ABSTRACT
The passage of over ten years since the first fully competitive elections should have succeeded in putting the progress of democratization in post-communist Europe into clear perspective. Taking central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as a whole the progress of democratization can be outlined in basic terms fairly precisely. Of course academic appraisals are rarely very approbatory anyway; moreover, the status of democracy in CEE is itself still rather confused. The chapter reviews how far democratization has progressed in CEE in concrete terms, discusses some major points of contention that have arisen, and identifies the main conclusions from the debate so far. It shows how democratization has been viewed in the CEE context and the nature of the conceptual lens that have been deployed to chart developments in this area. CEE developments seem to show a less uniform regional pattern of democratization than Latin America or southern Europe.
