While there is much research on the developmental trajectories of post-Communist state institutions and the external and domestic influences that have shaped their paths, much less is known about institutional performance, that is, the manner in which institutions operate and the extent to which they produce predictable patterns of effects. Academic analysis has been reluctant to shift attention from institutionalisation to effects, not least because of the fluidity of many formal institutions. The present article documents that over the last decade state institutions in East Central Europe have increasingly stabilized, especially at the macro-institutional level. The analysis highlights insights from institutional theory – notably how degrees, time, preferences and resources matter – to encourage further research in the field.

The impact of political institutions on policy performance has been a major research question in studies of advanced democracies. This study analyzes the effects of institutions and political actors on economic, social and environmental policies in ten Central Eastern European countries from 1995 to 2004. Using time-series-cross section (TSCS) regression analysis, this study shows that the impact of institutional veto players on policy output is more significant than international pressure. Moreover, the communist legacy has a much higher effect on policy output than expected.

This paper considers the effects of fiscal governance in Central and East European countries 1998–2008. The first part makes predictions about which form of fiscal governance fits which form of government. Under multi-party coalition governments, fiscal contracts where governments make political commitments to multi-annual fiscal plans work well. In countries where two political blocks face off against one another, delegation based around a strong finance ministry should be most effective. The second part examines electoral and party systems, which affect the form of government in place. The third part documents norms, rules, and institutions in place. The final section considers the joint effects of fiscal governance on fiscal outcomes. On balance, the underlying political climate is crucial for determining what types of fiscal norms, institutions, and rules function best. The more countries diverge from their expected form of fiscal governance, the greater the increase in a country's debt burden.

Relying on social choice theory, this paper argues that uncertainty regarding future public policies is likely to be related to party institutionalization and legislative organization. The argument is evaluated using survey data from businesses in eight EU member states in East Central Europe. It finds that firms report lower concern over policy uncertainty in systems with higher party institutionalization. There is also some evidence, although less robust, that restrictive parliamentary agenda control leads to lower perceptions of policy uncertainty and this effect mediates the influence of party institutionalization. These results tend to hold if one controls for the effect of other national and firm-level factors.

Given far-reaching changes in the legal systems of East Central Europe since the mid-1990s, one might expect administrative court judges to have modified the way in which they decide cases, in particular by embracing less formalistic adjudication strategies. Relying on an original dataset of over one thousand business-related cases from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, this article shows that – despite some variation across countries and time – judges have largely failed to respond to the incentives contained in the new constitutional frameworks. They continue to adopt the most-locally-applicable-rule approach and are reluctant to apply general principles of law or to rely on Dworkinian ‘policies’ in deciding hard cases. The analysis links these weak institutional effects to the role of constitutional courts, case overload and educational legacies.

This article compares the performance of state institutions and compliance with EU law in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. The public institutions highlighted are of crucial relevance when it comes to enforcing EU social standards and include the court and legal systems as well as labour inspectorates and equal treatment authorities. Expert and practitioner assessments point to major shortcomings in their institutional performance. The procedural compliance pattern to which these shortcomings give rise closely resembles that found by previous studies in some Western European countries, notably Ireland and Italy. Thus, the four countries examined here fall within a ‘world of dead letters’ as far as their compliance with EU law is concerned. In this ‘world’, EU directives tend to be transposed in a politicised mode (although so far, this happened rather timely and correctly) and there is frequent non-compliance at the later stages of monitoring and enforcement.

In the last decade regulatory reforms have focused increasingly on efforts to improve regulatory quality. As part of that development policymakers have been encouraged to consider fiscal, socio-economic and administrative effects of proposed legislation when making policy choices. The Central and East European EU member states have adopted regulatory impact analysis (RIA) mechanisms but so far there has been little analysis of their implementation. This article first compares the manner in which RIAs have been institutionalised in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. Second, it explores how differences in institutionalisation have affected RIA performance. The paper concludes that there are marked differences in the RIA quality across Central and Eastern Europe, notably as a consequence of national differences in institutional and administrative contexts and capacities.