Communism's Shadow

Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes

Grigore Pop-Eleches, Joshua Tucker

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400887828
• Thema: Politics & International Relations
• Thema: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism

It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes.Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality.A thorough and nuanced examination of communist legacies' lasting influence on public opinion, Communism's Shadow highlights the ways in which political beliefs can outlast institutional regimes.

Country Code Abbreviations Used in Figures 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, and 7.1

Country Code	Country
AL	Albania
AM	Armenia
AZ	Azerbaijan
BA	Bosnia-Herzegovina
BG	Bulgaria
BY	Belarus
CZ	Czech Republic
DE	East Germany
EE	Estonia
GE	Georgia
HR	Croatia
HU	Hungary
KG	Kyrgyzstan
LT	Lithuania
LV	Latvia
MD	Moldova
MK	Macedonia
PL	Poland
RO	Romania
RS	Serbia
RU	Russia
SI	Slovenia
SK	Slovakia
UA	Ukraine

Communism’s Shadow

CHAPTER 1

Communism’s Shadow

1.1. INTRODUCTION

More than a quarter century after the Leninist extinction in the former Soviet bloc, the specter—or at least the memory—of communism still haunts the region. Memories of Stalinism (both glowing and bitter) feature prominently in the political discourse of Russia and Ukraine, while new national-populist regimes in Poland and Hungary justify their political tactics at least in part in terms of the fight against communism, even as their opponents accuse them of having adopted much of the communists’ mindset and tactics. Even if much of this language is intended simply as a rhetorical flourish, it suggests a deeper truth about the politics of the region: communism’s shadow is still ever present in the hearts and minds of post-communist citizens.

Indeed, when analyzing a wide range of public opinion data from the first two decades after the collapse of communism, we find that post-communist citizens are, on average, less supportive of democracy, less supportive of markets, and more supportive of state-provided social welfare—but no more of supportive of gender equality—than citizens elsewhere in the world. (See Figure 1.1 on the following page.) Why?

The most intuitive answer to this question is that it is somehow a legacy of communism. But as popular as it has become to attribute outcomes of interest in post-communist countries to “legacies,”¹ and despite some recent theoretical efforts to conceptualize historical legacies more carefully (Beissinger and Kotkin 2014: 11–20; Wittenberg 2015), there is no clearly established theoretical or empirical blueprint for analyzing the effect of legacies on attitudes. Accordingly, we begin with two more theoretically precise potential answers to the question of “why”: it may be because of the experience of living through communism; or it may be because of the experience of living in a post-communist country. While related—we do not expect to find truly large proportions of a population who lived through communism anywhere else than in post-communist world,² and (at l...