| dc.description.abstract | 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Post-Communist region has displayed substantial diversity in terms of institutional choice. To explain institutional variation, a common assumption, for example articulated by Acemoglu and Robinson (2012), Olson(1993), Svolik (2012), and Frye (1997), is that power-balanced institutions and constrained executives are the results of competition between elites. This competition leaves political power dispersed, thereby prohibiting autocratic consolidation. The aim of this thesis is to exploit historical data of non-regulated elite contestation operationalized as regime change to assess its proposed effect on modern power-balanced institutions. As an area, the Post-Communist world is interesting because of the diverse paths the countries have taken since the fall of the Soviet Union. Methodologically, it is useful because the region-specific sample reduces heterogeneity and susceptibility to omitted variable bias, again increasing the plausibility of causal interpretation of results. I find that my operationalization of non-regulated contestation performs exceedingly well as a predictor of constraints on the executive in a multitude of OLS and Tobit model specifications. The robustness of the predictor persists through an array of sub-regional controls, alternative explanatory and dependent variable specifications, and when trying to account for the proposed endogeneity of contestation. Hence, I establish empirical support for the effect of non-regulated contestation on constrained executives. | nob |