ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the major methodological challenges faced in comparative studies on the emerging post-communist capitalism in Central and Eastern European countries. They are a derivative of the peculiar nature of the institutional endowment of these countries, being an outcome of systemic transformation and the command-economy legacy, and in broader terms, their path dependence. In the first part of the chapter the authors outline the main difficulties with a straightforward application of standard methodological frameworks in the specific conditions of former socialist countries. They also describe and substantiate the extensions and amendments made to this framework and explain the essence and details of the approach applied throughout the remaining chapters of the book. Against this background, in the second part of the chapter the authors provide justification for the choice of the research method and the dataset employed in the empirical part of the study and explain in particular the subspace clustering machine-learning technique.
