Today, after more than two decades of democratization and economic liberalization in postsocialist Eastern Europe, one wonders at the extreme variation of its outcomes. Eastern European postsocialist pathways have led to results as different as democratic stability and economic development, on the one hand, and authoritarianism and economic backwardness, on the other; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU) membership coupled with vicious ethnic conflicts; and vibrant societies alongside painfully slow national revival. Research related to Eastern European democratization has developed along two divergent lines, one holding a mainly inward outlook, the other predominantly outward. Some of the most prominent theorists have attempted to explain Eastern European democratization by applying theories built to explain the Latin American transformations of the late 1970s and 1980s. Existing theories were well positioned for studying democratization, since its third wave originated in Latin America; adding Eastern European cases would give scholarly efforts a comparative advantage (Bunce 2003). As a consequence, work conducted during the early and mid-1990s was an extension of models built to explain the Latin American and South Asian experiences. The latter claimed universality by discounting the contextual background of the political transformation process and perceiving democratization theories as applicable to any world region. Therefore, explanatory models related to Eastern European democratization mimicked the dominant characteristic of 1980s democratization literature: an ahistorical approach to transition and democratization (Lijphart and Waisman 1996; Haggard and Kaufman 1995; Karl and Schmitter 1991; Przeworski 1991; Di Palma 1990).