Individualization and Social Solidarity in Post-Communist Countries: Do Old Divisions Hold?

Abstract

Social solidarity covers the effective principles of social organization in a given society. Such principles are manifested in formal and informal practices and shape the social contract behind the welfare state, which is the most important form of organized (formal) solidarity today (Koster 2007). By contrast, informal mechanisms of social solidarity rely on the networks of friends and family which play a crucial role as a resource for economic assistance and security when state-provided social care fails.The communist redistribution system constituted a “communist welfare state” of its own (Deacon 2000) and that post-communist development was a transformation of the welfare regime rather than creating it “from scratch”. In a cross-European comparison, Fenger (2007) discovered three post-communist welfare regimes that were not resembling three types devised by Esping-Andersen (1990). Moreover, the theory of postmaterialist values (Inglehart 1997) and the adjoining theory of self-expression values (Inglehart & Welzel 2005) that otherwise provide a breakthrough perspective on explaining how high levels of individualism and diversity in modern societies coexist with high levels of altruism and wide concern about fellow citizens, produced much worse results in explaining social solidarity in eastern Europe, especially on the individual level (Janmaat & Braun 2009).The research question of this paper is what imprint the post-communist condition leaves on the patterns of social solidarity in European countries. Additionally, I inquire whether post-soviet or post-socialist status of the country matters and then discuss how these findings correspond to previous research. Multilevel analysis is used to model the data of European Values Study (2008) that covers 47 European countries, including more than 20 countries with post-communist history.It was demonstrated that 1) postmaterialists in post-communist countries score lower than western Europe on both family solidarity and redistribution, which may be attributed both to historical trauma of communism and to the average economic condition of post-communist countries (thus, a different meaning of “postmaterialist” indicators in these countries); 2) there are interesting gender differences in post-soviet and post-socialist (Central European) countries which should be further explained.