Democratic Values in the Post-Communist Region: The Incidence of Traditionalists, Skeptics, Democrats, and Radicals

Abstract

A generation after the democratic revolutions of 1989, most post-communist countries remain democratic. However, citizens differ by their identification with democratic values and by the prevalence of five main “(non)democratic mentalities” which we derived from the European Values Study (EVS). Our focus was on three post-communist regions: (a) the post-soviet core countries (Russia, Moldova, Ukraine), (b) ex-soviet Baltics (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), and (c) Central European “Visegrad” countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia). Results indicate that democrats (i.e., secular democrats and religious democrats) are represented in every country; their incidence is higher among elites and among the young; yet democrats in all post-communist countries constitute a minority. Intolerant traditionalists are most typical for the post-soviet core countries, while passive skeptics constitute majority in the post-communist Central Europe and plurality in the Baltics. Passive skepticism can be interpreted in terms of an enduring “post-communist syndrome.”