Explaining Political Participation in East-Central Europe...

Explaining Political Participation in East-Central Europe:

Social Capital, Democracy and the Communist Past

Natalia Letki Nuffield College, Oxford OX1 1NF

[email protected]

Nuffield College Politics Working Paper 2003-W2 University of Oxford

INTRODUCTION

Citizens’ participation in politics has been a central idea in research on

political systems, liberal democracy in particular, since the 1960s (Almond and Verba

1963, Verba et al. 1978, Parry et al. 1992). It is the core element of all definitions of

democracy (Dahl 1989), thus the decline of voting turnout and disengagement in

political groups is interpreted as the main malady of a modern, democratic state:

“where few take part in decisions there is little democracy” (Verba and Nie 1972: 1).

Political engagement is essential for the institutions’ credibility, but also for citizens’

capability to articulate their demands and hold their representatives to account:

“individual and otherwise quiet voices multiply and are amplified” (Putnam 2000:

338). Therefore, many stress that in new democracies, such as these of East-Central

Europe (ECE), development of a participatory, engaged approach to politics among

ordinary citizens is as important a goal as GDP growth or reform of bureaucracy, as

without it democracy cannot consolidate (Krishna 2002, Barnes and Simon 1998,

Paxton 2002).1

Active participation in public affairs is the main feature of the so-called ‘civic

community’. Although quoting de Tocqueville (1969) Putnam stresses that “not all

political activity deserves the label ‘virtuous’ or contributes to the commonweal”

(1993: 88), activities such as voting, discussing politics or membership in various

groups and parties deserve to be called ‘civic’ as they are oriented towards “shared

benefits” rather than self-interest. The decline of voting turnout and both interest in

1 The recent developments of the presidential election in Serbia (December 2002), where the

attempt to elect a president failed three times due to a very low turnout, are perhaps the best illustration

of the salience of political participation.

2

and discussion of politics are considered to be the main indicators (next to

membership in voluntary associations) of the “collapse” of the civic community, as

they represent the general decline of interest in and consideration for the ‘common

good’ and the ideals of democratic government (Putnam 2000).

Therefore, the question of what makes people participate in the political

process is not only interesting, but also salient – especially in the context of new

democracies. This paper presents an important contribution to the existing debate.

First, it tests the relevance of the recently popular explanations of political

participation, such as social capital (Krishna 2002, Brown and Uslaner 2002), in a

context other than that of established Western democracies. Second, it puts forward

and tests hypotheses specific to the context of new post-communist democracies that

have not been tested elsewhere: it looks at the influence of membership in a non-

democratic political group, such as Communist party, on participation in democratic

politics and analyzes the link between the development of democratic structures and

political engagement. The data used come from a survey conducted in 10 ECE

countries in the midst of transformation, 1993-1994.2 In the next section of the paper

we discuss the empirical indicators used to represent political participation in ECE.

Then, we explain the main hypotheses relating to the determinants of participation

and outline their empirical operationalisation. Later, we discuss the country levels of

2 The data used was collected as a part of the Economic and Social Research Council's East-

West Programme, Phase 2: Grant no. Y 309 25 3025 “Emerging Forms of Political Representation and

Participation in Eastern Europe”, Nuffield College, Oxford. The paper uses data from ten countries

included in the database: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania,

Russia, Slovak Republic and Ukraine. Surveys were carried out in the summer of 1993, with the

exception of Czech and Slovak Republics and Hungary, where it took place in the spring of 1994. For

the details concerning sampling methods and response rate see Appendix B.

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political participation in ECE and then move to individual level analysis. We

conclude by discussing the results of our analysis.

CONCEPTUALIZING POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

In 1993-94, when the data used in this paper were collected, the opportunity to

influence political outcomes was a relative novelty for most citizens of ECE

countries. Before 1989 only protest forms of participation directed “against the state”

(strikes, protests, demonstrations) were available for expressing citizens’ opinions,

and even these were significantly limited under most of the ECE regimes. Therefore,

many scholars dealing with the ECE transformation feared the prevalence of apathy,

lack of interest and low participation in politics among citizens of post-communist

countries (Miller 1992). Others were concerned that the patterns of political

engagement created under the communism, such as protests and street

demonstrations, may destabilize the fragile, new democracies (Foley and Edwards

1996). It seems that the former concern was much more relevant: the “early

democratic movements no longer play a visible role. Therefore, the prospects of the

new regimes might be less sunny than people wanted to believe during the heydays of

the glorious revolution” (Thomassen and van Deth 1998: 140).

So, are citizens of new, post-communist democracies really politically

disengaged? We have four measures of political activism that are based on self-

reported participation: frequency of discussing politics, partisanship, voting in the

prospective parliamentary election and political party membership. Political

discussion does not involve high political competence. In fact, talking about politics

does not necessarily require more than passive interest in the subject. Using the

measure of talk about politics from our survey we are able to tell not only whether a

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respondent discusses politics, but also how often this takes place. Respondents were

asked to name two people, apart from their spouse, with whom they talk about

politics most often and specify how often they do this3. The measure combines

information about both conversational partners, thus the score may range from ‘0’ for

not talking about politics at all to ‘6’ for always discussing politics with both persons

when the respondent meets them.

The concept of partisan identification is one of the key elements in the modern

electoral behavior research (Dalton 2000). Not only is support for a political party a

prerequisite of more demanding forms of participation, such as party membership4,

but also it reinforces basic types of political behavior such as voting and is, at least

implicitly, correlated with the discussion of politics. Both indicators are frequently

present in the research on political participation (Verba and Nie 1972, Verba et al.

1995, Parry et al. 1992). Our respondents were asked whether they consider

themselves as supporters of a political party, and if so, how strongly they support it.

They were also asked whether they are members of a political party.

Despite its popularity as an indicator and its purely political character, voting

is not the most obvious type of participation. This type of activity involves relatively

little input in terms of time, money and civic skills: it seems to be “the least

demanding form of political activity” (Brady et al. 1995: 283). Some authors also

stress its ‘ritualized’ character, enforced by the legal process and its relatively limited

character. On the other hand, it often happens to be the only available, and thus

3 The options ‘always when you meet this person’, ‘sometimes’ and ‘seldom’ were coded ‘3’,

‘2’ and ‘1’ respectively. Respondents who never discuss politics were assigned ‘0’.

4 For certainty, we tested this intuitive association between membership in and support for a

political party and found out that indeed, in all countries members were significantly stronger

supporters than non-members.

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extremely important, indicator of participation (Verba et al. 1978). Another argument

for including voting in the model of political engagement is its ‘less unequal’

character than other forms of participation, precisely because of its ‘undemanding’

character as well as traditional, symbolic and, thus, ‘compulsory’ dimension (Lijphart

1997). In the light of these considerations, voting turnout should be a good indicator

of the ‘civicness’ of post-communist societies; especially that it refers to some of the

first free elections in the post-communist regimes.

The only measure of voting that we have for all ten countries refers to

prospective parliamentary elections. Respondents were asked to assume that there

was a parliamentary election the next day and identify the party for which they would

vote. As a result, they form three groups: those who had clear, crystallized political

preferences at the time of the survey, those who could not name a concrete party, but

were determined to vote and those, who knew they were not going to vote. Therefore,

we measure not only willingness to vote or not, but also a general orientation in

politics.

All of these political activities belong to so-called conventional participation:

we do not have any measures of non-conventional activities, such as protest.5 On the

other hand, they capture a variety of dimensions of political participation, from

inexpensive and “equal” types, such as political talk or voting, to activities involving

more resources, such as partisanship or party membership. Moreover, all of them are

relevant for the quality of a democratic system, as they are correlated with the

mechanisms of political representation (c.f. Almond and Verba 1963, Verba and Nie

5 Analysis of the link between social capital and non-conventional participation would be a

valuable and relevant complement of the investigation of the determinants of political engagement in

the context of East-Central Europe, as in mid-1990s protest activities were there extremely popular.

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1972, Verba et al. 1995, Parry et al. 1992). Therefore, we believe that these four

variables provide us with a good and reliable measure of political engagement in new

post-communist democracies.

WHY DO PEOPLE PARTICIPATE IN POLITICS?

There exists a vast amount of literature investigating determinants of political

participation. The most popular interpretations refer to the individual’s resources and

to “socialization for participation” by means of involvement in civic groups and

initiatives. The first explanation assumes that those who have more resources, such as

knowledge, money or time, are more likely to participate in politics (Verba et. al

1995), and it has been tested in the context of post-communist democracies, pointing

to the lack of visible differences between them and established democracies (Barnes

and Simon 1998). Therefore, it will not be of primary interest to us.

The latter approach points to the importance of “education” (de Tocqueville

1969) or “socialization” for citizenship (Edwards and Foley 2001): “organizations

teach citizens the civic virtues of trust, moderation, compromise, and reciprocity and

the skill of democratic discussion and organization” (Newton 2001: 229). The most

recent form of this argument has been articulated by Robert Putnam, for whom

associational membership is the source of social trust: “social trust and civic

engagement are strongly correlated; the greater the density of associational

membership in a society, the more trusting its citizens. Trust and engagement are two

facets of the same underlying factor - social capital” (Putnam 1995a: 73). Trust and

membership are believed to be interrelated to such an extent, that they are sometimes

used individually as sufficient indicators of social capital.

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Social trust and membership in voluntary associations have been recognized

as important pre-conditions of a civic polity since Almond and Verba’s Civic Culture.

The “lack of interpersonal trust that is essential to cooperative public activity”

(DiFranceisco and Gitelman 1984: 610) has been identified as the main feature of

Soviet politics. 50 years of social (i.e. directed towards fellow citizens) and political

(i.e. directed towards the state institutions) distrust fostered by Communist regimes is

believed to make post-communist countries particularly prone to political instability,

especially when faced with economic hardships (Putnam 1993). Overcoming the

“legacy of distrust” seems therefore almost equally important an objective as

increasing GDP or reforming bureaucracy.

The context of post-communist countries creates a unique opportunity of

testing additional factors potentially determining political participation, that allow us

to develop the existing debate on the determinants and consequences of political

participation. First, many ECE citizens had been involved in pre-1989 politics, mostly

by means of Communist party membership. Despite the fact that this was not a

democratic organization, people who participated in it “fit the model of a

conventional activist” (Bahry and Silver 1990: 840). Therefore, we are interested in

the link between membership in Communist party and participation in new

democracies. Second, although the existence of the link between participation and the

quality of democracy has long been established, the causality of this relationship is

difficult to capture in the case of stable democratic systems. However, the transition

to democracy in ECE gives us an opportunity to test to what extent the experience of

democratic politics makes people more likely to participate in the future. Despite the

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popular perception of ECE “refolutions”6 as resulting directly from the popular

movements, the instillation of democracy in the post-communist countries happened

largely as a result of elite bargaining, and its further development was strongly

influenced by the external actors, such at the EU or NATO (Welsh 1994, Letki 2002).

The introduction of democracy created the space for civic and political activism

unknown under Communism. Therefore, the question we may ask is: to what extent

did the introduction of democratic institutions and procedures have a positive

influence on citizens adopting the strategies and behaviors suitable for a democratic

system?

Below we outline in depth the implications of the three factors discussed

above (social capital, communist party membership and the democratic structures) for

the patterns of political participation. We also introduce empirical indicators used to

operationalise these concepts.

Social capital. The model of social capital propagated by Putnam (1993,

2000) implies that only trust resulting from interpersonal relations within voluntary

associations will be functional for the “civicness” of a given community. Although

voluntary associations could not operate under the Communist regime, some forms of

interpersonal trust must have existed in the communist states to assist citizens in the

situations of economic hardships and the lack of accountability of political

institutions (Letki and Evans 2002). Therefore, the present levels of trust in the new,

postcommunist democracies are most likely to reflect the mixture of pre- and post-

1990 experiences. However, following Putnam we expect that only trust produced

within voluntary associations will positively effect participation in the democratic

6 The term ‘refolution’ was coined by Garton Ash to describe reform introduced from above in response to pressures for revolution from below (Garton Ash 1990).

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system. We will test for these effects using two indicators of social capital: social

trust and associational membership, and an interaction between them.

Our measure of social trust consists of five items combined together to form a

Likert-type scale. It therefore presents a significant improvement over the measures –

usually a single binary item – used by other authors (Putnam 1993, Inglehart 1997,

Dekker et al. 1997, Stolle and Rochon 1997). Our empirical operationalization of

social trust is based on five items that express individuals’ beliefs about trust and

norms of reciprocity that (because they imply trust, faith in co-operation, and reflect a

general vision of the norms and rules of social interactions) collectively constitute a

relatively broad and comprehensive measure of interpersonal trust (for the details of

the measure, see Appendix A).

Engagement in voluntary associations constitutes the second, behavioral,

component of social capital. Non-political engagement of this sort has proved to be

relevant to political pluralism, civic competence and the sense of civic efficacy, thus

confirming Almond and Verba’s conclusion that “membership in some associations,

even if the individual does not consider the membership politically relevant and even

if it does not involve his active participation, does lead to a more competent

citizenry” (1963: 322, see also Verba et al. 1978, 1995, Parry et al. 1992). The list of

associations that we use in the present paper includes business associations,

professional associations, farmers’ associations, church groups, local/community

groups, sports or social clubs, armed forces associations, ethnic organizations and

factory committees. Since the “original social capital view” claims that “social capital

translates directly into higher political participation” (Krishna 2002: 440), we will be

expecting a very strong influence of associational membership and the interaction

between membership and trust, representing “social capital”, on all forms of political

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participation. However, we are expecting to find that social trust unrelated to

associational membership is irrelevant for explaining political engagement.

Communist party membership. The unique feature of the Communist system

in comparison with other authoritarian regimes was the mass participation of ordinary

citizens, especially in the form of a Communist party membership (Linz and Stepan

1996, Letki 2002). Types of values and so-called “covert participation” (DiFrancesco

and Gitelman 1984) learned under the communist system are not expected to be

beneficial for participation in a democracy: Communist party membership has been

recognized as one of the components of a “compliant activism” in the communist

politics, next to, for example, membership in people’s militia (Bahry and Silver

1990). However, existing research points to the lack of any significant influence of

Communist party membership on democratic values (Gibson et al. 1992). We might

also hypothesize that skills and civic resources learned under the non-democratic

political system can well be used in a democracy: party membership is a type of

conventional activism that socializes citizens to be interested and participate in

politics. Bahry and Silver confirm this intuition with the Soviet Interview Project, as

they found that “people who were more interested in politics, felt more influential …

were more likely to be party activists” (1990: 838). However, as authors

acknowledged, that survey was not thought to be representative of the Soviet

population, nor did it represent behavior in the communist ECE countries in general.

Therefore, it is important to reanalyze their findings using representative samples of

former communist states. When it comes to the hypothesized influence of the

Communist party membership on political participation in the new democracies, then

“our expectations … are ambiguous, if not contradictory” (Gibson et al 1992: 357).

On one hand, since party members were one of the main pillars of the communist

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systems, we may expect them to be relatively reluctant to engage in the political

process under a democratic system. On the other hand, membership in a communist

party could be recognized as a type of “socialization for participation”. Thus, the

question we ask is: Is the fact that large numbers of ECE publics were involved in the

previous regime hampering the development of political participation suitable for

democratic polities?

Democracy. The cultural approach assumes that the political changes are

dependent upon cultural factors (Almond and Verba 1963, Inglehart 1990, 1997).

Civic, participatory culture is crucial for the emergence and consolidation of

democracies, thus “it is often asserted that democratization will continue to face

severe handicaps … in East Europe and Russia, given the strong legacy of

authoritarianism in the recent past” (Jackman and Miller 1996: 633). However, an

alternative explanation of the relationship between participatory culture and

democracy has been put forward and tested empirically (Schmitter and Karl 1991,

Muller and Seligson 1994). In this interpretation, the introduction and development of

a democratic system leads to the development of civic attitudes and behaviour.

Usually, the causality of the relationship between democracy and participation is

rather difficult to test, and the link between systemic changes and individual

behaviour is ignored in favour of aggregate level analysis (Inglehart 1997). However,

since our survey was conducted in the midst of systemic transformation, we can

easily test the impact of the change in democracy on political behaviour of ECE

citizens.

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To capture the change of political systems in ECE we will use Tatu

Vanhanen’s Index of Democratisation.7 This indicator is based on two dimensions:

electoral competition and participation. The total score assigned to a given country

combines the information about the turnout rates for national elections, calculated as

a percentage of the total population and not just registered voting population, and the

degree of competition, defined as “the smaller parties’ share of the votes cast in

parliamentary or presidential elections, or both … It is calculated by subtracting the

percentage of the votes won by the larges party from 100” (Vanhanen 1997: 34).

Index of Democratisation “gets high values only if the values of both basic indicators

are high. If either of them is zero, the value of ID will also drop to zero” (Vanhanen

1997: 35).

We calculated the difference between the score countries in our sample had in

their first available post-1989 entry (1989 for Bulgaria, Czech and Slovak Republics,

Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia, 1991 for Belarus, Estonia and Ukraine) and

the year of the survey: this variable should capture well ECE citizen’s exposure to the

democratic process.8 To measure the influence of the systemic characteristics, i.e. the

change of democracy, on individual level behaviour, we use a hierarchical model,

where individuals are nested within ten ECE countries. We expect to find a positive

influence of the change in the Vanhannen index on political participation.

Resources. Finally, following the more traditional approaches to participation,

we look at the effect of basic socio-economic characteristics, such as education and

7 Source: http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/data/vanhanen/.

8 For the scores, see Appendix A.

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http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/data/vanhanen/

income9, as they represent the most basic resources: skills and money (Parry et al.

1992, Verba et al. 1995). We also look at gender and age, since they have been found

out to be the important predictors of political activism (Schlozman et al. 1995). These

socio-economic characteristics will not be of a major interest in this study: they will

be present in the analysis as controls more than operationalisation of an alternative

explanation of political participation.

LEVELS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

Before we move to explaining the determinants of political activism in ECE,

we shall analyze its general levels. Table 1 below presents the average values for

particular countries. It shows clearly that no type of political activism can be taken as

representative for general levels of political participation (or the country’s civicness).

For example, the low level of declared voting abstention in Estonia is not

accompanied by high levels of political discussion or partisanship. In Bulgaria party-

related activities seem to be very popular, but at the same time Bulgarians do not talk

about politics particularly often and quite a few of them declared electoral abstention.

[Table 1 about here]

Political discussion. As many as 41.5% of respondents said they never discuss

politics and only 10.1% always do, while 21.3 scored ‘4’ (on a scale from 0 to 6). The

9 This is a household monthly income. Coding of income was different in particular countries;

in most of them income was categorized, but the number of categories and their scope differed. To

make the data on income comparable, we were forced to recode it into three broad categories: below

average, average and above average. The lower and upper borders of the ‘average’ category were

defined as mean - 0.5*SD and mean + 0.5*SD respectively.

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average score for the whole sample is 2.29. When we calculate the average frequency

of talking about politics for the particular countries, we can see that the differences

are not great, yet highly statistically significant (p<0.001). In fact, Poland and

Romania are the outliers: not only are levels of political discussion in these two

countries significantly lower than in the next lowest (Ukraine), but also they are

around half of those in the Slovak Republic and Belarus: in the latter two countries

roughly 30% claim to never discuss politics, while in Poland and Romania this figure

approaches a rather overwhelming 60%. The rank order does not seem to be

predictable by any characteristics of particular countries: it depends neither on the

stage of democratization nor the level of economic development. Also the timing of

parliamentary or presidential elections, which might be expected to enliven political

discussions, does not explain the rank order: Belarus, which had not even had free

elections by the time of the survey, scored significantly higher than Hungary, which

had parliamentary elections almost immediately before the survey was conducted, in

spring 1994.

Partisanship. The differences between particular countries are striking: in

Bulgaria and Romania more than 40% of the population considered themselves to be

supporters of a political party, while in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus this group was

less than 15%. Even in the context of the decreasing partisanship observed in recent

years in several Western countries (Dalton 2000, Schmitt 2002), the levels of

partisanship in the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic and Poland are rather

unimpressive, while in Estonia, Ukraine, Russia and Belarus they may be considered

alarming10.

10 In 1992-94 the proportion of “party identifiers” in seven developed Western democracies

ranged from 32% in Germany to 64% in the UK (Schmitt 2002).

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However, the more interesting issue is what factors differentiate the levels of

support between particular countries so much. Although some countries seem to form

clusters predicable on the basis of their cultural and historic characteristics and

geographical location (e.g., the Czech and Slovak Republics and Poland or Ukraine,

Russia and Belarus), this does not explain the pattern of the level of support for a

political party very well. The advancement in the political and economic transition is

helpful for explaining the location of the ‘bottom’ cluster: the countries lagging

behind, such as Ukraine, Russia and Belarus do have the lowest levels of party

support, but at the same time Romania and Bulgaria, where the development of

democratic institutions was much less advanced than in the Czech Republic, Hungary

and Poland or even Slovak Republic, have a higher proportion of partisans than these

four countries. Moreover, the timing of the last and forthcoming parliamentary

elections or strength of post-communist parties do not explain systematically

countries’ rankings either.

Although such a ranking is definitely conditioned by numerous factors, one

might expect the experience of the free elections to play a particularly important role.

The bottom cluster of countries seems to be easily explainable: Belarus, Russia and

Ukraine had not had entirely free parliamentary elections by the time of a survey and

although democratic parties (such as the Ukrainian Democratic Block, the Popular

Front of Belarus or Democratic Russia) were allowed to take part in the 1990

elections, they did not win with the Communist Party candidates. Although Estonia

had free parliamentary elections, a significant part of the population – Russians – was

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not politically represented. In fact, the Russian population of Estonia is much less

likely to support any political party11.

Voting. The most ‘undecided’ nations are, as one might expect, Ukraine and

Belarus: over 44% of respondents in these countries had no clear political

preferences, and over 32% also intended not to vote. The situation looks even worse

in Russia, where these proportions are reversed: 44% of respondents would not vote

in the parliamentary elections and 33.2% had no clear political preferences. This is

hardly surprising, as respondents in none of these countries had experienced free

parliamentary elections by the time of the survey.

If civicness was to be assessed on the basis of a combination of the

willingness to vote and party preferences, the Czech Republic would definitely have

to be assessed as the most civic nation. Romania would be comparable, as almost

70% of Romanians had crystallized party preferences12. With the exception of

Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, countries do not cluster in any systematic way; even the

Czech and Slovak Republics differ in terms of potential abstentions. Poland and

Slovakia, which were about to have parliamentary elections, had a lower proportion

of respondents with definite party preferences than, for example, Romania, and

Poland had a declared abstention rate as high as 25%.

Membership in a political party. The last type of political participation to be

examined here - membership in a political party - requires more political competence

11 This is another indication, along with the lower levels of political discussion, of their

withdrawal from a political life. The average level of party support among Estonians is 0.441, while

among Russians in Estonia it is only 0.069.

12 This is even more striking if one takes into account the emergence of Democratic NSF from

NSF and subsequent transformation of NSF into DP-NSF and of DNSF into PSDR that took place

recently before the survey.

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as well as more resources (such as time and skills) than any of the activities analyzed

above, so the engagement in it may be expected to be much lower. Indeed, as Table 1

presents, in East-Central Europe very few people belong to political parties: although

in Bulgaria members of a political party constitute almost 8% of the sample, in some

other countries this figure is below (Ukraine and Estonia) or slightly above (Russia)

1%. These results are even more disappointing if one takes into account the fact that

almost 17% of the pooled sample reported membership in the Communist party in the

past, while only 2.6% are the members of the democratic parties established after the

transition.

EXPLAINING POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS

The above analysis showed that indeed, the levels of political engagement in

the post-communist countries are rather low, but also that they are dramatically

differentiated across countries. Moreover, we have observed that the countries do not

cluster in terms of levels of political participation: a high score on one dimension may

be accompanied by a low score on the other. Therefore, we do not pool the indicators

together to create a combined measure of any sort, but instead look at each activity

independently. Table 2 below displays the results of regressions of the four types of

political participation on social trust, membership in social groups, socio-economic

characteristics and change on Vanhanen’s Index of Democratization. Three of the

presented models are logit models, while participation in political discussion is

explained by means of linear regression. In the case of voting, initial analysis showed

that the “don’t know” and “wouldn’t vote” categories do not differ in most respects,

thus we combined these categories.

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As mentioned above, we use a hierarchical model that allows us to

simultaneously estimate the impact of individual and country level characteristics on

political participation (Bryk and Raudenbusch 1992). For this purpose we use

MLWin, which is designed to fit multilevel models (or ‘random coefficient models’)

to data with hierarchical structure. Neglecting this hierarchical structure would lead to

an underestimation of the standard errors of the coefficients, which might lead to the

inference that effects are significant when they are not (Woodhouse et al. 1996). Here

we use a hierarchical model in which the respondents are nested within the 10

countries in our sample.

The main difference between this type of model and the standard one-level

model controlling for the country effect by means of country dummy variables is that

the multilevel model estimates the significance of the higher level as a random effect

rather than as a fixed effect. The model can be summarised by the following equation:

yij = β0ijx0 + β1x1ij… + βkxkij + βlxlj

Subscript ij means that a given variable varies between respondents and

countries, while subscript j means that a variable varies only between countries and is

constant for all respondents within a given country. β0ij is an intercept explained by

the formula

β0ij = β0 + u0j + e0ij,

where u0j is a level 2 residual, that is the same for all respondents in a given

country, while e0ij is a level 1 residual, varying between persons and countries. uj and

e0ij are assumed to be uncorrelated.

[Table 2 about here]

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In the first step, we estimated the baseline models containing only individual-

level characteristics, but as adding the contextual variable does not affect their

coefficients, for simplicity we present only a final version of the model. However, it

should be mentioned that in all cases the level-2 variance was statistically significant,

which simply means that the levels of participation significantly differ across

countries. It should also be mentioned that following the convention, initially we

controlled for the change in the level of GDP in particular countries between 1989

and the year of a survey, but found no effect, therefore these models are not displayed

here either.

So, how well do our predictors of political participation do? Since three out of

four models presented here are non-linear, the interpretation of the fixed effects is not

straightforward. Therefore, in Figure 1 we display the influence of statistically

significant effects in percentages.

[Figure 1 about here]

Social capital. Social trust significantly influences talk about politics,

partisanship and voting. Since trust is a linear predictor, it is difficult to compare its

impact with that of other variables. However, we may say that a one-point increase on

the five-point social trust scale results in the increase of probability to engage in

political participation ranging from 1% (partisanship) to 3.4% (voting). In Figure 1

we present the influence of a maximum (5 point) increase: it translates into 6%

increase of the probability to support a political party or discuss politics and as much

as 18.6% increase of the probability to vote. However, since such a change is

virtually impossible for an individual to achieve, these numbers reflect the spread in

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political activism between the least and most trusting respondents rather than the

actual influence of social trust on participation. Associations do worse as they are

statistically significant for explaining partisanship and voting only: association

members are 8.4% more likely to be party supporters than non-members and 19.7%

more likely to vote. The interaction term between social trust and associational

membership, that represents the core of Putnam’s hypothesis about social capital, is

relevant only for voting, but its effect is negative. Figure 1 presents the impact of a 5-

point increase on this scale: the most trusting association member is 12.2% less likely

to vote than the least trusting non-member. This is a truly puzzling finding especially

that this effect is almost as strong as the positive influence of social trust not related

to associational membership (18.6%).

Communist party membership is a statistically significant predictor in all four

models, and its influence is always positive. Moreover, the strength of this influence

is usually relatively high: being a Communist party member in the past increases the

probability of being a party member in a new democracy by 9.4%, probability of

being a party supporter by 5.6% and probability of voting by as much as 10.3%. In

the case of political discussion, Communist party membership can be rivaled only by

socio-economic predictors: the change of a “Communist party membership” variable

from 0 to 1 results in a 6% increase on the scale of political discussion.

Finally, how important is the change in the quality of democracy for political

participation? As we mentioned above, the levels of all four types of participation

discussed here are significantly differentiated among countries. But in the case of

political discussion this differentiation cannot be ascribed to the influence of the

process of democratization: the effect of the change of Vanhannen’s Index of

Democratization is statistically insignificant. However, when we look at party

21

membership and partisanship, the effect of the change in the levels of democracy is

clearly visible, and in both cases it is, as expected, positive. Since the scores on the

Index differ from -18.44 for Estonia to 42.63 for the Czech Republic, the coefficients

are rather small and difficult to interpret. However, we can easily make these results

more meaningful comparing particular countries. Belarus and Ukraine are two cases

that did not note any change in terms of democracy by the time of our survey (the

score for both is 0), so we will use them as our baseline. Therefore, we may say that if

Belarus and Ukraine experience a progress in terms of democracy similar to that

experienced by the Czech Republic, keeping all other factors constant, Belarussians

and Ukrainians would be 11% more likely to be party members and 14.9% more

likely to be party supporters. At the same time, if they experienced the regress similar

to Estonia, they would be 1.7% less likely to be party members and 4% less likely to

be party supporters (see Figure 2).

[Figure 2 about here]

Although in the case of voting the effect of change in democracy misses the

significance level, the coefficient is considerably larger than the standard error and it

tells us that Belarussians and Ukrainians, having experienced the “Czech

democratization”, would be as much as 21.2% more likely to vote and if they were

Estonians they would be 7.5% less likely to vote.

The analysis confirmed our initial intuition that particular types of

participation may relate somewhat differently to the independent factors we were

interested in. Only in the case of voting are all characteristics significant, and among

them membership in associations is by far the most important one. The impact of a

22

Communist party membership and socio-economic characteristics is much weaker,

but still relatively strong. The determinants of partisanship are very similar to those

of voting13, yet their predictive power is significantly weaker. Political party

membership seems to depend almost entirely, besides the socio-economic

characteristics, on the experience of membership in a Communist party. This effect is

not astonishing, as in most countries social-democratic or socialist parties are the

direct heirs of Communist parties in terms of human and physical resources. Finally,

political discussion seems to be much more dependent on socio-economic

characteristics (especially education) than group membership and trust. Moreover,

this is the only type of participation that is entirely independent from the change in

the level of democracy. We may explain this by referring to the fact that the

remaining three indicators are strongly related to political parties and electoral

process in a democratic system, while this one is much more general and could have

been (and was) practiced under the Communism.

CONCLUSIONS

Citizen participation in politics is said to be crucial for the development of a

strong, stable democracy, where the public’s interests are well represented in politics

and officials can be easily held to the account. The levels of participation in post-

communist countries in the mid-1990s were considered to be below what would be

necessary for a new democracy to stabilize and consolidate. This lack of political

activism in ECE after 1989 seemed in particular contrast with the mass movements in

some countries before 1989 and citizens’ wide participation in the Communist party

13 This could have been expected, as our measure of voting refers to the ability of pointing a

party respondent would vote for rather than to the general willingness to vote.

23

and system-related organizations. The major factors causing low levels of political

engagement are believed to be part of the Communist heritage: low levels of social

capital (interpersonal trust and membership in voluntary associations) and the anti-

democratic norms and attitudes learned through participation in the non-democratic

system. In turn, low levels of participation are likely to hamper the consolidation of

new democracies in ECE. In this paper we have analyzed all these factors and their

links with political participation. Below we recapitulate the findings:

First, we found that membership in a Communist party before 1989 is a very

good predictor of conventional political participation in the new ECE democracies,

and that its influence on participation in politics after 1989 is positive. Although we

suspected that the skills and general interest in politics learned under the non-

democratic regime may be relevant for participation in a democracy, the finding that

Communist party membership is consistently one of the main predictors was

relatively startling. This leads us to the conclusion that participation even in a non-

democratic organization can socialize for citizenship.

Second, when associational membership is a significant predictor, its power is

high, but this applies only to two out of four types of participation. The effect of

social trust, although relevant for explaining three out of four types of participation, is

usually small. An increase by 1 point on the social trust scale would mean that the

respondent would have to score 1 point higher on all five indicators used to create this

scale, which would be a relatively large change. At the same time, it would result in

the 1 to 3% increase of the dependent variables. We should also remember that this

trust is not the part of Putnam’s concept of social capital, as it is entirely independent

from membership in associations. The interaction term between social trust and

associational membership, which represents Putnam’s idea of reciprocal relationship

24

between these two elements, has very little predictive power, as it is significant for

explaining voting only, where its effect is negative, which is clearly inconsistent with

the social capital theory. Although one might argue that the above findings result

from the specificity of East-Central Europe, conclusions about the weak relationship

between political participation and social trust, similar to ours, were reached by

Dekker et al. (1997) who, despite narrowing the definition of political participation to

membership or volunteering in certain types of groups, such as political parties, trade

unions, environment, peace and animal rights movements etc., found that political

engagement is not related to generalized trust in most of the fourteen West-European

countries they investigated. Also Gibson’s extensive analysis of the networks and

various forms of trust in Russia show that “interpersonal trust actually has little to do

with attitudes toward democratic institutions and processes” (Gibson 2001: 51).

Defenders of the social capital thesis might argue that the link between social capital

and political participation is much more pronounced in democracies, as only under a

democratic government can voluntary associations generate trust. We tested this

argument by examining the slopes of the social capital variables across countries and

detected no significant differences, despite the varying levels of democracy.14

Finally, our analyses show that the exposure to the democratic processes and

development of democratic institutions has an important positive influence on

political participation related directly to a democratic system. The descriptive analysis

14 Following Seligman (2002) we believe that the lack of established Western democracies in

our sample does not make the results less robust. Quite the contrary: Seligman demonstrated

convincingly that “northern industrial cases” strongly bias any cross-country comparisons, blurring

region-specific patterns. Further, since we are interested in the influence of the change in democracy

(rather than levels of democracy) on political behavior, adding cases with stable levels of democracy

would result in decreasing the variance of the contextual variable.

25

of the levels of participation in particular East-Central European countries implies

that they are conditioned by numerous factors, such as the structure of party

competition, ethnic composition or simply the experience of elections. Obviously, the

lack of experience of free elections makes people less likely to have political

preferences (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine), the lack of civic rights to participate in the

electoral process has a naturally similar result (the Estonian Russian minority).

Extreme fragmentation of the political spectrum (Poland) makes it difficult for people

to actually choose a preferred party since “fragmented party systems are characterized

by ideological polarization, weak and unstable coalition governments, and bidding

wars” (Norris 1999: 224). Political context factors, such as the amount of political

conflict, clearly influence the levels of politicization (Schmitt 2002): thus in the

countries with clear and stable parliamentary majorities (Slovak and Czech

Republics, Hungary), reinforced additionally by the economic stability, partisanship

is less of an issue than in the countries where the political scene is dominated by two

main groups, each potentially capable of creating a majority (Romania, Bulgaria).

Vanhannen’s Index of Democratization captures the change in the openness of a

political system as well as institutional arrangements, and is sensitive to the party

competition patterns and minority policies. And we demonstrated that the change of

those conditions is very important for citizens’ willingness to engage in political

participation.

Summing up, we must argue for the limited usefulness of the concept of social

capital in explaining the levels and patterns of political activism in the democratizing

countries. The relevance of associational membership for political participatory

activities had been established long before the concept of social capital was

introduced to political science, and the ECE patterns do not diverge significantly from

26

those observed in Western democracies. Social trust has also been a part of a cultural

explanation since 1960s, while the novelty of the social capital argument lies in the

anticipated reciprocal connectedness of these two elements. However, as we

demonstrated above, this core idea of social capital is generally irrelevant for

explaining of political participation in ECE. In fact, participation in non-democratic

politics (Communist party membership) is far more important than social capital.

Therefore, our findings suggest that skills and attitudes gained from participation in

groups, such as voluntary associations or Communist party, and exposure to the

democratic political processes are far more important for the ‘civicness’ of a

community than whether its members’ trust each other.

27

APPENDIX A

Social trust

a) It is human nature to cooperate with other people.

b) Most people can be trusted.

c) If someone is in serious trouble, no one else cares about it.

d) If you are not always on your guard other people will take advantage of you.

e) A person cooperates with other people only when he or she sees it in his or her own

interest.

All of these items have an ‘agree-disagree’ format with five-point response

scales. For items a and b ‘strongly disagree’ is coded 1 and ‘strongly agree’ 5, while

for c, d and e the coding is reversed. ‘Don’t know’ responses are recoded to the mid-

point. Factor analysis detected two main dimensions (a, b as one positively-worded

dimension, and the remaining three as a second, negatively worded dimension) and

the reliability test for the 5 items indicated that Cronbach’s alpha is a rather low 0.54.

This results from the fact that the distribution of item a) is highly skewed (over 90%

of respondents agree with this item). However, when selecting the items to create a

composite measure of social trust we took into account not only the reliability of

particular items, but also their discriminating power: including a skewed item gives

“a good spread of scores and thus discriminates among individuals” (Martin et al.

1993: 3). We also performed additional tests to make sure that including item a) does

not distort the results. To balance the scale and avoid an acquiescence bias we used

all five items.

Vanhanen’s Index of Democracy

[Table A1 about here]

28

APPENDIX B: THE SURVEYS

The surveys used in this paper were undertaken in 1993-94 as part of an

ESRC funded research program on Eastern Europe “Emerging forms of political

representation and participation in Eastern Europe”, part of stage II of the ESRC's

East-West Program. The studies in each country were undertaken by researchers

based usually at the respective academies of science employing established teams of

interviewers and coders. The surveys were designed in and coordinated from Britain,

but with important contributions from collaborators in many of the countries studied.

Sampling frames and stratification procedures varied between countries: in

some countries census information was considered more reliable; in others electoral

records were preferred; in other random route procedures were adopted with a Kish

grid being used for final respondent selection. The sampling frame used in most

countries was the Electoral Register, although in some cases it was thought better to

use the Census, as some groups of the population were likely to be under-represented

among the electorate. The sampling methods used involved several stages of

selection. Typically, these took the form of: parliamentary constituencies stratified by

standard regions, population density and percentage owner-occupation, and selected

systematically with probability proportionate to the size of the electorate; polling

districts; addresses chosen with probability proportionate to their number of listed

electors; individuals - one at each address (or household) chosen by a random

selection procedure.

Table B.1 summarizes the main characteristics of the surveys. Each of the

strategies reported in Table B.1 was considered to be the most effective approach

within the countries in which it was adopted. As far as can be told, given the

fallibilities of official data, non-response biases are predictably like those in the West.

29

Compared to Census data non-respondents tend to be older and to have lower levels

of education (see below for an example). Non-response resulted mainly from non-

contacts and refusals.

[Table B.1 about here]

The items in the questionnaires were developed over several months with

extensive back-translation and cross-translation procedures, which were facilitated by

collective meetings in Britain and smaller meetings in many of the post-communist

countries studied. Items were pilot tested on 50-100 respondents in each country

prior to being finalized for use in the main surveys. All interviews were conducted

face-to-face in the respondents' homes. Interviewers were usually experienced and

were also given special training for some of the more difficult aspects of the interview

schedule. Local area supervisors carried out checks on the interviewers. Quality was

also checked in many countries using follow-up studies of approximately 10% of the

respondents' to the initial survey, who were randomly selected and re-interviewed a

few weeks later.

30

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Table 1. Levels of Political Participation in East-Central Europe

Political discussiona Partisanshipb Parliamentary election Political partiese

Votersc Non-votersd Belarus 2.73 10.5 17.1 38.0 1.8 Bulgaria 2.24 45.1 60.1 23.8 7.6 Czech Rep. 2.56 27.2 64.7 8.7 5.6 Estonia 2.34 17.2 53.9 13.8 0.7 Hungary 2.30 39.8 59.8 14.2 1.6 Poland 1.40 22.5 65.0 25.7 1.6 Romania 1.53 42.7 68.3 14.4 3.2 Russia 2.43 13.3 22.8 44.0 1.1 Slovak Rep. 2.90 26.7 61.1 17.2 4.8 Ukraine 2.22 14.6 23.0 32.8 0.6 a Average levels of reported political discussion (from 0 to 6). b Percentage of political party supporters. c Percentage of respondents declaring they know what party they would vote for in the prospective parliamentary election. d Percentage of respondents declaring they would not vote for in the prospective parliamentary election. e Percentage of political party members.

34

Table 2. Regressions of Political Participation on Trust, Associations, Communist Party Membership, Socio-Economic Background and Democracy, N1 = 13155, N2 = 10

(unstandardised coefficients, standard errors in parentheses)

Dependent Variable: Political

Discussiona Party

Membershipb Party Supportb Votingb Constant 2.340*** (0.340) -3.247*** (0.765) -1.867*** (0.363) -0.849 (0.445) Trust 0.150*** (0.031) 0.167 (0.102) 0.089* (0.037) 0.158*** (0.033) Associations 0.062 (0.192) 0.226 (0.499) 0.590** (0.213) 0.836*** (0.207) Trust & Associations Interaction 0.116 (0.063) 0.176 (0.163) -0.059 (0.071) -0.137* (0.068) Communist Party Membership 0.364*** (0.051) 1.352*** (0.114) 0.420*** (0.055) 0.454*** (0.055) Sex -0.488*** (0.037) -0.688*** (0.119) -0.371*** (0.043) -0.268*** (0.039) Age 18-29 30-44 0.329*** (0.051) 0.827*** (0.245) 0.415*** (0.065) 0.175*** (0.055) 45-59 0.421*** (0.055) 1.069*** (0.246) 0.619*** (0.068) 0.345*** (0.059) 60+ 0.346*** (0.061) 1.638*** (0.249) 0.925*** (0.074) 0.440*** (0.066) Education 1 2 0.507*** (0.061) 0.469* (0.215) 0.271*** (0.074) 0.171* (0.065) 3 0.791*** (0.065) 0.653** (0.225) 0.300*** (0.079) 0.276*** (0.070) 4 0.999*** (0.066) 0.733** (0.229) 0.424*** (0.080) 0.294*** (0.071) 5 1.296*** (0.068) 0.900*** (0.222) 0.423*** (0.082) 0.433*** (0.074) Income Below Average Average 0.328*** (0.045) 0.162 (0.139) 0.127* (0.054) 0.165*** (0.049) Above Average 0.621*** (0.059) 0.158 (0.177) 0.356*** (0.069) 0.415*** (0.064) Change in Democracy 0.002 (0.008) 0.035*** (0.008) 0.022** (0.007) 0.021 (0.012) Country Level Variance 0.217* (0.099) 0.189 (0.102) 0.207* (0.095) 0.588 (0.264) *** p < 0.001 ** p < 0.01 * p < 0.05 a Linear regression b Logit model

35

Figure 1. Statistically Significant Predictors of Political Participation

6.0%

6.0%

18.6%

8.4%

19.7%

5.2%

9.4%

5.6%

10.3%-12.2%

-15.0% -10.0% -5.0% 0.0% 5.0% 10.0% 15.0% 20.0% 25.0%

Political Discussion

Party Membership

Party Support

Voting

Interaction of Trust and AssociationalMembership (5-point increase)Communist Party Membership

Associations

Trust (5-point increase)

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Figure 2. The Impact of the Change in Democracy on Political Participation (Belarus and Ukraine are the baseline)

-1.7%

11.0%

-4.0%

14.9%

-7.5%

21.2%

-10.0% -5.0% 0.0% 5.0% 10.0% 15.0% 20.0% 25.0%

Estonia

Czech Republic

VotingPartisanshipParty memberhsip

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Table A1. Change of the Score on the Vanhannen’s Index of Democratization

Change 1989-1993 Belarus 0.00Bulgaria 40.48Czech R. 42.63Estonia -18.44Hungary 35.11Lithuania 0.76Poland 6.89Romania 26.1Russia 19.33Slovak R. 34.9Ukraine 0.00

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Table B.1. Information on sampling and response rates for each survey SAMPLING FRAME

SAMPLING RESPONSE RATE

BULGARIA SUMMER 1993

adult pop (18+) 1992 census of households

two-step cluster 1. 211 census districts (from 42000) 2.random:12 households from each

names issued: 2532 non-contact: 517 refused: 83 achieved: 1932 Response rate: 0.76

CZECH REPUBLIC SPRING 1994

adult pop (18+) list of voters from 1992 in sampled localities

1. 8 regions 2. 182 sampling points (localities) from 13410 3. 2104 addresses, of which: 1681 random list sampling (electoral register): 423 random route + 111 quota

names issued: 2104 non-contact: 404 refused: 291 achieved: 1409+ 111 Response rate: 0.67

ESTONIA SUMMER 1993

adult pop (18+) 1989 census of households

1. 5 regions 2. 15 counties 3. 321 sampling points 4.random-route/household 5.Kish matrix/respondent


HUNGARY SPRING 1994

adult pop (20+) Central Register of Population (1992)

1. 12 counties representing regions 2. 78 sampling points 3. random selection of individuals


POLAND SUMMER 1993

adult pop (18+) Central Register of Individuals

1. 8 regions 2. 4 types of settlements


ROMANIA SUMMER 1993

adult pop (18+) Electoral Records

1. 4 provinces 2. 4 types of settlements 3. electoral constituencies (126 from 51 settlements)


RUSSIA SUMMER 1993

adult pop (18+) lists of 'privatization vouchers'

1. 10 regions 2. 56 settlements 3. indiv. from list of vouchers


SLOVAKIA SPRING 1994

adult pop (18+) list of voters from 1992 in sampled localities

1. 4 regions 2. 215 sampling points (localities) from 4191 3. 2014 addresses of which: 1100 first wave; 914 second wave. Random list sampling (electoral register) + 68 quota

names issued: 2014 non-contact: 338 refused: 233 achieved: 1443+ 68 Response rate: 0.75

UKRAINE SUMMER 1993

adult pop (18+) Housing Offices' residence list of individuals

1. 70 urban + 50 rural settlements 2. 7 types (only urban) - selection proportional to size of pop. in each type


Response rate = achieved/names issued.

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