Introduction

The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition

Author

Affiliation

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

Published

April 25, 2026

What is this course about?

The course examines what happens to people — their minds, their identities, their values, and their social behaviour — when political systems change. We focus on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE): the countries that emerged from communist rule after 1989 and set out, with varying degrees of success and conviction, on the path toward liberal democracy and market economies. Social psychology provides our theoretical and methodological toolkit; CEE provides our empirical laboratory.

Political transitions are not just institutional events. When a regime collapses and a new one is built in its place, the consequences reach far beyond constitutions and elections. They reshape how individuals understand themselves and their place in the world, how groups form and cooperate (or fail to cooperate), how norms about what is acceptable and what is expected are renegotiated, and how deep psychological dispositions — toward authority, toward outgroups, toward uncertainty — are confirmed, challenged, or transformed.

Thirty years after 1989, the questions raised by those transitions are as urgent as ever:

Are CEE citizens converging with their Western European counterparts in their psychological and social profiles?
Are there persistent legacies — of communism, of transition, of the choices made in the 1990s — that continue to set the region apart?
Are we now witnessing a reversal of the democratic gains of the post-1989 period, and, if so, what role do psychological factors play in that reversal?

These are the questions that animate the course. They do not have simple answers. The aim is to bring rigorous social-psychological thinking to bear on the available evidence, and to come away with a more nuanced understanding of why people think, feel, and behave the way they do in the extraordinary circumstances of political transformation.

Why social psychology?

Social psychology is the scientific study of how individuals’ thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of other people. It sits at the intersection of psychology (focused on the individual) and sociology (focused on society and its structures). This positioning is ideal for our purposes, because it allows us to move between the micro-level of individual experience and the macro-level of social and political change without losing sight of either.

Social psychology equips us with a rich set of tools, operating at three distinct levels of analysis:

Level	What it studies	Examples of tools
Individual	How individuals form attitudes, construct identities, and make sense of themselves	Attitude theory, social cognition, self-presentation, identity formation
Group	How people behave in and between groups	Conformity, obedience, intergroup relations, prejudice, social influence
Cultural	How values, norms, and dispositions vary across societies	Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, Inglehart’s value framework, cross-cultural comparison

A methodological caveat is important from the start: much of what we know about social psychology comes from laboratory experiments conducted predominantly with WEIRD populations — Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic. A recurring question across this course is whether findings derived from these populations generalise to the very different context of post-communist CEE. Sometimes they do, sometimes they require significant modification, and sometimes the CEE evidence challenges established theories in illuminating ways. Approaching the material critically — alert to the limitations of both the theories and the evidence — is part of what it means to think like a social scientist.

Course structure and topics

The course is structured around thirteen thematic lectures, each addressing a distinct dimension of post-communist social psychology. The topics are organised to move from the broader political and historical context, through individual- and group-level psychological processes, to wider questions of culture and the psychology of democratic politics.

The arc is as follows:

We begin with the political transition itself — a necessary foundation for everything that follows.
We then examine the legacies of communism at the individual level (mentalities, attitudes, the self).
We turn to group-level phenomena (civil society, social cooperation, group dynamics).
We focus on social behaviour — both its darker sides (anomie, aggression, prejudice) and its more hopeful aspects (pro-social behaviour, altruism, the reduction of prejudice).
We close with lectures on cultural social psychology and on the psychological foundations of democratic politics and democratic backsliding.

Each lecture is designed to be self-contained — you can engage with it without having attended every preceding lecture — but the topics build on each other, and you will get more out of each lecture if you can situate it in the wider arc of the course.

Lecture 1: Transition to (and from?) democracy

The first lecture provides the historical and political context without which nothing else in the course makes sense.

What is meant by “transition to democracy”?

“Transition to democracy” is a concept from comparative politics that refers to the process by which an authoritarian regime gives way to a democratic one. In CEE, the transitions of 1989 were remarkable for their speed and, in most cases, their relatively peaceful character. The communist regimes that had governed the region for four decades — backed by Soviet power, enforced by secret police, and legitimated by an increasingly hollow ideology — collapsed within months, in some cases within weeks.

In CEE, transition meant moving simultaneously from communist one-party rule and from centrally planned economies. This “double transition” distinguishes the CEE experience from earlier democratisations elsewhere, where economic and political change were not usually compressed into the same historical moment.

The concept of “transition” handled with care

The very idea of “transition” requires careful handling, for two reasons.

First, it implies a starting point (authoritarianism) and an end point (democracy), as if the destination were fixed and the journey merely a matter of time and effort. In reality, the paths taken by CEE countries after 1989 were highly diverse. They were shaped by:

Prior conditions — the degree of prior reform, the strength of civil society, the nature of the communist regime.
Choices made in the early transition period — the pace of economic reform, the form of the new constitution, the treatment of former communist elites.
Subsequent developments — EU accession, economic shocks, and political conflict.

Second, and more urgently, the question mark in the lecture title reflects the fact that we are now witnessing transitions away from democracy in parts of the region. Hungary and Poland — both EU member states, both apparently consolidated democracies — have experienced systematic erosions of democratic norms and institutions. Understanding these trajectories requires understanding not just the political and institutional dynamics, but the social-psychological conditions that make democratic erosion possible.

The arc of the course: thirteen lectures

The sections below summarise the central questions and themes of each lecture. Treat this as a map of the semester.

Lecture 2: Individual-level legacies of communism

The second lecture asks whether communist regimes left a distinctive psychological mark on the individuals who lived under them — and whether that mark has persisted.

The concept of a “communist mentality” captures a cluster of psychological traits that researchers have associated with life under communism:

Trait	Description
State dependence	A high degree of dependence on the state for material security and life outcomes
Institutional distrust	Low trust in formal institutions, particularly those seen as captured by the party or the state
Public conformity	Habit of conformity and self-censorship in public, combined with candour in the private sphere
Egalitarian cynicism	Egalitarian values in economic life, combined with cynicism about whether formal commitments to equality were genuine
Authority ambivalence	A particular relationship to authority: simultaneously deferential and distrustful

Whether these traits actually constitute a coherent “mentality” is questionable. The communist period was not monolithic: different countries had different regimes (some more reformist, some more repressive), and the experience of communism varied enormously depending on when you were born, where you lived, what work you did, and how you related to the party. Nevertheless, cross-national surveys suggest that, on a range of psychological and attitudinal dimensions, CEE publics differ systematically from their Western European counterparts in ways consistent with communist-era experiences.

On persistence: cohort effects matter (those socialised before 1989 show stronger legacies than younger cohorts), and country effects matter (longer or more intense communist experiences produce stronger legacies). But some of what looks like a communist legacy may actually be a rational response to post-communist realities — low institutional trust makes sense where institutions are genuinely unreliable — or a product of the transition process itself rather than communism per se.

Lecture 3: Group-level legacies of communism

The third lecture shifts from the individual to the group, asking how the experience of communism shaped collective life — and in particular, the capacity for voluntary collective action on which democratic politics depends.

Communist regimes had a paradoxical relationship with collective life. On the one hand, they were intensely collectivist in ideology: citizens were expected to participate in party organisations, trade unions, youth movements, and state-directed voluntary activities. On the other hand, this collectivism was enforced. Genuine civil society — autonomous, self-organised associations not directed or co-opted by the party — was systematically suppressed. The result: a population that had been extensively mobilised through official channels but had little experience of genuine voluntary association.

After 1989, civil society developed unevenly across the region. Countries with pre-existing traditions of organised dissent — Poland’s Solidarity movement and Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 — could build on these resources. Countries without such traditions faced a much harder task. Across the region, levels of associational participation, social trust, and collective action remain lower than in Western Europe.

The implications for democratic quality are significant: a robust civil society is not an optional extra in a democracy but one of the mechanisms through which citizens hold governments accountable, articulate interests, and sustain the habits of cooperation and trust on which democratic politics depends.

Lecture 4: The self under and after communism

Communist regimes sought to construct a new collective identity for their citizens: the socialist citizen, committed to the collective good, the party, and the fraternal community of socialist nations. This required the suppression or subordination of competing identities — national, religious, and granular class identities.

In practice, the identity project was never fully successful. National and religious identities survived, often strengthened by the experience of being repressed. The collapse of communism in 1989 triggered what has been described as an “identity explosion” — the rapid re-emergence of previously suppressed identities and the emergence of new ones:

National identities became, in many countries, the dominant frame for political mobilisation.
Religious identities — Catholicism in Poland, Orthodoxy in several Balkan countries — experienced revivals.
Ethnic identities became politically salient in multi-ethnic states, with sometimes violent consequences (the disintegration of Yugoslavia being the most extreme case).

Over the three decades since 1989, identities have evolved and in many cases stabilised. EU membership has created new frames of identification, with highly variable popular attachment: some CEE publics have developed strong European identities alongside national ones, while in others European identity remains thin. The lecture draws on social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner) as a theoretical framework.

Lecture 5: Attitudes, values, orientations and beliefs

The fifth lecture examines the attitudinal and value profiles of CEE publics using large-scale cross-national surveys — the European Social Survey, the European Values Study, and the Eurobarometer. The communist period bequeathed a distinctive attitudinal profile:

High demand for state intervention in the economy
Low trust in political institutions
Ambivalence toward democracy: support for democratic principles in the abstract combined with scepticism about how democracy actually works
Using Inglehart’s framework, a positioning toward the “traditional” and “survival” ends of the two main value dimensions, compared with the more secular-rational and self-expression orientations found in Western Europe

The key question is how this profile has changed over the thirty-year period since 1989. Convergence with Western European patterns is real but uneven and slow. On social issues — gender equality, sexual minorities, environmental protection — convergence is visible, particularly among younger and better-educated cohorts. On institutional trust, economic preferences, and the value placed on order relative to freedom, the picture is more complex. What looked like a straightforward convergence story in the 2000s has been complicated by the re-emergence, in the 2010s, of more “traditional” value orientations — orientations actively mobilised by populist and nationalist political movements.

Lecture 7: Anti-social behaviour — anomie and aggression

The seventh lecture addresses some of the darker social-psychological consequences of transition: the rise of anomie, crime, corruption, and interpersonal aggression after 1989.

Two theoretical frameworks are central:

Framework	Key idea	Relevance to post-communist CEE
Durkheim’s anomie	A state of normative breakdown in which existing norms have lost their force but no replacement norms have been established	Transition delegitimised existing norms overnight while new norms had to be built from scratch
Merton’s reformulation	A disjunction between the goals society holds out and the legitimate means available to achieve them	Transition raised aspirations sharply while destroying many legitimate pathways
Beck’s “risk society”	Modern societies expose individuals to systemic risks that traditional structures no longer protect them from	Post-communist CEE was in many respects an extreme case of risk-society conditions

The empirical record reflects these conditions. Crime rates rose sharply in most CEE countries in the early-to-mid 1990s. Organised crime and corruption became pervasive in some countries, capturing state institutions. Trust in formal institutions collapsed.

The picture has improved significantly since the nadir of the early 1990s. Crime rates have fallen across most of the region, and corruption indicators have improved in countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007, where accession conditionality and institutional reform created incentives for clean government. But the picture is not uniformly positive: the relationship between democratic backsliding and institutional capture by corrupt interests is a recurring theme.

Lecture 9: Groups and group dynamics

The ninth lecture steps back to address foundational questions in social psychology about how groups work. Key phenomena include:

Phenomenon	What it refers to
Social facilitation	The finding that the presence of others affects individual performance, depending on the task and the individual’s expertise
Social loafing	The tendency to exert less effort in group settings, where individual contributions are less visible
Conformity and social pressure	The powerful influence of group norms on individual behaviour (Asch’s line experiments; Milgram’s obedience studies)
Group development	How groups form, develop norms, allocate roles, and move through stages such as forming, storming, norming, and performing

In the post-communist context, these dynamics take on particular significance. The collapse of communism required the rapid formation of new groups — political parties, civil society organisations, social movements — in conditions of institutional uncertainty and low social trust. The delegitimisation of communist-era authority figures created a leadership vacuum that was filled very differently in different countries. In some, charismatic leaders of democratic transitions — Wałęsa, Havel, Michnik — embodied the aspirations of their societies. In others, the vacuum was filled by figures whose relationship to democracy was more ambiguous. Charismatic and populist leadership styles have flourished in contexts of low institutional trust and high uncertainty.

Lecture 10: The nature of post-communist prejudice

The tenth lecture addresses prejudice — negative attitudes toward members of social groups defined by characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin. Groups that have historically been targets of prejudice in CEE include:

Roma — the region’s largest and most marginalised minority
Jewish communities
LGBTQ+ individuals
Migrants and refugees (especially in the last decade)

Cross-national survey data consistently show higher levels of prejudice toward these groups in CEE than in Western Europe, though the gap varies by group and measure. The lecture draws on several theoretical frameworks:

Framework	Core idea
Social identity theory	Group membership shapes self-concept; in-group favouritism and out-group derogation
Realistic group conflict theory	Prejudice is rooted in competition over scarce resources
Authoritarian personality theory	Certain personality dispositions predispose individuals to prejudice
Contact theory (Allport)	Positive intergroup contact under the right conditions reduces prejudice

Communist regimes had a paradoxical relationship with prejudice. Official ideology was internationalist and professed commitment to equality between peoples; in practice, ethnic minorities — particularly Roma and Jewish communities — were often marginalised, scapegoated, and discriminated against, sometimes with official encouragement. The collapse of communism removed formal constraints on prejudice, allowing latent hostilities to surface. At the same time, the anxieties of transition — economic insecurity, identity disruption, status threat — provided fertile ground for the psychological mechanisms through which prejudice develops and intensifies.

Lecture 11: Reducing prejudice in CEE

The eleventh lecture asks what works in reducing prejudice, under what conditions, and what the obstacles are in the CEE context.

Allport’s contact hypothesis remains the most influential framework: positive contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice, provided that contact meets certain conditions — equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Subsequent research has qualified this: contact is most effective under specific conditions often difficult to engineer in real-world settings. In CEE, where the Roma minority is often spatially segregated, economically marginalised, and in dramatically unequal status, the conditions for effective contact are frequently absent.

Other approaches include:

Approach	Examples	Challenges in CEE
Legislative	Anti-discrimination law, hate speech legislation, EU equality directives	Implementation challenges where judicial independence is weak
Educational	School-based intercultural education, teacher training, curriculum reform	Difficult to scale; effects often do not generalise beyond the immediate setting
Civil society	NGO campaigns, media engagement, community dialogue projects	Limited by the weakness of civil society itself

A crucial dynamic of the 2010s has been the active reversal of prejudice-reduction efforts by governments engaged in democratic backsliding. In Hungary and Poland, governments have rolled back anti-discrimination protections, targeted LGBTQ+ communities with discriminatory legislation, and deployed anti-migrant rhetoric as a tool of political mobilisation. The institutional and political context shapes not only the conditions under which prejudice reduction can occur, but whether it is even attempted.

Lecture 12: Cultural social psychology and intercultural relations

The twelfth lecture asks whether there is a coherent “CEE culture” underlying many of the phenomena we have examined.

Cultural social psychology asks how culture shapes psychological processes, and how psychological processes in turn shape culture. Key theoretical frameworks include:

Framework	Key dimensions
Hofstede’s cultural dimensions	Individualism vs. collectivism; power distance; uncertainty avoidance
Inglehart’s value survey work	Traditional vs. secular-rational values; survival vs. self-expression values
Triandis’s work on subjective culture	Cultural syndromes; within-culture variation

On cross-national surveys, CEE countries consistently cluster toward the “traditional” and “survival” ends of Inglehart’s value space, with lower individualism and higher power distance than Western Europe. But the region is highly differentiated:

The Baltic states, the Visegrad countries, and the Balkan states differ significantly in their cultural profiles.
Religious traditions matter: Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox traditions shape distinctive patterns.
Historical experience matters: the Habsburg and Ottoman legacies produce important within-region variation.

EU integration, migration, and digital communication have intensified cross-cultural contact — connecting back to the social remittances introduced in Lecture 6 — and raised questions about cultural convergence and divergence.

Lecture 13: Democratic attitudes and democratic backsliding

The final lecture brings the course full circle, returning to the question with which we began: the transition to — and from — democracy.

Survey evidence from Eurobarometer, the European Social Survey, and regional barometers presents a complex picture:

Majorities in CEE endorse democracy as a form of government in the abstract.
But satisfaction with how democracy actually works in practice is substantially lower than in Western Europe.
Support for “strong leader” solutions — leaders who do not have to bother with parliamentary oversight or judicial scrutiny — is higher in CEE and has been rising in some countries.

These patterns suggest that while democracy has formal support, the psychological foundations of liberal democratic culture — attachment to pluralism, acceptance of minority rights, toleration of opposition — may be shallower than institutional consolidation alone would suggest.

“Democratic backsliding” refers to the gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions by elected governments — distinct from sudden military coups or revolutionary change, and therefore harder to diagnose and resist. In Hungary since 2010 and in Poland since 2015, governments have systematically weakened judicial independence, concentrated media power, changed electoral rules to favour incumbents, and mobilised cultural and religious anxieties against minorities and perceived elite enemies. Crucially, these processes have enjoyed significant popular support.

The psychological factors that may facilitate backsliding include:

Factor	What it refers to
Authoritarian personality traits	Preference for order, deference to strong leaders, hostility to outgroups (Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism; Stenner’s authoritarian dynamic)
Communist nostalgia	Selective positive memory of the communist period — particularly its perceived security and equality — shaping contemporary political preferences
Populist attitudes	Distrust of elites, identification with “the people”, hostility to pluralism

The argument is not that democratic backsliding is primarily a psychological phenomenon — it has powerful institutional, economic, and political drivers — but that understanding the psychological conditions that make it possible and that sustain popular support for it is an essential complement to institutional analysis.

Assessment

The course is assessed by means of an end-of-semester test consisting of 40 multiple-choice questions, with at least one question from each of the 13 topics. The basis of the questions is the lecture slides and the course readings.

Test results are translated into a percentage score and grades assigned as follows:

Grade	Score
Very good (5,0)	91–100%
Good plus (4,5)	81–90%
Good (4,0)	71–80%
Satisfactory plus (3,5)	61–70%
Satisfactory (3,0)	51–60%
Unsatisfactory (2,0)	≤ 50%

Students are encouraged to engage with the course readings from the beginning of the semester rather than leaving them until the revision period. The lectures are designed to orient you in each topic and to highlight the most important concepts and debates; the readings provide the depth of understanding required for the more demanding questions in the test — and, more importantly, for a genuinely sophisticated understanding of the social psychology of post-communist societies.

Initial diagnostic test: key facts to know

The first lecture includes a short diagnostic quiz to establish a shared baseline of regional knowledge. The answers below summarise the factual ground students should be comfortable with as they begin the course.

Countries of the region

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) includes Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Baltic states, Romania, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav states, and others. Greece is not part of CEE.
The Baltic States consist of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
The Visegrad Group comprises the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia.
The Balkans include Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, and others — but not Slovakia.
Former Yugoslavia included Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo — but not Romania.
Belarus is not a democracy.
Moldova has the lowest GDP per capita in the region; the Czech Republic has the highest among the listed options.
Poland is the largest recipient of EU funding in CEE.
Bratislava is the capital of Slovakia.
Fidesz is one of the major political parties in Hungary.

Key concepts and events

The process of transition to democracy in CEE began in 1989.
Slovakia joined the EU in the 2004 enlargement (along with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus, and Malta).
Hungary is the paradigmatic CEE case of democratic backsliding over the last decade.
The “Eastern Bloc” referred to the group of communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
Communist regimes were characterised by centrally-controlled economies, state censorship, and restrictions on free enterprise — but not by free and fair elections.
Poland’s Solidarity movement demanded freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners, and acceptance of the right of free trade unions to exist — but initially not full free and fair democratic elections.
Reasons for the collapse of communist regimes included profound economic problems, loss of faith in communist ideology, and the absence of reformist leaders — but not the threat of war between Western Europe and CEE.
Lustration refers to the publicising of the truth about individuals’ past collaboration with the secret services — a process many CEE countries implemented during the 1990s.
Presidents of CEE countries have included Traian Băsescu (Romania), Dalia Grybauskaitė (Lithuania), and Václav Havel (Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic). Jarosław Kaczyński has not been president of Poland.