Protest Activities in the Postcommunist World: Assessing the Effects of Historical Legacies

A growing literature emphasizes the critical role played by historical legacies in the democratic trajectories of postcommunist countries. The relation between these legacies and political participation remains, however, underresearched. Benefiting from recent advances in Age-Period-Cohort (APC) analysis, this study argues that variation in the intensity of protest activities across postcommunist countries of Eastern Europe and the former USSR is partially explained by historical factors. Collective experiences during, or directly preceding, the Leninist era have set countries on different paths of mass mobilization. The paper develops a multilevel model of mass participation in which aggregate data on historical legacies are combined with survey data on protest activities in 23 postcommunist countries. Longitudinal trends are presented using a smaller set of cases. The results provide evidence that distinct political generations, socialized under different political environments, exhibit contrasting patterns of non-conventional participation in the postcommunist world.