This article investigates the effects of social trust, both direct and mediated – via internal and external efficacy – on different forms of political participation in post-communist Lithuania. The relationship between social trust and participation features prominently in the social capital and civic culture literature, but little empirical evidence exists that supports it, especially in post-communist democracies. We use the Lithuanian National Elections Study 2012 to test our hypotheses and replicate our analysis with the European Social Survey waves of 2014 and 2016. Our results show that social trust increases turnout, because it is related to a sense of external efficacy, which in turn enhances the likelihood that people vote. There is, however, no association between social trust and being involved in other institutionalised politics, namely, working for a political party. Interestingly, we find a positive indirect effect for non-institutionalised political participation: social trust increases external efficacy, which in turn enhances protest behaviour. Overall, however, social trust does not lead to more protesting, because the former is at the same time positively related to political trust, which seems to decrease, rather than increase non-institutionalised participation. In sum, our findings demonstrate that explanations for political participation based on the core element of social capital – social trust – work out differently for different forms of political participation.

This paper discusses theoretical debates regarding small states and their foreign policy and also argues that research should include more analysis of small states’ identities and the dominant meanings related to being a small state. Using poststructuralistic theoretical perspective and discourse analysis, two empirical cases – Lithuania and New Zealand – are analysed with attention paid to the meanings of smallness and the ways these meanings are constructed. Empirical analysis follows with suggestions for how future research of small states could be improved.

Most of the history of the Baltic States in the 20th century is completely dominated by their relation to the Eastern giant, the Soviet Union. What the Soviet Union represented was not only an authoritarian, and at times, totalitarian rulership but also a constant fear of the unpredictable. Two French military historians, connected with the journal Guerre et Histoire, have recently managed to go through newly opened archives in Russia to unveil the unpredictable career of the most distinguished commander of the Red Army, Gregory Zhukov. Their book entirely confirms the impression among Baltic people that the Soviet Union was fundamentally instable in the sense that anything could happen: state arbitrariness. [...]

In the previous issue of The Baltic Journal of Political Science (no. 4, 2015), Kamil Ławniczak, co-author of the article Poland’s International Relations Scholarly Community and its Distinguishing Features According to the 2014 TRIP Survey of International Relations Scholars, was misidentified as a “PhD student” in a footnote of page 94. Kamil Ławniczak possesses a PhD degree. We apologise to the author for this regrettable error.

In this paper, I argue that contemporary political and intellectual conflicts over the right course for European integration are reflected in the historiography of Jean Monnet, the so-called founding father of the European Union (EU). Multiple and mutually antithetical representations of Monnet are explored across the central themes of the contemporary European debate: nationalism, sovereignty, political methodology, and economic ideology. I investigate how the different faces of Monnet are constructed and used to legitimate contradictory scholarly standpoints regarding these central themes. Along the way, I attempt to decipher the puzzle of Monnet’s elevation to the status of a theoretical pioneer in EU Studies. Finally, I also explore how different roles assigned to Monnet in the various narratives of the EU’s origins contribute to the construction of European identity.

The sharp rise in electoral volatility in the last two decades calls for a new explanation of Western European party systems. The established party system theory—Lipset and Rokkan’s “freezing hypothesis”—is not confirmed by today’s data. But what framework should replace Lipset and Rokkan’s? One option is to focus on values in postmodern society, as French sociologist Alain Touraine does, by emphasizing how individualism trumps social cohesion formed by social cleavages. The rational-choice approach, combined with a principal-agent model perspective, offers another lens for exploring electoral volatility in Western Europe. In this paper, gross and net volatility are analysed with both Touraine’s sociological approach and with a new principal-agent model of political election, underlying dynamics.

What does the European polity of twenty-eight member states owe to an eighteen-year-old Frenchman’s journey across Canada in 1907? This question preoccupies Trygve Ugland in his 2011 study Jean Monnet and Canada: early travels and the idea of European unity. Ugland presupposes there would hardly be a European Union to speak of if it weren’t for Jean Monnet; and he wonders whether there would be a Jean Monnet worth talking about if it weren’t for Monnet’s formative experiences in Canada as a salesman for his father’s cognac firm. [...]

In this article, Lithuania's relations with Russia from 2004 to 2014 are examined. This analysis is not much of a challenge in itself: there have been no significant changes in the overall quality of the two countries' relations, no new issues of disagreement, and the countries' approaches to each other have also remained unchanged. This analysis is significant in a different way—relations with Russia motivate and induce Lithuania's entire foreign policy arena, from its strategies to the country's everyday debates. Understanding Lithuania's relations with Russia leads to insights regarding Lithuania's geopolitical thinking and how Lithuania represents itself. Therefore, in this article, the goal is to demonstrate that an analysis of Lithuanian-Russian relations since 2004 not only explains Lithuanian foreign policy, but also reveals an enduring and negative stability in bilateral relations notwithstanding constant turbulence and quarrels.

This article compares the actual patterns of agencification and depoliticisation in Lithuania and explains the extent to which the EU influenced these changes. Our research employs (descriptive and inferential) statistical analysis of data on the organisational changes of Lithuanian agencies and the political participation of their managers in the 1990-2012 period. The article found that the EU made a significant contribution to the establishment of new agencies but changes in the scope of politicisation can be explained by a combination of evolution in the political conditionality of EU membership and wholesale government changes. The differentiated impact of the EU on public administration changes was observed with the management of the Europeanised agencies becoming increasingly professional over time. Overall, the results of our research confirm the stronger and more enduring impact of specific acquis rules in the policy domain compared to the much weaker influence of the EU’s political conditionality.

Several years ago, the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism prompted a considerable number of academic meetings and publication. By that time, most ex-communist states had already made their new identities clear and familiar to the world – or so it seemed. Transitology was slowly growing out of intellectual fashion, and the whole region affected by the post-communist transformation was more and more frequently regarded as stable and comparatively uninteresting. Amid this fading interest, conferences that aimed to re-examine of the post-communist transition were considered, even by the participants themselves, more of a ritual commemoration than a necessary attempt to solve pressing issues.