Communist Legacies and post-communist political participation

In this paper we identify a large and temporally resilient deficit in political participation in post-communist countries based on data from 218 surveys conducted between 1990-2009 in 24 post-communist countries and 67 non-post-communist countries in the World Values Survey. We then try to identify the mechanisms through which the communist past affects these outcomes, focusing specifically on four types of legacies: demographics, economic conditions, political institutions and direct personal exposure to communism. Our preliminary findings suggest that most of the deficit can be explained by the economic and institutional legacies of communism, which have cast a long shadow over post-communist politics but there is surprisingly little evidence political passivity is linked to personal exposure to communist regimes.