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Across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, an intense debate has ensued over
the last decade and a half regarding what tasks the state should and should not take up in
economic, social and political life. Over-stretching the state, undoubtedly, brought about the
recent crises in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet, merely shrinking the state’s role in society
may not be a magic panacea, either. For if the state fails to function well, the dual transitions to
democracy and market capitalism are in danger of being derailed.
It is clear that a state need not be as big as in Soviet times in order to fulfill essential
tasks and to provide basic public goods. Yet, regardless of how one defines the appropriate
limits of the state sector, one must question whether a state is capable of doing what it sets out to
do. Why, in fact, have some transitional states been more effective in administering policy than
others at certain times?
To begin to answer this question, I have turned to Poland and Russia in my dissertation,
and asked why has the Polish state possessed a capacity to function in ways that other former
communist states including Russia have been less capable of so doing. Specifically, in an earlier
part of my work, I have asked why has Poland been able to implement tax reforms during a time
of transition in such a way that tax collection rates are moderately successful whereas Russia’s
tax collection has been erratic and plagued by mounting tax arrears. That conclusion was that
the extraction of revenue from society depends upon economic conditions as well as a mixture of
bureaucratic rationalism on the part of the state and social compliance on the part of society.
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Here I examine, by contrast, the distribution of social welfare payments—another post-
communist state activity that along with the tax system has required the creation of new
bureaucracies. The fact that the distribution of benefits, such as childcare and unemployment
benefits, does not require the same level of social compliance that paying taxes does and the fact
1
Berenson, Marc P., “Re-Creating the State: Tax Governance in Poland and Russia,” 2004.
Convention