Communism's Shadow is an important book, one that draws upon a wealth of data and sophisticated modelling and statistical techniques to answer, at its core, an important question: how does the communist past matter in shaping political attitudes among post-communist publics? As the authors note, there is a rich literature on how the communist legacy has shaped post-communist institutions, but much less on political culture. This may seem odd because, after all, communist regimes explicitly attempted to create a New Socialist Man, whose values would differ from those of people living in capitalist countries. One would therefore perhaps expect some sort of communist legacy, as attitudes acquired while living under communist periods would persist well after communism fell.
Conclusively demonstrating this, however, is difficult to do. At the most basic level, as Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker note, based upon analysis of the World Values Survey (WVS), one can say that post-communist publics do exhibit less support for democracy, markets, and gender equality, and more support for social welfare policies, than those in countries that never experienced communism. The problem, however, is that these surveys mostly occurred after communism's collapse, so it is difficult to determine if the observed effect is a communist legacy, the result of living through a difficult post-communist period, or, perhaps, something else.
In order to identify a communist legacy, the authors dive into the survey data and add a host of other variables to test competing models, employing both global and intra-regional comparisons. They suggest that post-communist countries could “look different” because of pre-communist factors (such as levels of literacy or prior experience with democracy), communist-era factors (including state control over the economy, urbanization, and education), and the post-communist experience (such as difficulty of building democracies and markets). Their primary hypothesis is that the longer one lived under a communist system (“greater exposure”), the more likely it is that one acquired the regime's values. They recognize, however, that not all communist systems were the same, and thus take into account factors such as the level of repression (Stalinist vs. post-totalitarian regimes) and whether communism was imposed or home-grown. They add nuance to their argument by also adding individual-level variables that they suggest might either provide resistance against exposure to communism (such as higher levels of education and Catholicism) or intensify the effect of “exposure” (including Communist Party membership, urban residence, and parental socialization). The construction of this dataset was, no doubt, a herculean task, and the authors deserve credit both for the comprehensiveness of their model and how they explain their reasoning. Furthermore, they display a welcome humility, acknowledging shortcomings in the data and where objections can be made.
The dependent variables, support for democracy, markets, social welfare, and gender equality, come primarily from questions asked in various waves of the WVS, supplemented with surveys conducted by European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and country-specific surveys in Hungary and Germany, the last of which allows a more focused comparison between West and East Germans. The data is pooled, with one consequence being that most of the discussion focuses on the examination of variables (that is, does a pre-communist democratic past matter, does higher economic growth under communism matter?) as opposed to countries (how do Czechs differ from Ukrainians?).
This book is methodologically sophisticated, and readers averse to statistical analysis may decide it is not for them. That would be a pity. The authors explain and display their data in a very accessible manner, saving the details for a 125 page electronic appendix (currently available at Joshua Tucker's webpage). They walk readers step by step through competing models, clarifying how each added variable does (or does not) matter. One can get lost in some of the details, but the general conclusion remains clear across the four issue-areas: living through communism (even when controlled for age) does seem to matter in terms of producing legacies in attitudes (weaker on gender equality), even taking into account all these other variables. Furthermore, more purchase can be gained by taking into account some of the resisting/intensifying variables. As for whether this is a permanent or more transitory effect, the authors suggest in Chapter 8 that whereas the “exposure effect” for support for social welfare seems to be more lasting, the effect for support for democracy and markets may be more transitory since over time, as markets and democratic systems have stabilized in many postcommunist states, individual communist era socialization legacies appear to be receding.
There is obviously more going on in this book than can be covered in a short review. Among possible critiques, perhaps the strongest relate to the WVS, which is conducted in a limited set of countries (which changes in each wave) and asks a limited range of questions. These problems, of course, are not the authors’ fault, and one could argue they do a great job working with what is publicly available. This book should be widely read by those interested in post-communist politics and societies, but it should also find a broader audience, as it sets a high standard in how to do research with public opinion datasets and wrestle with questions of the legacy effects of prior political systems.
