After the Party: Legacies and Left-Right Distinctions in Post-Communist Countries

Abstract

The left-right political spectrum sits at the heart of political analysis. Yet questions remain as to the appropriateness of the left-right spectrum for the comparative analysis of party systems: does the left-right spectrum mean the same thing in different political contexts, and in particular is it appropriate to compare left-right self-placement in post-communist countries with left-right self-placement elsewhere? In this paper, we advance our understanding of this topic in three important directions. First, we demonstrate that (a) post-communist citizens have a leftist bias relative to the rest of the world but (b) they are more likely to rely primarily on economic attitudes in making that self placements than citizens elsewhere, who bring a combination of economic and social attitudes to bear on their left-right self placement. Second, we explore the socio-demographic and attitudinal profile of the post-communist left and the right in comparative perspective. Finally, we do not merely identify these distinctions, but rather seek to explain them in a systematic fashion by applying a theoretical framework we have previously developed (Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2010) for analyzing the effects of communist era legacies on political values, attitudes, and behavior in post-communist countries. We find that while neither the demographic legacies of communism nor macro-economic conditions associated with the transition can account for much of the leftist-bias of post-communist citizens, theories based on political socialization under Communism and Bayesian updating that takes account of experiences in the pre-communist, communist, and post-communist eras do help us to understand the sources of this left-wing bias. Taken together, we conclude that living through communism may indeed have conditioned the way in which citizens thought about their left-right ideological orientation, but it did not permanently fix these attitudes, and nor did it do so independent of prior, pre-communist, developments.