Tuesday, June 25, 2013
C0.23 (Oudemanhuispoort)
On the background of widespread expectations about flourishing democracy and active citizenship inspired by the 1989 "revolutions", authors criticize low levels of democratic participation, the lack of political trust, and weak civil societies in the new post-communist democracies. The available analyses of overtime trends report declining political trust and satisfaction with politics among post-communist citizens that is sometimes interpreted as yet another sign of the coming crisis of democracy. Contrary to this literature and drawing on authors such as Dalton, Inglehart and Welzel, the paper argues that what we observe in the new post-communist democracies is a process analogous to what is going on in the "old" democracies. Similarly to other industrialized countries, a new style of "modern democracies" evolves in Central-Eastern Europe. The public is critical to and challenges political elites not primarily by participating in elections, but by using rather non-institutional forms of activism that allows for more involved and autonomous participation on the part of activists. In our paper we focus on the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary, and use our unique dataset of all protest events that took place in these countries between 1990 and 2010, which we supplement with measures of political distrust and dissatisfaction with government. This makes it possible to show that declining trust and satisfaction with politics goes hand in hand with increased political activism.
