Elsevier

Electoral Studies

Volume 33, March 2014, Pages 77-89
Electoral Studies

Communist socialization and post-communist economic and political attitudes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2013.06.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A cross-national approach to APC analysis with historically defined cohorts.

  • Analysis of effect of communist exposure on attitudes towards democracy and market.

  • More exposure to communism has an indoctrinating, not resistance, effect.

  • Early childhood exposure is more influential that adult exposure but both matter.

  • Catholics & Protestants more likely to resist communist imprinting than Orthodox.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of individual exposure to communism on support for democracy and capitalism. We examine whether this effect varies across different types of communism, at different periods of people's lives, in different countries, and across different types of individuals. To do so, we propose a modified approach to solving the APC problem that relies on (a) survey data from multiple countries (b) historically defined cohorts and (c) variation in the time-periods related to these cohorts across countries. We provide a series of robustness tests for the method, and show that results are not very sensitive to panel structure. We conclude that generally communism had an indoctrinating effect, with more exposure to communism resulting in more opposition to democracy and capitalism.

Section snippets

Introduction: substantive motivation

Does exposure to communism affect the political attitudes and behaviour of citizens in post-communist countries? Although intuitively we would expect the answer to this question to be affirmative, it raises a number of more difficult follow-up questions: How do we conceive of more or less communist exposure? How do we differentiate exposure to Stalinism from exposure to perestroika? Is exposure likely to have a homogenous effect across individuals? Despite a few recent contributions (Neundorf,

Studying cross-national cohorts with limited surveys

The challenge to assessing the effect of exposure to communism on any attitude in the post-communist era is disentangling these socialization effects from other variables, especially the age of the respondent but also the timing of the survey. This problem is known in the literature as the “Age-Period-Cohort” effect, whereby the challenge is to identify the “cohort” effect in a way which does not conflate this effect with simply being of a certain age (“age”) at the time of the survey

Indoctrination, resistance, and exposure to communism

Shifting gears from methodological considerations, our substantive goal is to understand how exposure to communism affects attitudes towards democracy and the market. More specifically, we are interested in exploring the variation in the extent to which post-communist citizens prefer democracy to other forms of government (Chu et al., 2008, Evans and Whitefield, 1995, Kitschelt, 1992)8

Data and methods

To test these hypotheses we use data from the Post-Communist Publics (PCP) Study. The PCP study consists of two waves of surveys (1990–2 and 1998–2001) and was administered in twelve ex-communist countries for the first wave and in fourteen ex-communist countries plus West Germany for the second wave. All told, therefore, we have surveys that take place in seven different years across 14 countries (see Table A1 for full coverage details). In addition to the individual-level survey data, we

Empirical results

The first set of regressions in Table 2 simply captures the number of years past the age of six that a respondent has spent under communism. The baseline specification in model 1 suggests that even controlling for the individual and country-level controls described in the previous section, including age and survey year, individuals with a longer exposure to communism were less supportive of democratic ideals. This effect was not only highly statistically significant but fairly large in

Robustness tests

From the perspective of this special issue, a very important question is how robust our findings are to changes in the sample composition, particularly with respect to the number and the timing of surveys for different countries. As mentioned earlier, the PCP surveys span a period of 11 years in 14 countries but each country has at most two surveys (with two of them only having one survey). While we have argued that by pooling these unevenly spaced surveys across countries we can get around

Conclusions

In this article we analyze how the experience of living through communism affected post-communist attitudes towards democracy and the market. Since the survey data available to answer these questions was not available for as many survey waves as in typical APC studies, we have proposed an alternative identification strategy that relies on historically defined cohorts that vary cross-nationally and thereby avoids the multicollinearity problems inherent in APC analyses with limited time periods.

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  • Cited by (0)

    This paper is part of the symposium “Beyond political socialization: New approaches in age, period, cohort analysis” edited by Anja Neundorf and Richard Niemi.

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