Getting Central and Eastern Europe Right? How Greater Academic Pluralism Would Improve Collective Knowledge-Building in Democratization Studies

Until a decade ago, the idea that Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had successfully democratized prevailed in political science. In the current context of democratic malaise, it has been argued that this “optimism” arose from the discipline’s privileging of more effusive positivist accounts over more cautious interpretivist accounts. Based on quantitative analysis of 500 papers about CEE published 2000-2015, we find cautious support for these claims. Positivist-leaning research categories predominate in higher-impact general journals, and some also correlate with optimistic conclusions about democratization. Conversely, more cautious findings correlate with interpretive-leaning research categories, these mostly confined to area studies journals.