Personal Mobility and Communication in the Warsaw Pact States

Abstract

HE RELATIONSHIP between social communication and various indices of economic and political development has long intrigued social scientists.' Relatively few studies, however, have sought to assess the impact of type of political system on a nation's social communication profile. A major hypothesis of this paper is that political organization and ideology do influence a society's distribution of communication resources with considerable independence of its level of economic development. Specifically, we suggest that the Marxist-Leninist states grouped in the Warsaw Pact have developed a distinctive social communication profile, tending to inhibit the movement and communication among their citizens to a greater degree than have other political systems of comparable affluence and development. They may have allocated fewer resources to goods and services associated with communication and personal transportation, even though all of these states have, by the 1970s, become relatively advanced and affluent members of the world community. In order to test this hypothesis, this paper examines data on various forms of interpersonal communication and transportation (our indicators of social communication) in a number of states ranging from 112 to 50 depending on the availability of information. More precisely, we compare the performance of the Warsaw Pact states to that of all other states which have reported relevant information to the United Nations. Thus, our political system variable consists of communist, or more precisely, Warsaw Pact states and non-communist states.2 In order to take account of the great variation among states in terms of levels of economic development, area, population, size, as well as differences in the degree of political pluralism, multiple regression analysis is employed. This analytic technique (discussed in more detail below under the heading, Analytic Methods) enables one to study the relationship between a set of independent or predictor variables (e.g., political system type, level of economic development, population size) and a number of dependent variables (e.g., personal mobility and communication), while taking into consideration the interrelationships among the predictor variables. One thus may address the question of whether at X level of resource capability there are not significant differences between Warsaw Pact and noncommunist states with regard to communication and mobility variables such as millions of passenger miles traveled, total messages exchanged, etc.