Authoritarian legacies or unfulfilled promises: in search for reasons behind low electoral turnout in post-communist Europe.

Research on electoral behavior in post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) often times operates under the assumption of tabula rasa, maintaining that in the first elections held after the fall of the Iron Curtain all post-communist citizens were newcomers to a democratic society and free elections, regardless of their previous political experiences. In this study I challenge this supposition by analyzing the propensity to vote in subsequent elections of those socialized politically under communist rule, during transformation period, and those that entered the political domain under democratic regime. Data from all modules of CSES and from both waves of Consolidation of Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe surveys is used to assess, in the first place, if the legacy of having lived under authoritarian rule has a negative impact on electoral turnout, and second, whether this legacy is vanishing through the process of democratic learning or, on the contrary, is accentuated by the unfulfillment of transitional high hopes and the disappointments of post-communist electoral participation experiences. Individual-level experience of living through communist rule and through the transition and their influence in electoral turnout is evaluated for 10 CEE countries that are member states of the EU. The goal is to shed some light on the reasons behind the particularly low levels of electoral participation in post-communist Europe by performing an analysis of cohort effects through multi-level logistic regressions controlling for other factors that affect the probability of casting a ballot.