Legacies fade once cheaper alternatives consolidate after a regime collapses

Evidence

Second, disaggregating the legacies of communism into specific patterns of elite advancement, policy innovation, and societal negotiation also moves us beyond the assertion that “history matters” and instead shows us precisely how it did so. Even a collapsed and discredited regime leaves behind legacies that may not be readily visible, but that nevertheless exert a powerful influence on political development. Disaggregation also shows us when and why a given legacy stops influencing political developments – when it is no longer the “cheapest” way to orient decision making, as the new policies it has set into motion consolidate and are established enough to exert their own influence. Differentiating among the various inheritances of the communist era thus allows us to trace the dynamics of the linkages between two supposedly discrete regimes and eras. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks to the reader’s comparative question: communist successor parties that decayed versus those that survived — a legacy stops mattering when new paths become cheaper than the inherited template, implying survival depended on whether new institutional infrastructure replaced party habits. — connects to: Institutional legacies persist after the conditions that produced them vanish — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 106; A legacy stops shaping politics once newer routines become cheaper — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 372; Stabilized politics make direct legacy influence fade into structure — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 135 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: This is the mechanism for when threat-based solidarity decays — need to identify which parties had no cheap alternative and thus retained the legacy vs. those that built one.

Broader Connections

• A legacy stops shaping politics once newer routines become cheaper #corroborates (0.90) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 372
• Stabilized politics make direct legacy influence fade into structure #qualifies (0.75) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 135
• Outdated institutional partitions persist by tradition long after their logic expires #complicates (0.75) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1992