Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Methods: Fitting the Empirical Data and Comparing Old and New Europe
Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Methods: Fitting the Empirical Data and Comparing Old and New Europe

Summary/Abstract: This study explores the contradictory classifications of the post-communist Europe in the Varieties of Capitalism perspective. The paper outlines several shortcomings that contribute to the discrepancy in the past classifications. The empirical part of this paper compares two methods of the coordination index construction, the factor analysis and our own alternative calculation. Subsequently we apply both of the procedures to two groups of countries, Western and Central Eastern Europe. This way we demonstrate that even when using the same input variables a slight change of method might result into different findings. In the end we therefore argue that the future studies be more careful in the methods used as well as the country and data selection. This could potentially help to improve the comparability and the credibility of the future findings and country classifications.

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