Title After the Party: Legacies and Left-right Ideology in Post-Communist Countries

Drawing on data from almost 200 surveys conducted in 83 countries, we demonstrate a left-wing bias in the ideological self-placement of post-communist citizens. We also show that while post-communist citizens essentially have no more difficulty placing themselves on a left-right scale than citizens of other countries, they do tend to rely more heavily on economic than social factors in doing so. We seek to assess the extent to which these patterns are legacies of communist rule and what mechanisms brought them about. To do so, we introduce two general theoretical arguments for why post-communist citizens might hold systematically different views on these types of questions. The first focuses on the experience of living in a post-communist country (e.g., demographic, economic, and political conditions). The second is based on the idea that it is living through communist rule that may have led to people adopting a particular set of attitudes. We find that the various aspects of living in a post-communist country do little to explain why post-communist citizens are more leftist, but that increased exposure to communism does indeed correspond with a more pronounced left-wing bias.