The focus of the volume is on the negative factors for the establishment and consolidation of democratic constitutional states resulting from previous autocratic regimes with totalitarian features. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the one-party regimes in Central and Eastern Europe favored democratic developments in many countries. But they went different ways, and some of them abandoned the path of democratic transformation that had been taken initially after a short time. The great differences in the eastern transformations raise the question of why, at first glance, very similar starting conditions led to very different results. What role did the totalitarian hereditary burden of "actually existing socialism" play in this?