Abstract
A generation after the democratic revolutions of 1989, most post-communist countries remain democratic. However, citizens differ by their identification with democratic values and by the prevalence of five main “(non)democratic mentalities” which we derived from the European Values Study (EVS). Our focus was on three post-communist regions: (a) the post-soviet core countries (Russia, Moldova, Ukraine), (b) ex-soviet Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and (c) Central European “Visegrad” countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia). Results indicate that democrats (i.e., secular democrats and religious democrats) are represented in every country; their incidence is higher among elites and among the young; yet democrats in all post-communist countries constitute a minority. Intolerant traditionalists are most typical for the post-soviet core countries, while passive skeptics constitute majority in the post-communist Central Europe and plurality in the Baltics. Passive skepticism can be interpreted in terms of an enduring “post-communist syndrome.”
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Notes
- 1.
Multinomial regressions confirm and specify the relationships. They show that the younger age (up to 56 years) characterizes secular democrats and higher age the traditionalists. Further, according to odds ratios, (a) secular democrats in the Baltics are 1.7 times more frequent, while (b) Baltic traditionalists are approximately half of the number of religious democrats.
- 2.
A historical Central European exception may be Yugoslavia, a country which turned back to its parochial ethnic roots and identities during a post-communist break up (Vasovic, 1999, p. 50).
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Klicperova-Baker, M., Kostal, J. (2018). Democratic Values in the Post-Communist Region: The Incidence of Traditionalists, Skeptics, Democrats, and Radicals. In: Lebedeva, N., Dimitrova, R., Berry, J. (eds) Changing Values and Identities in the Post-Communist World . Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72616-8_2
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