Formal and Informal Institutional Change: The Experience of Postsocialist Transformation (Report‪)‬

1. Introduction The wide-ranging experiences of post-socialist transformation in about 30 countries during the 1990s and 2000s have led to a number of surprises and puzzles for the social sciences. Two stylized facts of transformation are the striking diversity of national paths of change and the general importance of informal relations and rules, even though the process of system change from socialism to capitalism has generally been understood as a process of rationalization and formalization.