Public lecture “The Puzzle of the Baltic States’ Democratic Resilience: The Evolution of the Party System as a Missing Link,”

On 11 June 2025, the OSCE Academy hosted an online public lecture on “The Puzzle of the Baltic States’ Democratic Resilience: The Evolution of the Party System as a Missing Link,” by Dr. Liutauras Gudžinskas, Associate Professor at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. The event was opened by Dr. Pal Dunay, Director of the OSCE Academy, who welcomed the lecturer and the audience. Dr. Dunay expressed his excitement to see the three Baltic states “being examples for everybody,” despite their “relatively disadvantageous past,” because “they thwarted democratic backsliding” by eliminating corruption and establishing defence measures, etc. Dr. Gudžinskas started his presentation with a compelling reflection on political science, drawing connections with natural science, such as biology, where “social systems, like states, societies, organizations—objects of analysis political science—change, adapt, and evolve,” and where “the whole development, evolution”—of “political process, in general”—is unpredictable or “open-ended.” Thus, after the collapse of the USSR, countries took on “different evolutionary paths.” Dr. Gudžinskas “puzzled” the post-communist transformation of the Baltic states using the categories of post-communist transformation factors as structural, institutional, and interactional—each shaped by time and space—and used it to analyze the Baltic states’ democratic resilience despite neoliberalism and high inequality.

He emphasized that structural factors, such as the Baltic states’ “interwar independence and pre-Soviet modernization,” played a crucial role, noting that “only the three Baltic countries have managed to achieve this with a few decades of independence,” which shaped “a very distinct political identity of these societies.” He also highlighted spatial dimensions like Nordic proximity and the drive for decolonization from Russia as key motivators behind their swift Westernization. Institutional reforms, driven in part by EU conditionality, helped solidify democratic norms, but Dr. Gudžinskas stressed the often-overlooked importance of interactional factors: how strategic actors “interact with each other in daily politics” and make decisions that shape the path of their societies. “General analysis focuses on structural and institutional factors, but much less on interactional factors,” and suggested that future research—and democratic reform—must pay greater attention to this dynamic level of political agency.

Dr. Liutauras Gudžinskas visited the OSCE Academy through the Horizon 2020 staff exchange project “MOCCA: Multilevel Orders of Corruption in Central Asia,” led by Lund University. As part of this collaboration, the OSCE Academy serves as a Central Asian project partner, supporting Dr. Gudžinskas’ research on the role of trade unions in promoting good governance and the rule of law.

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