Historical legacies only matter causally if they persist, transmit, and show consistent effects.

Evidence

If communist legacies are defined as the patterns of behavior, cognition, and organization with roots in the authoritarian regime that persist despite a change in the conditions that gave rise to them, three separate tests assess the impact of a given legacy on post-1989 party development. First, does the party consistently exhibit the given behavior or organizational pattern? If it does not, a “legacy” explanation becomes a tenuous and wishful description of what might have happened rather than a specification of an actual causal factor. The imprecision inherent in some of the existing accounts of the “Leninist legacy” has led to unwarranted assumptions – for example, many so-called sociological legacies of communism turned out on closer inspection to be short-term responses. … Second, can we identify a transmission mechanism? Some structural, individual, or ideational means must be discernible for the legacy to affect the party directly. Many of the mechanisms of replication and transmission of the legacies of the socialist regimes have remained underspecified. Both critics and advocates of the legacy-centered approach seemed to assume that inertia or a nearly “automatic” replication will continue to make legacies relevant, but have not taken into consideration either a dynamic or a deliberate element. While legacies without an identifiable transmission mechanism may appear, they do not lend themselves easily to a systematic analysis. … Third, does a given pattern persist until the political disjuncture, such as the regime collapse of 1989? If it does not, such a legacy is less likely to affect subsequent political development directly. This concern with persistence further implies that it is necessary to trace when, if ever, the legacies stop being relevant, and what determines why some are more tenacious than others. Despite their concern with the past, many students of the historical influences on the political status quo have not taken into account the time horizons, or the political “half-lives,” of a given political legacy. Yet some inheritances from the old regime, such as a distorted price system, can disappear immediately, while others, such as patterns of labor relations, can continue for much longer periods of time. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 129

Categorization

• DEFINE: Operationalizes the legacy concept via three falsifiable tests, giving the reader a rigorous analytic standard.
• XREF: connects to: History changes only through historical means, not eternal truths — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 261; Regime legacies persist independently of the conditions that created them; Institutional legacies persist after the conditions that produced them vanish — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 106

Broader Connections

• Institutional legacies persist after the conditions that produced them vanish #corroborates (0.85) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 106
• History changes only through historical means, not eternal truths #qualifies (0.75) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 261
• Regime legacies persist independently of the conditions that created them #contradicts (0.72)