Stephen E Hanson
Biographic Data
| ID | 987782 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen E Hanson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen E |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanson |
| SIGNATURE | HANSON S E |
| AFFILIATIONS | William & Mary |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4801-5781 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 163 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Staging the Absolute: Ritual in Russia's Modern Era by Thomas Seifrid
Thomas Seifrid's new book presents a cultural analysis of remarkable scope and ambition. Weaving together a complex tapestry from a wide range of sources, including copious references to works of Russian fiction, poetry, and theater from the late 19th century to the Stalinist era as well as historical accounts of official Soviet efforts to forge a new “proletarian” culture after the Bolshevik Revolution, Seifrid discerns an underlying thematic un…
Integrating Continuity and Change in the Study of Soviet Society: The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia
Tomila Lankina has written a pathbreaking book. Impressively combining theoretical ambition, sensitive attention to historical detail, and the skillful use of multiple quantitative and qualitative methods, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia brings the study of Soviet history squarely back onto the agenda of contemporary comparative social science. For those of us who have spent much of our careers trying to explain to academics and policy …
The Weimar/Russia Comparison Revisited
Just over a quarter-century ago, the authors published a widely read essay comparing Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia in historical perspective. After Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine, comparisons of Vladimir Putin’s regime with Nazi Germany are once again tragically relevant. Reexamining our arguments from 1997 shows the continuing relevance of the variables we emphasized in that essay: the burdensome legacies of the past imperial reg…
The Weight of the Soviet Past in Post-1991 Russia
Four distinguished experts on Soviet history and Soviet politics discuss the issues raised by Andrea Graziosi in his article “The Weight of the Past in Post-Soviet Russia,” which appeared in the Winter 2020–2021 issue of the JCWS. The article and the discussion forum are the first of several items that will be published in the journal over the next few years assessing a variety of legacies of the Cold War
Understanding the Global Patrimonial Wave
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modern…
Defining Democratic Consolidation
Weasel Words and the Analysis of “Postcommunist” Politics: A Symposium
A weasel word is a term used in academic or political discourse whose meaning is so imprecise or badly defined that it impedes the formulation of coherent thought on the subject to which it is applied, or leads to unsubstantiated conclusions. In this symposium we consider several key terms central to the study of postcommunist politics and discuss the extent to which they fall into this category. The terms discussed here include regime terminolog…
The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR naturally provokes us to reflect on the course of Eurasian and world history in the post-communist era. Upon closer examination, however, it is not clear what significance the precise time span of two and a half decades has for the scientific study of political and institutional change. A review of the social science literature indicates that we are very far from having any consensual under…
Social Science and Systemic Failure: A Discussion of Stefan Hedlund's Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure
Invisible Hands, Russian Experience, and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding Systemic Failure . By Stefan Hedlund. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 324p. $95.00, cloth, $35.99 paper. In recent decades the study of social phenomena has been characterized by the increasing specialization of academic subdisciplines. At the same time, social science has had great difficulty in accounting for instances of systemic failure that chall…
Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin's Russia: Legitimating Authoritarianism in a Postideological Era
The Putin-Medvedev transition reveals the continuing inability of post-Soviet Russian leaders to arrive at any consensual notion of Russia's national identity around which ordinary forms of legitimate domination might be constructed. In searching for an answer to the problem of leadership succession during his second term as president, Vladimir Putin tried out all three of the classical types of legitimate domination that Max Weber defined-the tr…
The Founding of the French Third Republic
The story of how France became a consolidated democracy after its defeat and occupation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 has received little attention from students of comparative democratization. It is difficult to understand why. The case is of obvious historical significance: the Third Republic was the first stable electoral democracy with universal male suffrage on the European continent, and its example inspired republicans throughout Euro…
Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia
This book examines the causal impact of ideology through a comparative-historical analysis of three cases of 'post-imperial democracy': the early Third Republic in France (1870–86); the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–34); and post-Soviet Russia (1992–2008). Hanson argues that political ideologies are typically necessary for the mobilization of enduring, independent national party organizations in uncertain democracies. By presenting an explicit…
Post-Imperial Democracies: Conceptual and Theoretical Issues
Soviet Studies, National Security and the Production of “Useful” Knowledge: A Discussion of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts
Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480p. $34.95. Know Your Enemy is a sociology of knowledge of the rise of post–World War II Russian and Soviet Studies, written by intellectual historian David C. Engerman. While it is not a work of political science, it offers an important historical analysis of a foundational episode in the history of the political scien…
The Founding of the French Third Republic
How France became a consolidated democracy after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 has received little attention from students of comparative democratization. Contrary to earlier structural theories, the French case shows that in periods of high social uncertainty, political elites with clear ideological visions of the future have a strategic advantage over their more “pragmatic” opponents. Clear and consistent ideologies can solve the collective a…
The Uncertain Future of Russia's Weak State Authoritarianism
The policies of President Vladimir Putin have undermined Russia's fledging democratic institutions but have also failed to generate any sort of coherent authoritarianism to take their place. Thus, fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR, the country still lacks any consensus about its basic principles of state legitimacy. To explain this, we must understand the ways in which the Soviet Union's institutional legacies have short-circuited all …
Rationality, Structure, and Agency in Post-Soviet Russian Democratization
Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and a…
Postimperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia
Post-Soviet Russia, the early Third Republic in France, and the Weimar Republic in Germany can be understood as cases of “postimperial democracy”—a situation in which a new democratic regime emerges in the core of a former empire that has suddenly collapsed and where democratic elections continue for at least a decade. However, the regimes consolidated in these cases—republican democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state aut…
NCEEER and the Ellison Center: A Breakthrough Initiative for the Field of Eurasian and East European Studies
Rebuilding Russian Studies
Regime Type and Diffusion in Comparative Politics Methodology
In recent years, several prominent political scientists have argued that quantitative and qualitative methodologies should be seen as united by a single logic of scientific inference. Just exactly how this reconciliation of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches should be effected in practice, however, remains highly contentious. For all its promise, the project of uniting quantitative and qualitative methods in political science …
Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages
Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages. By Debra Javeline. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 312p. $60.00. Why, in the face of massive delays in the payment of wages throughout the Russian Federation during the 1990s, did so few Russian workers engage in organized protest? This empirical puzzle has important implications not only for understanding how the fragile post-Soviet regime managed to endure m…
Margaret Levi: Institutions, Individuals, Organizations, and Trust in Democratic Regimes
For a generation of political scientists witnessing dramatic declines in social and political participation and rising distrust in government at all levels, APSA President Margaret Levi's research program addresses fundamental issues concerning the bases for and effects of legitimacy, compliance, and consent in democratic regimes. Levi's scholarship has made pioneering contributions to understanding enduring questions about the conditions for and…
Reform and Revolution in the Late Soviet Context
Stephen Hanson points out that there is little to no agreement among contemporary scholars concerning either the predictability of the Soviet collapse or its underlying causes; between the untenable determinism Cohen rightly attacks and Cohen's own extreme "possibilism" are many quite sensible intermediate positions. Once this is recognized, the real question becomes at what point, exacdy, were Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet system likely to l…
From Culture to Ideology in Comparative Politics
The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change
Analysts of democratization and marketization in post-Communist societies have tended to treat the countries of the former Soviet bloc as an undifferentiated whole, hindering successful theorizing about the sources of institutional change in particular cases. In this light, Ken Jowitt's insightful argument about the deleterious effects of the Leninist legacy in Eastern Europe must be refined in two ways. First, the degree of proximity of differen…
The Weimar/Russia Comparison
Research methodology in the information age: A comparison of two survey techniques.Survey research started in the 1930's when the "big three" pioneer commercial polling organizations went door to door gathering data to predict presidential elections, women's rights, or other timely topics of interest (Glenn, 1995).Seventy years later, as we enter the 21st century, technology has propelled survey research into new arenas of data collection.What wa…
Postimperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia
Post-Soviet Russia, the early Third Republic in France, and the Weimar Republic in Germany can be understood as cases of “postimperial democracy”—a situation in which a new democratic regime emerges in the core of a former empire that has suddenly collapsed and where democratic elections continue for at least a decade. However, the regimes consolidated in these cases—republican democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state aut…
Understanding the Global Patrimonial Wave
The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of patrimonial rule not only in the developing world but also, more surprisingly, in the developed West. This resurgence carries potentially dire consequences for responding to a range of pressing problems. Understanding the sources of contemporary patrimonialism is hindered by assimilating the phenomenon into the familiar democracy/autocracy typology or by assuming that it is a function of failed modern…
Plebiscitarian Patrimonialism in Putin's Russia: Legitimating Authoritarianism in a Postideological Era
The Putin-Medvedev transition reveals the continuing inability of post-Soviet Russian leaders to arrive at any consensual notion of Russia's national identity around which ordinary forms of legitimate domination might be constructed. In searching for an answer to the problem of leadership succession during his second term as president, Vladimir Putin tried out all three of the classical types of legitimate domination that Max Weber defined-the tr…
The Uncertain Future of Russia's Weak State Authoritarianism
The policies of President Vladimir Putin have undermined Russia's fledging democratic institutions but have also failed to generate any sort of coherent authoritarianism to take their place. Thus, fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR, the country still lacks any consensus about its basic principles of state legitimacy. To explain this, we must understand the ways in which the Soviet Union's institutional legacies have short-circuited all …
Regime Type and Diffusion in Comparative Politics Methodology
In recent years, several prominent political scientists have argued that quantitative and qualitative methodologies should be seen as united by a single logic of scientific inference. Just exactly how this reconciliation of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches should be effected in practice, however, remains highly contentious. For all its promise, the project of uniting quantitative and qualitative methods in political science …
The Evolution of Regimes: What Can Twenty-Five Years of Post-Soviet Change Teach Us
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the collapse of the USSR naturally provokes us to reflect on the course of Eurasian and world history in the post-communist era. Upon closer examination, however, it is not clear what significance the precise time span of two and a half decades has for the scientific study of political and institutional change. A review of the social science literature indicates that we are very far from having any consensual under…
Weasel Words and the Analysis of “Postcommunist” Politics: A Symposium
A weasel word is a term used in academic or political discourse whose meaning is so imprecise or badly defined that it impedes the formulation of coherent thought on the subject to which it is applied, or leads to unsubstantiated conclusions. In this symposium we consider several key terms central to the study of postcommunist politics and discuss the extent to which they fall into this category. The terms discussed here include regime terminolog…
Paths to Uncivil Societies and Anti-Liberal States: A Reply to Shenfield
The Founding of the French Third Republic
How France became a consolidated democracy after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 has received little attention from students of comparative democratization. Contrary to earlier structural theories, the French case shows that in periods of high social uncertainty, political elites with clear ideological visions of the future have a strategic advantage over their more “pragmatic” opponents. Clear and consistent ideologies can solve the collective a…
Rationality, Structure, and Agency in Post-Soviet Russian Democratization
Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and a…
From Culture to Ideology in Comparative Politics
Rebuilding Russian Studies
Social theory and the post-Soviet crisis
The collapse of the Soviet Union has made a thoroughgoing reassessment of the theoretical orientations of Sovietology and post-Sovietology indispensable. Without an analysis of what went wrong in standard approaches within the former field of Soviet studies, we are unlikely to build any scholarly consensus about how to analyse the turbulent post-Soviet milieu. This essay argues that one crucial theoretical issue remained unresolved in all major b…
Ideology, uncertainty and the rise of anti‐system parties in post‐communist Russia
Despite widespread Western expectations that post‐communist politicians in Russia would become increasingly ‘pragmatic’ as a result of the failure of Marxism‐Leninism, the leaders of Russia's two best‐organized parties continue to rely on extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories in order to mobilize support. This phenomenon is poorly explained by the three major theories of post‐communist party formation, none of which sees party ideology as ex…
Reform and Revolution in the Late Soviet Context
Stephen Hanson points out that there is little to no agreement among contemporary scholars concerning either the predictability of the Soviet collapse or its underlying causes; between the untenable determinism Cohen rightly attacks and Cohen's own extreme "possibilism" are many quite sensible intermediate positions. Once this is recognized, the real question becomes at what point, exacdy, were Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet system likely to l…
The Charismatic Bond: Political Behavior in Time of Crisis
The Leninist Legacy and Institutional Change
Analysts of democratization and marketization in post-Communist societies have tended to treat the countries of the former Soviet bloc as an undifferentiated whole, hindering successful theorizing about the sources of institutional change in particular cases. In this light, Ken Jowitt's insightful argument about the deleterious effects of the Leninist legacy in Eastern Europe must be refined in two ways. First, the degree of proximity of differen…
Social theory and the post-Soviet crisis
The collapse of the Soviet Union has made a thoroughgoing reassessment of the theoretical orientations of Sovietology and post-Sovietology indispensable. Without an analysis of what went wrong in standard approaches within the former field of Soviet studies, we are unlikely to build any scholarly consensus about how to analyse the turbulent post-Soviet milieu. This essay argues that one crucial theoretical issue remained unresolved in all major b…
Analyzing Post-communist Economic Change: A Review Essay
Can Europe Work? Germany and the Reconstruction of Postcommunist Societies
IntroductionPART ONE: THE PAST & FUTURE OF NATIONALISM & NATIONAL IDENTITYNationalism in Western and Eastern Europe ComparedThe Role of Nationalism in East European Latecomers to DemocracyThe Polish Roman Catholic Church Unbound: Change of Face or Change of Context?PART TWO: GERMANY: NEW CORE OR OLD PROBLEM?United Germany as the Renewed Center in Europe: Continuity and Change in the German QuestionGerman Economic Penetration in East Central Europ…
The Weimar/Russia Comparison
Research methodology in the information age: A comparison of two survey techniques.Survey research started in the 1930's when the "big three" pioneer commercial polling organizations went door to door gathering data to predict presidential elections, women's rights, or other timely topics of interest (Glenn, 1995).Seventy years later, as we enter the 21st century, technology has propelled survey research into new arenas of data collection.What wa…
Ideology, uncertainty and the rise of anti‐system parties in post‐communist Russia
Despite widespread Western expectations that post‐communist politicians in Russia would become increasingly ‘pragmatic’ as a result of the failure of Marxism‐Leninism, the leaders of Russia's two best‐organized parties continue to rely on extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories in order to mobilize support. This phenomenon is poorly explained by the three major theories of post‐communist party formation, none of which sees party ideology as ex…
Paths to Uncivil Societies and Anti-Liberal States: A Reply to Shenfield
The Dilemmas of Russia's Anti-Revolutionary Revolution
Had Western observers understood the truly revolutionary nature of communism's collapse and its aftermath, the crisis-ridden and often violent nature of Russian politics in the post-Soviet era would have come as far less of a shock. Why did we make the mistake of thinking that Russian ‘reform’ could unfold through ordinary, not extraordinary, means
Viewpoints
Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy
Why did the wave of democracy that swept the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe starting more than a decade ago develop in ways unexpected by observers who relied on existing theories of democracy? In Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy, four distinguished scholars conduct the first major assessment of democratization theory in light of the experience of postcommunist states. Richard Anderson, Steven Fish, Stephen Hanson, and Philip Roe…
From Culture to Ideology in Comparative Politics
Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages
Protest and the Politics of Blame: The Russian Response to Unpaid Wages. By Debra Javeline. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 312p. $60.00. Why, in the face of massive delays in the payment of wages throughout the Russian Federation during the 1990s, did so few Russian workers engage in organized protest? This empirical puzzle has important implications not only for understanding how the fragile post-Soviet regime managed to endure m…
Margaret Levi: Institutions, Individuals, Organizations, and Trust in Democratic Regimes
For a generation of political scientists witnessing dramatic declines in social and political participation and rising distrust in government at all levels, APSA President Margaret Levi's research program addresses fundamental issues concerning the bases for and effects of legitimacy, compliance, and consent in democratic regimes. Levi's scholarship has made pioneering contributions to understanding enduring questions about the conditions for and…
Reform and Revolution in the Late Soviet Context
Stephen Hanson points out that there is little to no agreement among contemporary scholars concerning either the predictability of the Soviet collapse or its underlying causes; between the untenable determinism Cohen rightly attacks and Cohen's own extreme "possibilism" are many quite sensible intermediate positions. Once this is recognized, the real question becomes at what point, exacdy, were Gorbachev's reforms of the Soviet system likely to l…
NCEEER and the Ellison Center: A Breakthrough Initiative for the Field of Eurasian and East European Studies
Rebuilding Russian Studies
Regime Type and Diffusion in Comparative Politics Methodology
In recent years, several prominent political scientists have argued that quantitative and qualitative methodologies should be seen as united by a single logic of scientific inference. Just exactly how this reconciliation of quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches should be effected in practice, however, remains highly contentious. For all its promise, the project of uniting quantitative and qualitative methods in political science …
Postimperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia
Post-Soviet Russia, the early Third Republic in France, and the Weimar Republic in Germany can be understood as cases of “postimperial democracy”—a situation in which a new democratic regime emerges in the core of a former empire that has suddenly collapsed and where democratic elections continue for at least a decade. However, the regimes consolidated in these cases—republican democracy in France, Nazi dictatorship in Germany, and weak state aut…
The Uncertain Future of Russia's Weak State Authoritarianism
The policies of President Vladimir Putin have undermined Russia's fledging democratic institutions but have also failed to generate any sort of coherent authoritarianism to take their place. Thus, fifteen years after the collapse of the USSR, the country still lacks any consensus about its basic principles of state legitimacy. To explain this, we must understand the ways in which the Soviet Union's institutional legacies have short-circuited all …
Rationality, Structure, and Agency in Post-Soviet Russian Democratization
Why, more than 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and after repeated elections at both the regional and national levels, has post-Soviet Russia slid back into authoritarianism? Given the increasingly tense relations between the Kremlin and the West, this is a question of growing geopolitical importance. Analyzing it also turns out to be immensely fruitful for sharpening our theoretical understanding of the sources of democracy and a…
The Founding of the French Third Republic
The story of how France became a consolidated democracy after its defeat and occupation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 has received little attention from students of comparative democratization. It is difficult to understand why. The case is of obvious historical significance: the Third Republic was the first stable electoral democracy with universal male suffrage on the European continent, and its example inspired republicans throughout Euro…
Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia
This book examines the causal impact of ideology through a comparative-historical analysis of three cases of 'post-imperial democracy': the early Third Republic in France (1870–86); the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918–34); and post-Soviet Russia (1992–2008). Hanson argues that political ideologies are typically necessary for the mobilization of enduring, independent national party organizations in uncertain democracies. By presenting an explicit…
Post-Imperial Democracies: Conceptual and Theoretical Issues
Soviet Studies, National Security and the Production of “Useful” Knowledge: A Discussion of Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts
Know Your Enemy: The Rise and Fall of America's Soviet Experts. By David C. Engerman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. 480p. $34.95. Know Your Enemy is a sociology of knowledge of the rise of post–World War II Russian and Soviet Studies, written by intellectual historian David C. Engerman. While it is not a work of political science, it offers an important historical analysis of a foundational episode in the history of the political scien…
Political science (35 works) · Law (28 works) · Politics (27 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Political economy (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Economics (12 works) · Democracy (11 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (11 works) · Russia and Soviet political economy (10 works)