Political Participation and Non-democratic Political Culture in Western Europe, East-Central Europe and Post-Yugoslav Countries

Abstract

Theory of postmodernization (Inglehart, R. (1997). Modernization and postmodernization: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. Princeton/Chichester: Princeton University Press; Inglehart, R., & Welzel, C. (2007). Modernization, cultural change, and democracy: The human development sequence. New York: Cambridge University Press) predicts that the public in socioeconomically more developed countries (e.g. established democracies) are more politically engaged and more pro-democratically oriented (e.g. higher levels of self-expression values) than citizens in less prosperous (e.g. post-communist) countries; and that individuals who are more non-democratically oriented are generally less political active. We tested these predictions by comparing three European regions: a group of twenty established European democracies, nine Central and Eastern European EU member states, and seven post-Yugoslav countries. The predictive power of postmodernization theory within the post-Yugoslav sample was also examined. Employing European Values Study (European Values Study. (2008) http://zacat.gesis.org. Accessed 27 Mar 2011) we cross-regionally and cross-nationally compared (1) the levels of three types of political participation (voter turnout, party membership, and protest participation); (2) the levels of non-democratic political culture (authoritarian political culture, lifestyle intolerance, and gender role traditionalism), and (3) the link between political participation and non-democratic political culture. The results indicated that post-communist citizens are less politically engaged and more non-democratically oriented than their Western counterparts, and that in all three regions “authoritarians” are less likely to be political active. A less straightforward pattern was observed in post-Yugoslav countries. Implications of the results and future research suggestions are discussed.