Les elites politiques dans le postcommunisme. Quelques jalons analytiques
The political elites in the postcommunisme. Some analytical jalons

Summary/Abstract: The main argument of this article is that we can better understand the change or continuity in the way of conceiving politics and public policies in the Central and Eastern European Countries after 1989 by appealing to classical elite theories, combined with an approach that takes into consideration the social and intellectual trajectory of the members of the elites. Thus, we propose some analytical building blocks that can lead to the construction of a model which includes elite theories refined by some concepts taken from Pierre Bourdieu. The latter might clarify some problems of path dependency through the insight they bring into the way of thinking of political elites, which is marked by the habitus they acquired during the communist years. The three main corpuses of literature that contribute to this model are the classical elite theories, the theories on the formations of post-communist elites and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. We will briefly review this literature, in order to see how it can be applied to the contemporary political landscape of Central and Eastern Europe.

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