This paper theorizes the transformation of the pre-1914 imperial order in Central Europe into the post-1918 nation-state system through the concept of rescaling of fields of power, drawing on Bourdieu’s field theory and new imperial history. Rescaling designates the process by which a social field shifts its organizational scale, with a corresponding reorganization of capital hierarchies and conversion mechanisms. Post-imperial rescaling is theorized as a differentiated process, and a comparative typology of five modalities across the successor states of 1918 is proposed. The central case is Poland: the transformation of a trans-imperial space of national elite integration across the Russian, Austrian, and German empires into the institutionalized field of power of the Second Polish Republic. Three mechanisms of rescaling are identified: the devaluation of capital forms underwritten by imperial frameworks, the disruption of elite coalitions organized at the imperial scale, and the emergence of new legitimation principles in the national field.

This article develops a formal analytical framework for examining how processes, structures, and relations shape contention in civil societies across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). By integrating country-level data from the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Civil Society Organization Sustainability Index, and Freedom in the World with individual-level data from the European Values Study in 20 postsocialist CEE countries, the article employs multilevel analysis to examine changes in citizens’ engagement in contentious practices from 2008 to 2018. The findings show that contention increased significantly over this period. Processes (political and economic transformation) and structures (governance capacity and civic sector sustainability) are positively associated with contention, while civil liberties—more than political rights—emerge as the most consequential relational factor. The analysis further shows that civil society is neither an evenly accessible democratic arena nor a homogeneous regional formation, as contention is socially stratified and shaped by divergent socialist legacies.

This article traces the emergence of socially engaged architectural practices in Croatia within wider civic mobilizations against investor-driven urbanism and contested spatial governance. It examines how architects, acting as civic experts, navigated post-socialist urban transformations by combining public critique, knowledge production, and institution-oriented engagement. Situating these practices within broader civil society, the article identifies three phases: early experimentation within the independent cultural scene, politicization of space through public protest and coalition-building, and recent efforts toward institutional reform and participatory governance. Conceptually, it formalizes architecture as civic praxis as a public-oriented configuration of expertise operating through three mechanisms: hybrid roles (pedagogy, organizing), knowledge infrastructures (civic tools deepening public understanding of spatial politics), and institutional repertoires (interventions translating civic claims into procedural change). The Croatian case widens what counts as civil society in CEE by showing how architecture “dirtied by many hands” can help organize communities, circulate usable knowledge, and influence decision-making.

Higher-education institutions have long relied on a broad range of internal and external stakeholders, including academic staff, administrators, governmental representatives, donors and industry. In recent decades, this stakeholder landscape has diversified, driven by higher-education reforms that have intensified competition, strengthened accountability and heightened expectations that universities respond to societal needs. At the same time, geopolitical tensions and growing societal distrust in academic institutions have underscored the need to reassess how stakeholders shape governance and strategic directions of universities. Against this backdrop, this article examines the changing role of stakeholders in higher-education governance through the lens of the stakeholder theory, focusing on their power, legitimacy and urgency. While traditional actors remain central, emerging and previously overlooked stakeholders – including students, early career academics, organized academic labour and EdTech platforms – are increasingly playing a role in higher-education decision making. The article explores the changing influence of these actors and what these shifts imply for institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

This article investigates how Central and Eastern European (CEE) cities construct notions of Europeanness and articulate localized European identities through their participation in the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) programme. Focusing on the 17 CEE cities awarded the ECOC title between 2007 and 2028, the article argues that these cities use the ECOC platform not only to reframe their cultural narratives but also to reconcile and strategically re-narrate their communist pasts within a European framework. Employing a post-structuralist discourse analysis, the study identifies two interrelated discursive strategies – unity and diversity – through which cities position themselves in relation to a broader European identity. The findings highlight spatial and temporal variation in how Europeanness is mobilized. This analysis contributes to debates on cultural policy, memory politics, and identity-making in contemporary Europe.

This article investigates the impact of electoral reforms on entry barriers in political markets. The discussion starts by delineating the theoretical boundaries of various political markets, such as those for participation, parties and government. By taking a cue from industrial organisation theory, the article offers an analysis of entry barriers, both hard and soft, along with their operationalisation for empirical research. Based on this theoretical framework, a single hypothesis is investigated. It posits that the modification of the entry barriers in the market for parties leads to changes in the concentration of the popular vote for party lists. An observable implication of this relationship would be if an electoral reform that raises entry barriers led to subsequent increases in the Herfindahl index (a measure of market concentration), and vice versa. This proposition is empirically tested by a comparative analysis of a new database covering Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. The analysis offers support for the following proposition: in most cases the changes in the entry barriers led to a corresponding change of concentration in the market for parties.

This brief article introduces the Special Issue “Unlikely Partners? Evolving Government-Nonprofit Relationships, East and West”, which calls attention to a growing pattern of “nonprofitization” of the welfare state in countries stretching from Western Europe, through Central Europe and Russia, and into Central Asia and the Far East to determine what lessons they might hold for the Russian experience and for the evolution of the modern welfare state more generally.

This article offers a new empirical perspective on the state of Comparative Politics (CP) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We present findings on the authors, methods, and epistemology of CP publications in the most relevant journals from eleven countries in the region. The major finding is that CP is rather marginal in CEE Political Science. Furthermore, CP articles predominantly focus on the authors’ country of origin, use off-the-shelf data, apply mostly qualitative data analysis techniques, and rarely take a historical perspective.

The article discusses some of the paradoxes of minority accommodation in Eastern Europe 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the course of doing so, it focuses on four specific issues: volatility, sequencing, a shift from nationalism (group) to social conservatism (grid), and on the radicalisation of mainstream parties. Volatility is tied to the ebb and flow of shifts in the status quo associated with minority accommodation, which elucidates both why radical right mobilisation accelerates and why it loses steam. The expansion of minority rights leads to political ‘extreme reactions’. Sequencing matters since minority accommodation coincided with democratisation in Eastern Europe, so the struggle over minority rights is confounded with a concurrent regime change. Shifts from group to grid refer to the recent rise in socially conservative issues as sources of polarisation. Finally, extremist parties can threaten democratic pluralism. Nevertheless, large radicalised mainstream parties that control parliaments, not small extremist parties, subvert the institutions of democratic oversight. The threat originates from the mainstream and is exacerbated by the fact that liberal democracy has not ‘locked in’ in most of Eastern Europe.

This article introduces the Debate on editing and publishing (in) Political Science and International Relations journals in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The Debate brings together editors of PoliSci and IR journals published in four CEE countries to examine the practice of publishing (in) these disciplines and explore the diverse strategies journals, and their editors employ to navigate the semiperipheral context of CEE. Going beyond structuralist accounts of semiperipheral inferiority, we introduce CEE journals as institutions endowed with agency, self-reflection and responsibility towards their academic communities. The Debate discusses if and in which sense these journals try to become (limited) innovators, how they are bound by different conditions stemming from the national or regional contexts, how they work with or challenge them and which opportunities they exploit to advance their goals.

This article discusses the integration of scholars from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) into the broader field of European political science. Evaluating data from 2000 to 2020, we ask whether CEE scholars managed to “close the gap” stemming from the initially underdeveloped state of post-communist political science. We contend that the results are rather mixed: CEE scholars have been increasingly present, yet achieved only very limited access to the top levels and mostly remain in a position of dependency. Using the case of Czechia, we discuss the factors that have likely contributed to the perpetuation of this state of integration with limited convergence.

This research aims to develop a deeper insight into the development of political science from the bibliometric perspective by analysing peer-reviewed journal articles (n = 1117) indexed in the Scopus database and published by authors from fifteen Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in the period 1996–2013. Results indicate that the majority of articles (84%) by CEE authors have been published in international journals and in the English language. The visibility of these articles in international journals, measured by the mean number of citations, is 5.2 per paper, while the same indicator for CEE journal articles amounts to 0.2. Authorship analysis indicates a gradual but continuous increase in co-authorships. Additionally, there are significant differences in citations between single-authored and co-authored articles, both in international and CEE journals. Co-authorship among CEE authors is present in only 1% of the analysed articles, confirming weak collaboration between political scientists in CEE countries.

This research note addresses issues, concerns, and opportunities for teachers and researchers of the third sector in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on experiences in Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, and Hungary. The paper briefly outlines the development of the third sector in the aforementioned countries, and describes the current state of third sector teaching and research there. It then frames the challenges for the region’s teachers and researchers, and proposes an appropriate role for the West, commenting upon the West’s relevance within Central and Eastern Europe.

Despite the ever growing body of scholarly work on policy developments in the post‐communist New Member States of the European Union (NMS), systematic comparisons of policy outcome performance and its determinants are still scarce. This article identifies patterns of post‐communist policy outcomes across the fields of economic, social and environmental policy. By employing pooled time‐series cross‐sectional analysis with a Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition (FEVD) estimator it investigates to what extent policy outcome performance is determined by differing policy efforts (outputs or reform tracks), transitional conditions and international influences. Although citizens are still negatively affected by the initial economic recession, especially in the social domain, policy reforms and efforts are decisive in determining the outcome performance of the NMS relative to one another in the longer run. Successful and comprehensive market reforms and steering capabilities prove to be particularly important in this regard. Furthermore, internationalisation has an important, albeit ambiguous, impact. While exposure to the world market is reflected in negative policy performance, interaction with and financial commitment from Western European Union countries promote positive policy outcomes.

Romanian Political Science was institutionalized mostly after the fall of the communist regime. While the number of Political Science departments has declined after the 2000s, the number of journals continued to increase. We investigate this unusual pattern, focusing on the journals’ relationship with their home universities and editorial teams, and on their reaction to the opening of Romanian Political Science to the outside world. In a context characterized by low competition, lack of resources, and the absence of functioning professional associations and national conferences, the journals failed to cut across departmental boundaries and evolve into a national platform for scientific publishing. Changes in national academic standards also brought them into direct competition with international journals. Although, through internationalization, standards of scientific publishing have improved, the landscape of Romanian Political Science journals remains semiperipheral, and the national community continues to be fragmented and tribal.

This article proposes a mixed-methods measurement of the mass-elite congruence of opinions on the EU based on a combination of speech and survey data. It focuses on two countries (Bulgaria and Romania) that were known for their pro-European profile until their EU accession, but which faced many political difficulties afterwards. The analysis covers the 2013–2017 period that includes a great deal of these post-accession difficulties. The article illustrates how we can make meaningful comparisons between short-term, dichotomous mass, and elite attitudes with timeframes determined by non-electoral events.

The paper discusses the Polish Political Science Review as a case study of a semiperipheral scientific journal focused on political science and international relations and published by the University of Wrocław. The objective is to present the strategies adopted by the journal’s editors in a twofold context, which is critical for the journal: the international rankings and the national system of journal assessment in Poland. The paper discusses how the journal has to navigate the intersections of the requirements posed by the two systems as well as reasons why both are important. The Polish Political Science Review faces challenges typical for semiperipheral journals, building its recognisability and position on the Polish and international markets. While ensuring the high-standard quality of manuscripts is the mainstay of a journal’s strategy, functioning within the inconsistent and sometimes unpredictable environment requires a combination of internationalisation with strong local rooting.

To many citizens in post-communist states European Union (EU) membership represented a historical–civilisational choice: an end to the Cold War division of Europe and symbolic reuniting of Eastern Europe with a ‘West’ that they had always considered themselves to be part of culturally and spiritually. In fact, in spite of its multiple crises, there continued to be high levels of support for EU membership and ‘Hard’ rejectionist Eurosceptic discourses were confined to the margins of politics. However, the increasing sense of East European cultural distinctiveness, highlighted by the post-communist states’ responses to the European migration crisis, meant that pro-EU discourses were less romantic and more instrumental, driven increasingly by a cost–benefit analysis based on an evaluation of the tangible material benefits that the Union was felt to deliver.