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A legacy of ‘uncivicness’? Social capital and radical right-wing populist voting in Eastern Europe

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Abstract

This article is focusing on radical right-wing populist voting in Eastern Europe, and shows that neither the mass society thesis nor the theory of social capital, in Putnam's tradition, has much explanatory value for explaining the support for radical right-wing populism. Individuals with low participation in civil society are shown not to be significantly more right-wing populist than others, so that participation in civil society organizations is not a shield against populism. That means, that claims that radical right-wing populism has risen in Eastern Europe over the past one and a half decades because of a weakly developed civil society, that is, because of a legacy of lack of civic virtues being born through participation in civil society organizations, must be questioned. Such claims are not finding support in the empirical results presented in this article.

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Notes

  1. As acknowledged by Putnam (2000, p. 19), his conception of social capital comes close to what earlier was usually discussed in terms of civic virtues (for example, Almond and Verba, 1963).

  2. However, as has been increasingly noted within the literature on social capital, the link between membership in social associations and these outcomes is often not very well specified. This is in particular the case with trust (and, as a corollary, tolerance): although it is plausible that repeated social interaction leads to increased trust (and tolerance) for the people within the group, it is unclear how this trust is generalized to people outside the group or association (Stolle, 1998; Paxton, 2007, p. 50). Moreover, most studies do not deal satisfactorily with the problem of (reverse) causality. As Stolle (1998, p. 498) noted, it is always possible that ‘people who are more trusting will self-select into associations’.

  3. For readers who are unfamiliar with logistic regressions, the tables should be read in the following way: Instead of displaying coefficients (b), as is common in OLS regressions, odds ratios (eb) are used. The odds ratio shows how the odds of the ‘event’ are influenced by changes in the independent variables. For example, an odds ratio of 2 means that the odds of the event are doubled by a one-unit increase in the independent variable. A value of 1 means that the change in the independent variable has no effect on the odds, and an odds ratio of 0.5 means that the odds of the event is halved as the independent variable increases by 1. Odds ratios greater than 1 thus signify positive relationships, odds ratios less than 1 negative relationships, and odds ratios equal to 1 no relationship at all. Log likelihood is a value for the overall fit of the model, whereas pseudo-R2 provides a way to describe or compare the fit of different models for the same dependent variable (cf. Pampel, 2000). Here and in the following models the dependent variable will be ‘voted for the radical right in the last national election’.

  4. The following parties are deemed to belong to the radical right (cf. Mudde, 2007): Liga Polskich Rodzin (LPR), Partidul Romãnia Mare (PRM), Liberal’no-demokraticheskoi Rossii (LDPR) and Slovenská národná strana (SNS).

  5. For more information about the European Social Survey, see www.euopreansocialsurvey.org.

  6. However, since I do not control for religiosity, we cannot know if it is organization membership that has an effect here, or if it is religion per se.

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Rydgren, J. A legacy of ‘uncivicness’? Social capital and radical right-wing populist voting in Eastern Europe. Acta Polit 46, 132–157 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.4

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