Political Participation in Eastern Europe After 1989 – Reassessing Political Socialisation in Times of Growing Social Inequality

According to Nations in Transit 2015, many countries in Central and Eastern Europe are still not considered fully ‘consolidated democracies’. One of their current political features is that political participation is weaker and less developed than in so-called established democracies. In the literature, the post-communist heritage is treated as the predominant explanation for the lack of political participation in Eastern Europe. Past research portrayed the effects stemming from the communist past in a rather monolithic and predominantly negative way. Therefore this paper breaks down the different facets of the post-communist heritage in order to enable an operationalisation of both its economic and societal dimensions. In particular attention is drawn to the time after 1989, to the transformation, which triggered many upheavals, in particular regarding social inequality. Those transformation effects are well described in other parts of literature on the region but are still underplayed in political participation research on Eastern Europe. This contribution stresses the degree of socialization within communism as an indicator for measuring the influence of the post-communist period on citizens’ political engagement in terms of associational, electoral and protest participation. The proposed age-period-cohort analysis thus compares different age groups with different biographical and socio-economic backgrounds and their impact on political participation. By using three waves of the European Value Study (1990/1999/2008) the paper takes ten cases into account (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia). This methodological approach enables new insights in regard to the effects of political socialisation on political participation in the case of transforming countries.