ABSTRACT
The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe have participated in elections for over a hundred years; most of them have participated in truly democratic elections for no more than twenty-five years. In the aftermath of the Second World War, communist regimes modelled on the Soviet Union emerged in Central and South Eastern Europe. Elections were regularly held under communism, but they were either entirely uncompetitive, as in the Soviet Union, or they involved effectively non-partisan choice, as in Yugoslavia. The first major shift in the post-communist move towards competitive elections involved the introduction of multi-party politics and the adoption of electoral systems suited to fostering political party development. The study of electoral malpractice in Eastern Europe received a boost from the series of 'colour revolutions' that ripped across the region in the early years of the twenty-first century. A potentially problematic characteristic of much of the Eastern European electoral studies literature is the assumption of geographically defined 'regions'.
