Euromaidan Ukraine prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, with a focus on the re...

In this article, we investigate what kind of institutions affect bank ownership transformations in a post-transition economy. We use statistical data concerning mergers and acquisitions in the Poli...

Even if political parties have new labels, they often can be perceived as a continuation of an earlier existing grouping. The main goal of this article is to discuss how to assess party novelty and...

The existing research on contextual sources of support for populist parties has revolved around two factors: the unemployment rate and the size of immigrant groups. Conceived as residential charact...

In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944–1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroye...

The extant literature on rebel governance takes the political institutions that rebels develop to rule a civilian population as an indivisible entity. As a result, it cannot answer the question, wh...

The shrinking of civil society—a problematic trend in a growing number of countries—often involves enacting legal measures to curtail the activity of civil society organizations and vilifying and/o...

This paper reassesses Russia’s policy vis-à-vis the Western Balkans in terms of its pursuit of status. The region has been historically significant to Russia. It saw centuries of interaction betwee...

Autobiographies frequently feature the author’s understanding of home as an anchoring ground for the creation of the self. While home in such texts often invokes childhood and family, in the contex...

Focusing on coexistence in towns and villages of the former Šariš Zemplín County during World War II, our article exposes the shifting meanings assigned to belonging in what was a multiethnic borde...

This article belongs to the special cluster, “Biographies of Belonging in the Holocaust”, guest-edited by Natalia Aleksiun and Hana Kubátová.This article argues for using personal accounts in recon...

This introduction highlights the analytical potential of “belonging” for those studying the social processes of Jewish exclusion in the Holocaust. It does so by proposing a tripartite definition of...

“This was my rudest awakening that I was Jewish. I was not Polish, I was horrified!” Cesia Honig, from Tarnów, perceived herself as a Polish patriot until 1938, when she was insulted for being a Je...

Life under Stalinism in the 1930s challenged Jews, particularly the young, with innumerable compromises to their religious and ethnic identity, yielding unexpected responses during World War II and...

This article focuses on a cluster of institutions rooted in Polish rural life that were co-opted by the German authorities into the lowest level of rule in occupied Poland from 1939-1945. It identi...

This article examines the advantages and limits of late non-Jewish witness testimonies in Holocaust research. Grounding my conclusions in more than 150 biographical interviews conducted in small co...

This article reconstructs the events leading up to the killing, on the night of 26 May and early morning of 27 May 1945, of Jewish survivors who returned to their home town of Przedbórz near Radoms...

The article shows the results of empirical research conducted among members of advisory councils operating in Polish cities. The study covers five types of councils: councils of NGOs, senior citize...

This article aims at finding a relationship between the degree of fiscalism and innovation in eleven countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The article uses clustering algorithms to divide ...

This article studies the party alignment bias in Poland. Relying on quasi-experimental regression discontinuity design and 2006–2019 data for over 2,400 municipalities, we aim to establish whether ...

This article explores Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s largely forgotten travel diary “A Journey to Burma.” It argues that the strategy Herling-Grudziński employed to describe the postcolonial world was...

While social trust is seen as an essential factor in political, economic, and social progress in the world, its country-specific mode of formation remains underresearched. Considering Ukraine as a ...

Symbols of the past influence the present, very often in the way dependent on the will of those who currently “weave the story,” to use the expression coined by Olga Tokarczuk.1 This applies in par...

Since the Euromaidan revolution, Ukrainian cinema has been experiencing a renaissance, associated with both the wave of civic and creative activity and the policy of the post-Maidan authorities sup...

Based on a systematic analysis of three databases of court decisions and a comprehensive overview of out-of-court use of cultural expertise in dispute resolution across various institutional contex...

Most issues that come before the Council of the European Union are decided without any recorded opposition. Constructivist literature explains that informal norms encourage state officials to condu...

The Prespa Agreement concluded between (North) Macedonia and Greece in June 2018 is hailed as a major success for the European Union’s (EU) policy of promoting conflict resolution through in the Ba...

This article examines Russian citizens’ support for and participation in civic activism today, nearly three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically, we consider how activism has evolved over time in two key issue sectors—environmentalism and women’s rights. We draw on a recent nationally representative survey that challenges existing stereotypes of Russians as apathetic and/or

Qualitative studies featuring in-depth research have recently pushed back against characterizations of citizens in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as passive. After mobilizations in 2014, ho...

Both political parties and differentiated integration (DI) play an ambivalent role in regard to democratic backsliding. Parties’ positioning towards democratic backsliding has not always been straightforward, and DI has been seen as facilitating it. We analyse whether party actors view democratic backsliding as a problematic issue for the EU, if they think DI facilitates it, and how they consider the

This article analyzes how the 2020 Polish Presidential election was affected by the recent COVID-19 pandemic in the context of global democratic backsliding. Specifically, this article examines how the incumbency advantage of President Andrzej Duda was bolstered during the pandemic by the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). Although PiS was unable to carry out every planned electoral manipulation,

The developments that took place in Central and Easter Europe (CEE) over the last three decades have consequences for how researchers define and understand the concept of civil society. This article revisits four major approaches to civil society that were developed after 1989 and provides reasons for a reconceptualization in light of new research and empirical data. It argues that civil society in

Why do supporters of radical right parties in Central and Eastern Europe hold economically left-wing policy preferences? In this article, the author argues that this can be explained by welfare chauvinism. First, in ethnically heterogeneous societies, minority groups provide a plausible scapegoat for the grievances emphasized by radical right parties. Therefore, the majority population is sensitive

The article examines the Soviet nationality policy in Belarus in 1944–1947 during the population exchange between the Soviet Union and Poland. Unlike in Lithuania and Ukraine, the authorities in Belarus prioritized keeping the labor force over national homogenization, determined nationality by territory of birth, and attempted to keep the people by designating them as Belarusians irrespective of their

The outbreak of communal violence against Jews catalysed by the German invasion of the USSR was long neglected by scholarship due to biases against eyewitness testimony and the opacity of local events to outside observers. A growing number of studies on the topic have recently emerged, drawing from the eyewitness testimonies of Jewish survivors and previously inaccessible Soviet archives. This article

There are only two European Union (EU) states where hard coal is still mined: Poland and the Czech Republic. One of the key interest groups in the hard coal mining industry are trade unions. They are particularly strong in this sector, almost entirely controlled by the state, in Poland—without their approval, it is in fact impossible to implement any significant reforms. The main goal of the article

This article examines the future-oriented use of the culinary past in Poland’s food discourse through a qualitative analysis of popular food media (printed magazines and TV). We analyze how interpretations of food and culinary practices from the past are connected to contemporary debates. We contend that media representations of the culinary past co-create projects of Polish modernization in which

This article explores the roots of electoral hyper-accountability in Central and Eastern Europe. I focus on Lithuania: a country that is a stable liberal democracy, but has re-elected none of its governments (in the same party composition) since the restoration of independence. Survey data from the Lithuanian National Election Study reveal that Lithuanian voters are constantly dissatisfied with the

This article investigates the changing relationship of class and the living conditions of individuals in Hungary in comparison with other European countries. Our central question is to what extent class position determines the material living conditions of individuals in Hungary, how this relationship has changed, and how significant it is compared to other European countries. Our analysis is a direct

This article examines the effectiveness of grassroots lobbying at the regional level in Poland. For the purpose of the article, “loyalty to the citizens versus party theory” was formulated. It distinguishes two stages of the policy-making process within which the councilors react differently to grassroots lobbying. The first stage refers to the preparation of the law by the region’s board. The theory

This paper will compare and contrast Visegrád and Southeast European mobility towards (and away from) the European Union (EU) ideal of cohesion, in the process investigating conflicting “core” and “peripheral” assertions of “Europeanness.” Though the Visegrád states have exceeded economic expectations, they have to varying degrees stood in opposition to the values of the EU’s self-professed “European

There is a growing consensus within both policy and academic circles, including various schools of political, legal, and economic thought, that institutions matter and that the quality of institutions and governments makes an important difference for economic development. However, while the institutional literature has extensively discussed different types of institutions and their importance, only

A significant element of Central and Eastern Europe’s democracies backsliding process turns out to be changes in the media law. These changes are now leading to a decline in media freedom. The article attempts to understand this phenomenon by analyzing the process of legal and policy changes in Poland. In the course of the analysis, the reader’s attention is drawn to three elements that form the mainline

This article explores some notable uses of psychological language in the Securitate archives. We examine Securitate files concerning Constantin Vaman, a suspected legionary subjected to surveillance work by the Securitate. This article seeks to show how Securitate activities, particularly the writing of informer notes and operatives’ reports, are the upshot of strategic use of morally implicative psychological

How reliable are the EU’s reports when assessing its Eastern neighbouring countries’ progress towards democracy? To explore this question, I first developed an original scale that enables to identify the variation in the quality of the EU’s assessment reports across the partner countries and over time. Subsequently, by employing both quantitative and qualitative research techniques, I carried out a

George Tsebelis distinguished two forms of veto players’ actions: institutional and partisan. In a democracy, the Church is not able to play either role because it is not an element of the state’s institutional structure. This was the source for Simon Fink’s proposal to look at the Church as a societal veto player (VP). The case of Poland shows, however, that such an approach becomes inadequate in

Economic growth is a key point of macroeconomic policy and is the subject of constant attention and debate by professional public and policy makers. Theoretical and empirical research indicates differences in the level and direction of determinants’ influence on the growth rate. The main goal of our article is to construct a model of economic growth determinants in South-East European countries. We