Communism's Shadow: Postcommunist Legacies, Values, and Behavior

Abstract

The way in which ordinary citizens interact with world has long fascinated scientists, and in recent years a small but growing body of research has emerged that analyzes values and in postcommunist countries. As with analyses of other features of postcommunist systems, there is by now a strong consensus that postcommunism did not simply represent a tabula rasa. Thus it is important to take account of historical legacies in other countries. While legacy argu ments, which try to explain why values and in former communist countries ought (or ought not) to differ from values and elsewhere, are not new, there is no common analytical framework for assessing their effects. This article is intended as a first step toward remedying this gap. In it, we propose a theoretical framework for considering effects of legacies on values and in postcommunist countries. This framework takes seriously Jeffrey Kopstein's warning that the concept of legacy is especially slippery. If weight of past affects present, at a minimum, it is necessary to specify which past.1 A brief word on terminology is in order. In this article, we examine effects of legacies on citizens and how they relate to politics in postcommunist countries. Often these types of empirical questions are studied as political behavior, encompassing topics such as voting, participation, and public opinion. However, attitudes toward politics are not technically a behavior until individual acts on that attitude. Therefore, we distinguish political behavior—actions undertaken by citizens such as voting—from political values—attitudes held by citizens toward politics, actors, and public policy.

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