Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 2,0, Helmut Schmidt University - University of the Federal Armed Forces Hamburg (Politikwissenschaft), course: Political Systems of Central and Eastern Europe, language: English, abstract: The term paper aims to explain the varying level of democracy in the two post-Soviet countries Estonia and Lithuania. The topic is relevant due to the proximity of these countries to Russia, as well as the current trend of democratic backsliding across Central and Eastern Europe. The two particular cases were selected due to their overall similarity, as the paper pursues the most-similar system design. The theoretical framework first conceptualizes democracy, the dependent variable of the study. It proceeds to introduce some factors which might theoretically be responsible for the differing level of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe in general. The research design chapter describes the most-similar system design, introduces the index of democracy to be used in the empirical analysis, and lays out the steps of the empirical analysis. The empirical analysis first delivers the scores of the democracy index for the two countries, before evaluating the possible effect of various factors. The analysis finds that the decisive factors are political and not economic.
