Prospects for democratic regime change in Cuba and Belarus civil society and political culture

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - Political systems in general and in comparison, grade: 1,3, Vilnius University, language: English, abstract: This thesis studies the prospects for democratic transition in Cuba and Belarus. The theoretical part argues that civil society is an important variable in transition theory and a necessary condition for democratic transition. It furthermore argues that in relation with the political culture of one society and the respective type of regime present in one country it is decisive for a successful democratization. Therefore the theoretical framework to study democratic transition should be widened from elites to masses and from a short term perspective to a long term one. This is somewhat different from other studies that concentrate on structural factors like economic development, economic crisis or international influence to explain democratic transition.
This thesis undertakes a qualitative comparative analysis of two nontransition cases, Belarus and Cuba, to avoid the selection bias of researching only successful cases of democratic transition and to solve the problem of not finding any individually necessary or jointly sufficient conditions for democratization. The aforementioned factors are analyzed for each case, comparing the main findings and drawing conclusions.
The analysis shows that the state of civil society in both countries can only be characterized as embryonic. In the case of Belarus the relatively good starting position of the embryonic civil society after the dissolution of the USSR was not used to strengthen itself. The civil society forces lost continuously support and strength and therefore the ability to fight for democratic transition. The weakness of the Belarusian civil society was therefore a factor that led to a stabilizing of the authoritarian regime.