The Succession Connection: Policy Cycles and Political Change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This article tests whether economic policy in the Soviet bloc follows a cycle of change in which more mass-oriented policies rise on the agenda after a succession crisis and then fall once the succession is resolved. Changes in investment and budgetary priorities, growth rates of personal income and consumption, and finally, changes in elite rhetoric and policy pronouncements over time all support the existence of a succession cycle in economic priorities. This suggests that the mass publics do influence—albeit indirectly—the policy process in socialist states, and that chief executives change their priorities over the course of their administrations as different clienteles line up at the trough and different constraints develop. There is, then, a structural component to economic decision making in the Soviet bloc, and that component seems to be similar to the one that operates in the West—that is, the desire of politicians to expand their power and remain in office, and their willingness to use economic policy to achieve those ends.