"If Russia eventually reverts to a full-blown autocratic regime, it is not inconceivable that tension and competition once again will define Russian-American relations. At this critical moment in Russia's internal development, American foreign policy makers cannot afford to be disengaged."

This collection of essays is the result of a conference convened at Princeton University marking the ten year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some of the best minds in post-Soviet studies focused on the task of identifying in what ways the post-communist experience with transition has confirmed or confounded conventional theories of political and economic development. The result is a rich array of essays examining vital aspects of the transitional decade following the Soviet collapse and the comparative lessons learned.

This collection of essays explicitly tallies the gains and losses to post-Soviet countries of the last ten years as well as comparing the post-Soviet experience implicitly and explicitly with that of other developing countries. Each essay blends political science theory with fresh empirical analysis.

Creative destruction "revolutionises the economic structure from within," Joseph Schumpeter famously said, "incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." Innovation in business-new goods, new markets, new methods of production, new ways of organizing firms-is the "fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion" (Schumpeter, 1975, p. 82). Does the economy have enough flexibility? Are there barriers in the way of entrepreneurship? This paper develops a framework for quantifying creative destruction.

As democracy has spread over the past three decades to a majority of the world's states, analytic attention has turned increasingly from explaining regime transitions to evaluating and explaining the character of democratic regimes. Much of the democracy literature of the 1990s was concerned with the consolidation of democratic regimes. In recent years, social scientists as well as democracy practitioners and aid agencies have sought to develop means of framing and assessing the quality of democracy. This stream of theory, methodological innovation, and empirical research has three broad motives: first, that deepening democracy is a moral good, if not an imperative; second, that reforms to improve democratic quality are essential if democracy is to achieve the broad and durable legitimacy that marks consolidation; and third, that long-established democracies must also reform if they are to attend to their own gathering problems of public dissatisfaction and even disillusionment. In fact, these latter trends, the broad decline of public confidence in governmental and political institutions, the growing citizen alienation from political parties in particular, and the widespread perceptions that democratic governments and politicians are increasingly corrupt, self-interested and unresponsive are common to many democracies, new and old, and have even led prominent researchers to speak of a "crisis of democracy."