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Switching Ideologies? The Role of Authoritarian Legacies in Explaining Left-right Divide in New Democracies

Europe (Central and Eastern)
Democratisation
Political Sociology
Comparative Perspective
Political Ideology
Political Regime
Public Opinion
Southern Europe
Ekaterina Gorbunova
Universidade de Lisboa Instituto de Ciências Sociais
Ekaterina Gorbunova
Universidade de Lisboa Instituto de Ciências Sociais

Abstract

The Paper studies the impact of authoritarian legacies of previous regimes on citizens´ current political attitudes and political culture in new democracies, thus addressing a largely overlooked topic in political science literature, and making an effort to bridge existing theories of nondemocratic (authoritarian) regimes and democratization, on the one hand, and theories of political behavior, on the other. More specifically, we aim to uncover the effect of socialization under a specific type of authoritarian regime (left- vs. right-wing) on citizens´ left-right ideological identification in third-wave democracies, comparing South European and Eastern European countries. On the one hand, in the previous research on the content and determinants of Left and Right, mostly individual level variables have been included into the analysis. On the other, the literature on authoritarian legacies has been largely focusing on their institutional, rather than socio-political, effects. The current exploratory research aims to fill in this gap by combining cross-national comparative approach with quantitative methods of public opinion data analysis. The preliminary results show that – controlling for other factors, previously identified as relevant in the literature – the type of authoritarian past does matter for citizens´ left-right ideological identification, and that this effect is reversed: citizens from the countries with the communist past demonstrate more tendency to place themselves on the right half of the ideological spectrum, while citizens from former right-wing dictatorships tend to ´turn left´. Moreover, the impact of the authoritarian political socialization seem to be more significant in the case of former right-wing dictatorships.