Communist Legacies and Left-Authoritarianism

• Author: Grigore Pop-Eleches,Joshua A. Tucker
• Published date: 01 October 2020
• Date: 01 October 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019879954
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414019879954

Comparative Political Studies

2020, Vol. 53(12) 1861 –1889

© The Author(s) 2019

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414019879954

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Article

Communist Legacies and

Left-Authoritarianism

Grigore Pop-Eleches1

and Joshua A. Tucker2

Abstract

Communist regimes were avowedly leftist authoritarian regimes, a relative

rarity among autocracies. The growing literature on regime legacies

would lead us to expect that postcommunist citizens would be more

likely to exhibit “left-authoritarian” attitudes than their counterparts

elsewhere. Finding that this is the case, we rely on 157 surveys from 88

countries to test if a living through Communism legacy model can account

for this surplus of left-authoritarian attitudes. Employing both aggregate

and micro-level analyses, we find strong support for the predictions of

this model. Moving beyond previous legacy studies, we then test a variety

of hypothesized mechanisms to explain how exposure to communist

rule could have led to the regime congruent left-authoritarian attitudes.

Of the mechanisms tested, greater state penetration of society is

associated with a strong socialization effect and religious attendance—

and in particular attending Catholic religious services—is associated with

weaker socialization effects.

Keywords

East European politics, nondemocratic regimes, elections, public opinion,

voting behavior, Russia/former Soviet Union

1Princeton University, NJ, USA

2New York University, New York City, USA

Corresponding Author:

Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University, 248 Corwin Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

Email: gpop@princeton.edu

879954CPSXXX10.1177/0010414019879954Comparative Political StudiesPop-Eleches and Tucker

research-article2019

1862 Comparative Political Studies 53(12)

Introduction

Political scientists are paying increasing attention to the effects of regime

legacies not just on institutions (Acemoglu et al., 2002; Crawford & Lijphart,

1995; Hagopian, 1993), but also on attitudes and behavior (Bernhard &

Karakoç, 2007; Darden & Grzymala-Busse, 2006; Joly, 2017; Neundorf,

2010). Interestingly, though, there has been little research to date on the effect

of legacies on left–right self-identification, and most of the existing studies

are limited to single countries (Neundorf, 2009) or regions (Thorisdottir, Jost,

Liviatan, & Shrout, 2007).1

If one were to posit a regime legacy likely to affect left–right self-

identification, probably the first to spring to mind would be the likelihood

that communist regimes would leave behind a leftist legacy, due to the

almost existential link between communism and left-wing ideology.2 In our

recent book Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary

Political Attitudes (Pop-Eleches & Tucker, 2017), we put forward a theoreti-

cal framework and empirical methodology for examining the effect of com-

munist era legacies on attitudes that includes empirical work on attitudes

toward democracy, markets, social welfare, and gender equality. When we

replicate our general approach of comparing attitudes held by postcommu-

nist citizens with those held by citizens in non-postcommunist countries

using the World Values Survey (WVS), we do indeed find a postcommunist

leftist bias.3 Interestingly, though, this leftist surplus is largely limited to

people with low levels of support for democracy; among pro-democracy

postcommunist citizens the postcommunist left-wing “bias” disappears. The

left-hand panel of Figure 1 demonstrates this pattern graphically by plotting

the predicted left–right orientation, on a 1 to 10 scale, of postcommunist citi-

zens (gray diamonds) as opposed to citizens from countries in the rest of the

world (black circles) on the basis of a standardized index of support for

democracy normalized to a mean of zero for respondents in the third, fourth,

and fifth waves (1995-2009) of the WVS.4

Similarly interesting is the fact that judging by the right-hand panel of

Figure 1, the “democratic deficit” of postcommunist citizens we identified in

the book is largely driven by leftists: Postcommunist citizens who self-iden-

tify as rightists do not seem to have much less support for democracy than

right-wingers in other parts of the world.

As we have no real theoretical prior as to whether democratic attitudes

cause left–right self-placement or vice versa, we here focus on whether or not

there is a communist legacy effect on the intersection of left–right self-place-

ment and attitudes toward democracy, or, put another way, whether the sur-

plus of left-authoritarians in postcommunist countries represents a communist