Associated with the past?: Communist legacies and civic participation in post-communist countries

East European Politics and Societies

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 2013, Pages 45-68

  Pop Eleches, Grigore ^a   Tucker, Joshua A ^b  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Civic participation; Communism; Communist legacies; Socialization

Indexed keywords

EID: 84872787004     PISSN: 08883254     EISSN: 15338371     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0888325412465087     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in post-Communist Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. Theodore H. Friedgut, Political Participation in the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);
3. T. H. Rigby, The Changing Soviet System: Mono-Organizational Socialism from Its Origins to Gorbachev's Restructuring (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1990).
4. Valerie Bunce, "Regional Differences in Democratization: The East versus the South," Post-Soviet Affairs 14, no. 3 (1998): 187.
5. Howard, Weakness of Civil Society.
6. Nikolay Valkov, "Membership in Voluntary Organizations and Democratic Performance: European Post-communist Countries in Comparative Perspective," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 42 (2009): 1-21;
7. Natalia Letki, "Socialization for Participation? Trust, Membership, and Democratization in East-Central Europe," Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2004): 665-679; Howard, Weakness of Civil Society;
8. Jeffery Mondak and Adam Gearing, "Civic Engagement in a Post-Communist State," Political Psychology 19, no. 3 (1998): 615-637.
9. Michael Bernhard and Ekrem Karakoc, Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship, World Politics 59, no. 2 (2007): 539-567.
10. which demonstrates a civic participation deficit in post-totalitarian regimes more broadly. For a different type of perspective, see Green (Andrew T. Green, "Comparative Development of Post-Communist Civil Societies," Europe-Asia Studies, 54, 2002), who analyzes not the number of participants in civil society organizations (or organizations themselves), but rather the legal framework for establishing civil organization in post-communist countries.
11. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, "After the Party: Legacies and Left-Right Distinctions in Post-Communist Countries, Center for Advanced Study in the Social Science, Juan March Foundation, Madrid, Spain, 2010, Working Paper Series, Estudio/Working Paper 2010/250;
12. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies, and Political Values and Behavior (Manuscript, NY, 2012);
13. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, "Communist Legacies and Political Values and Behavior: A Theoretical Framework with an Application to Political Party Trust," Comparative Politics 43 (July 2011): 379-408.
14. Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960);
15. Fred I. Greenstein, Children and Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965);
16. Kenneth Langton and Kent Jennings, "Political socialization and the High School Civics Curriculum in the United States," American Political Science Review 62 (1968): 852-867;
17. Kent Jennings and Gregory Markus, "Partisan Orientations over the Long Haul: Results from the Three-Wave Political Socialization Panel Study," The American Political Science Review 78, no. 4 (1984): 1000-1018.
18. Andrew C. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Preto Postcommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
19. However, it should be noted that high literacy was accompanied by generally low levels of higher education and, to the extent that citizens received higher education, it was more along the line of technical training than liberal arts education.
20. Adam Przeworski, "Economic Reforms, Public Opinion, and Political Institutions: Poland in the Eastern European Perspective," in Economic Reforms in New Democracies, ed. L. C. B. Pereira, J. M. Maravall, and A. Przeworski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
21. Jan Fidrmuc, "Economics of Voting in Post-Communist Countries," Electoral Studies 19, no. 2/3 (2000): 199-217;
22. Jan Fidrmuc, "Political Support for Reforms: Economics of Voting in Transition Countries," European Economic Review 44 (2000): 1491-1513;
23. Joshua A. Tucker, ";Economic Conditions and the Vote for Incumbent Parties in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic from 1990-1996," Post-Soviet Affairs 17, no. 4 (2001): 309-31;
24. Joshua A. Tucker, Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia,
25. The Czech Republic, 1990-99 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
26. Valerie Bunce, ";Democratization and Economic Reform," Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 43-65;
27. Jeffrey Sachs, Poland's Jump to the Market Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
28. Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993);
29. Robert Putnam, ";Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital," Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995).
30. Howard, Weakness of Civil Society
31. Howard also argues that these effects are exacerbated by a real dissatisfaction with the "new political and economic system," which has led citizens to want to withdraw even farther from public activities; we address exactly this point in our final theoretical mechanism.
32. Sachs, Poland's Jump to the Market Economy;
33. Joel Hellman, ";Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions," World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203-34.
34. Elsewhere, we have described our approach as having four pathways, not three (Grigore PopEleches and Joshua A. Tucker, "Post-Communist Legacies and Political Behavior and Attitudes," Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 20, no. 2 [2012]: 157-66). This is largely a matter of semantics: while here we have included both institutional legacies of communism and postcommunist shocks such as economic developments in the single "differential stimuli" category, we have other instances described these as two separate approaches. Readers particularly interested in the theoretical framework are invited to see Pop-Eleches and Tucker, "Post-Communist Legacies and Political Behavior and Attitudes," for a concise statement of the theoretical arguments as they apply to political behavior generally, as well as our in-progress book manuscript (Pop-Eleches and Tucker, Communism's Shadow) for much more detail.
35. Marc Morjé Howard, ";The Weakness of Post-Communist Civil Society," Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002): 157-169; Howard, Weakness of Civil Society.
36. Grigore Pop-Eleches, ";Historical Legacies and Post-Communist Regime Change," Journal of Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 908-926.
37. One of the authors remembers being repeatedly told in school (in communist Romania in the 1980s) that on the following Sunday everybody had to show up for "voluntary work" for this or that cause.
38. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
39. On the other hand, simply looking at "active membership" responses tended to yield lower country averages than the dichotomous measure, and there was a great deal of cross-country heterogeneity, which suggests that the questions may have been understood differently in different countries.
40. We reran the main statistical tests for the alternative measure, which is based on the data from the third and fifth waves, and found comparable results (available from the authors on request)
41. Howard, Weakness of Civil Society; Bernhard and Karakoc, "Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship."
42. While Vuong tests suggested that zero-inflated negative binomial regressions would have been more appropriate given the nature of the data, such models failed to achieve convergence for several of the specifications reported in the article. As the results from these zero-inflated negative binomial regressions that did converge were in all cases substantively similar to the standard negative binomial model, we chose to report the latter in the text and consider the former as robustness tests; results are available from the authors on request.
43. Given the multilevel nature of the data, we also ran a series of multilevel mixed-effects regressions in Stata 11. Since the results were substantively similar, and since Stata only offers Poisson but not negative binomial regression models and does not allow the use of weights in multilevel models, we chose to report results based on the clustered standard error approach used here.
44. Respondents from the former East Germany (DDR) were also coded as ex-communist citizens.
45. Since we are interested in establishing the difference between these countries and non-communist countries, in our analysis we excluded surveys from China and Vietnam, since these countries are neither properly post-communist nor (obviously) non-communist.
46. The World Values Survey asked respondents to place themselves into one of ten income bands but since these categories were country-specific, they cannot be used for cross-country comparisons (even though they do provide an indicator of within-country household income differences.)
47. Unless otherwise stated, all of the country-level economic and political variables are lagged one year to reduce possible reverse causation concerns.
48. While ideally we would like to have a more specific measure of the extent to which the state promotes or hinders the development of civic organizations, we are not aware of an indicator that does so for the wide range of countries and years represented in our surveys.
49. The logged version is justified on both theoretical grounds (since the difference between 50 and 60 years of democracy is arguably less than between 1 and 11 years), and empirically, since the logged version consistently produced better fits than nonlogged and quadratic specifications.
50. To capture this ";local" civic context, we categorized individuals by the subnational region to which they belonged as well as on the size of the locality they lived in and then calculated the prevalence of narrow trust for these much smaller geographic units.
51. Moreover, we also include controls for both the age of the respondent and the year of the survey, in order to assess the effect of exposure to communism independent of the respondent's age or when the survey was conducted. In the statistical literature, this is known as the ";age-period-cohort" method, whereby the challenge is to identify the ";cohort" effect in a way that does not conflate this effect with simply being of a certain age (";age") at the time of the survey (";period").
52. Karen O. Mason, William H. Mason, H. H. Winsborough, and W. Kenneth Poole, ";Some Methodological Issues in Cohort Analysis of Archival Data," American Sociological Review 38 [1973]: 242-258
53. Norval D. Glenn, Cohort Analysis, 2nd ed. [Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005]
54. Anja Neundorf, ";Democracy in Transition: A Micro perspective on System Change in Post-Socialist Societies," The Journal of Politics 72, no. 4 [2010]: 1096-1108.
55. Standard age-period-cohort models rely on many more repeated surveys than we have access to for our analysis. However, we are able to take advantage of the fact that we have historically defined cohorts (here, the actual periods of different communist rule in each country) that vary cross-nationally to identify our models. Interested readers should see Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua A. Tucker, Communist Socialization and Post-Communist Economic and Political Attitudes (Manuscript, N Y, 2012a), where we lay out our method in great detail, including numerous robustness tests.
56. Easton and Dennis (1969) found that among white U.S. children political consciousness developed in primary school. We thank Markus Prior for bringing this study to our attention.
57. While this phenomenon can be explained at least partially by the rapid deindustrialization and privatization of East European economies during the 1990s, as well as by the rapid rise in unemployment, the dramatic decline of union membership and the relatively modest resistance of organized labor to this decline are symptomatic of the weak attachment of many East Europeans toward their labor unions.
58. Bernhard and Karakoc, ";Civil Society and the Legacies of Dictatorship."
59. Ibid. 4
60. Ibid. 5
61. We obtain similar results if we use a different temporal cutoff (e.g., 1950), but we prefer the current measure since we expect a more recent authoritarian experience to play a greater role.
62. Another comparable approach, which would try to control more tightly for pre-communist legacy differences, would be to engage in comparisons at the subregional level. Therefore, in additional tests (not reported here) we found that ex-communist Balkan countries exhibited a substantively large and marginally significant civic participation deficit compared to their non-communist counterparts (Turkey and Greece) once we control for demographic differences. Furthermore, we found a significant deficit of ex-communist East-Central European countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, East Germany, Slovakia and Slovenia) compared to their non-communist neighbors (Italy, Austria, and West Germany).
63. The difference between the two coefficients was significant at.05.
64. While this difference could also be interpreted as evidence that prior exposure to democracy drives civic participation, we found that the civic participation difference was only marginally reduced when our models included a control for interwar democracy (measured as the average Polity regime score from 1920 to 1939).
65. Preliminary tests indicate that pre-communist democratic exposure was a significant predictor of civic participation among the non-Soviet East European countries, which suggest that future work should focus on the interaction between pre-communist and communist legacies in explaining post-communist outcomes.
66. However, it should be noted that Poland, which by virtue of the strong mobilizing impact of both Solidarity and the Catholic Church in the last two decades of communism should be the most obvious
67. candidate for deviating from the regional ";norm," did not actually exhibit greater civic participation based on the survey-based indicators we used in the present analysis.
68. GDP/capita falls short of achieving statistical significance in model 6, but it is at least marginally significant once we introduce religiosity controls in models 7 and 8.
69. Sidney Verba, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic Volunteerism in American Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
70. Grigore Pop-Eleches ";The Post-Communist Democratic Deficit: Roots and Mechanisms" Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Nov. 12-15, 2009 Boston, MA.
71. In fact, there seems to be little correlation between post-communism and the prevalence of narrow trust individuals, which suggests that the phenomenon is not an exclusively post-communist phenomenon.
72. Given that the regressions control for age, these findings are not simply an artifact of the fact that older individuals may be less civically active.
73. Howard, Weakness of Civil Society.