Although the bulk of the essays in this issue are focused on an assessment of democratization in post-communist politics, in this essay, I focus not so much on "democratization" as on characteristics of "governance." The basic contention, here, is that regime legacies are critical factors in explaining the emergence of the rule of law, effective governance, and personalism. The results from the analysis suggest that legacies, and particularly the legacies of the previous communist regimes, matter a great deal when accounting for the development of "good governance." Using panel data from 1996 to 2013 for twenty-nine post-communist states, there is support for the notion that previous bureaucratic authoritarian and national consensus communist regimes have been better able to develop the rule of law and government effectiveness than countries that emerged from patrimonial communist regimes. However, there is no relationship between the communist legacies and the extent to which personalism has characterized the post-communist regimes. Implications of this analysis are then discussed.