Twenty Years After: The Politics of Memory in Postcommunist Democracies

This paper proposes and tests an original theory on the politics of memory and commemoration.  It reports the results of a multi-authored work that explores the emergence of memory regimes in postcommunist democracies.  It explains the emergence of fractured, pillarized, or unified memory regimes during the commemoration of twentieth anniversary of the end of communism.  It uses the results of seventeen structured process-tracing narrative analyses to perform a Boolean analysis of the diverse outcomes.  We detect five different patterns of causal conditions, three that generate fractured memory regimes and two that produce either unified or pillarized memory regimes.