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This article makes a plea for a more explicitly intentional and politicalstrategic analysis of post-communist public policy pathways. The author analyses a set of social and labour-market policies implemented in the Czech Republic (pro-active job loss prevention) compared to Hungary and Poland (large-scale non-elderly retirement), and indicates why, far from being fully constrained by structural or external variables or by international pressures, political elites were able to design policy packages that served to reduce anti-reform protests. Once enacted at a formative historical turning point, these early policies fundamentally reshaped the subsequent operational space of post-communist politics throughout the 1990s. They crystallised the distinct pathways of post-communist welfare regimes, and they enabled early, and irreversible, democratic and market reform progress. While seemingly inefficient, and definitely costly in public-finance terms, these policy packages contained a degree of political rationality, as they contributed to the making of the great Czech, Hungarian, and Polish transition success stories, in an otherwise highly heterogeneous population of postcommunist transition cases.

Starts out by documenting the massive scale of early, and disability, retirement in Hungary and Poland, during the first seven years of the post‐communist transition. Sums up that the Hungarian and Polish governments had urgent reasons to design social policies to try to halt the danger of large‐scale protests in the 1990s.

The article reviews four recent economic books on efficiency in democracy. Special emphasis is given to two ambitious competing approaches: Mancur Olson's theory of encompassing interests and Donald Wittman's Myth of Democratic Failure. It is argued that the thesis that democracy should generally be presumed to be efficient is problematic in several respects. Sweeping conclusions are reached by virtue of a superficial application of economic analogies, which abstracts away many crucial characteristics of democratic politics, such as information imperfections, weak incentive structures, and collective action failures. The basic explanation for efficient outcomes may have more to do with the size of rulers' stakes in the economy than with voluntary Coasean bargaining.