In Pursuit of Liberalism. International Institutions in Postcommunist Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rachel A. Epstein. In Pursuit of Liberalism. International Institutions in Postcommunist Europe. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008. xiv, 261 pp. Notes. References. Index. $55.00, cloth.In Pursuit of Liberalism seeks to explain the varied success of institutional change across the region previously shaded from the liberal world by the Iron Curtain. The argument builds upon a theme dominating comparative politics by asking: Do international institutions have greater success in places undergoing transition? Epstein makes clear that actors - not institutions - determine the outcomes of change and, as such, international organizations, nation-states and policymakers should be seen as decision-makers with their own, at times inconsistent, agendas. The point, however, does not come to bear largely due to problems concerning the wrapping of this argument.First, Epstein provides an extensive compendium of facts about postcommunist change in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine. However, her discussion fails to engage the reader and allow one to follow the narrative from one section to another. Highly fragmented to accommodate a case-by-case, within a hypothesis-by-hypothesis discussion, it does not make the material more accessible. It appears that the author herself was indecisive about how to link different case- study developments into an overall argument. The argument is little but a patchwork of four chapters, each dedicated to an issue area and drawn upon the four country specific circumstances. Within each chapter, meticulous documentation of indicators speaks volumes about the trajectories of institutional reforms, but it equally reveals the author's uncommitted effort to link these to an implied choice of liberalism.Second, poor mechanics in the argument make it hard to distil the contribution of this excellently researched monograph to the literature of comparative politics. This reviewer decided to read the book backwards after struggling through the detail of postcommunist institutional change making up the bulk of the volume. Epstein introduces her point of departure in the introduction and chapter 1, yet all of the major implications of this debate remain inaccessible throughout the four substantive chapters. It is only in the conclusion that the research hypotheses are clearly spelt out, the theoretical debate is re-introduced, and the implications are made clear. Unfortunate design makes the welcome discussion of institutional condition ality, actor socialization, path dependence, domestic opportunity structure and politicking hard to digest. Had the discussion been moved from the conclusion to an earlier section of the book, institutionalism's shortcomings could have been made more explicit throughout, thereby allowing for bolder conclusions about the cases, issues and stakes studied. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".