Valerie Jane Bunce is an American political scientist, currently the Aaron Binenkorb Professor of International Studies and a Professor of Government at Cornell University. She studies democratization, international democratic movements, ethnic politics, and governance in communist and post-communist states.
Education and early career
Bunce obtained her BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Michigan.[1] She earned her BA in political science and psychology in 1970, and her MA and PhD in 1973 and 1976, respectively, both in political science.[2]
Bunce has been the solo author of two books. Her first book, Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy Under Capitalism and Socialism, was released in 1981. Bunce argued that both communist and democratic countries exhibited a similar cycle of policy innovation, in which rapid policy innovations occur whenever a new leader assumes power, followed by a period of incremental or no change until the next leadership transition.[3][4] Thomas Baylis noted that an important corollary of this theory is that secession crises in Communist regimes therefore must serve a functionalist purpose, which he viewed as a counterintuitive but fundamental claim.[5]
Bunce's second book, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Collapse of Socialism and the State, was published in 1999. Bunce explains the near-simultaneous collapse of Europe's major communist regimes in terms of their fundamental designs: that they necessarily divided the powerful and strengthened those without power, while also hampering economic performance, a design which was exacerbated by the particular context of the 1980s.[6] In a review written in 2000, Michael Bernhard called Subversive Institutions one of the two "most important books on developments in Europe east of the Elbe since 1989",[7] while Robert Legvold wrote that it "tackles the transcendent questions of an age" with impressive brevity.[6]
In addition to highly cited[8] journal articles in venues like Comparative Political Studies[9] and World Politics,[10] Bunce was also a coauthor of the book Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (2011) and a co-editor of Democracy and Authoritarianism in the Postcommunist World (2009).[2]
^ abcd"Valerie Jane Bunce". Cornell University Department of Government. 2019. Retrieved 27 January 2020.
^Genovese, Michael A. (10 January 1982). "Review of Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy under Capitalism and Socialism". Political Science Quarterly. 97 (3): 540–541. doi:10.2307/2150031.
^Breslauer, George W. (1 October 1982). "Review of Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy under Capitalism and Socialism". The Russian Review. 41 (4): 502–503. doi:10.2307/129878.
^Baylis, Thomas A. (March 1983). "Review of Do New Leaders Make a Difference? Executive Succession and Public Policy under Capitalism and Socialism". American Political Science Review. 77 (1): 230–231. doi:10.2307/1956059.
^ abLegvold, Robert (1 July 1999). "Review of Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State". Foreign Affairs. 78 (4): 142. doi:10.2307/20049413.
^Bernhard, Michael (6 January 2000). "Review of Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State". The American Political Science Review. 94 (2): 473–475. doi:10.2307/2586057.
^Bunce, Valerie (1 September 2000). "Comparative Democratization: Big and Bounded Generalizations". Comparative Political Studies. 33 (6–7): 703–734. doi:10.1177/001041400003300602.
^Bunce, Valerie (January 2003). "Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience". World Politics. 55 (2): 167–192. doi:10.1353/wp.2003.0010.
