title: Changes in Political Institutions and Party Systems
abstract: Institutional redesign constituted the essence of the vast program of post-communist transformation on which East Central Europeans embarked in 1989, after the political and economic structures of the “dictatorships of the people” had been completely discredited. The revolutions of 1989, whether velvet or bloody, showed that East Central Europeans knew exactly what they did not like: a regime dominated by one mass ideological party that was generally insulated from and often aloof to the demands