Overview

• Groups are where individual psychology becomes political action.
• The first nine lectures looked at individuals reacting to transition. Today we bridge to the collective: parties, parliaments, protest movements, online publics.
• Three blocks:
  • What groups are and why they form — definitions, types, entitativity
  • How groups decide and conflict — groupthink, polarisation, escalation
  • Trust, membership, and democratisation — Letki (2004) and what we have learned since
• The headline puzzle for the second half: in CEE, communist-party membership predicts more democratic participation after 1989. Why?

Defining a group

• A group is a collection of people who are perceived to belong together and are dependent on one another.
• Two candidate criteria:
  • Social integration — frequency and depth of interaction
  • Entitativity (Campbell 1958) — the extent to which a collection is perceived as a coherent entity (shared fate, similarity, common cause)
• Entitativity is largely perceptual. A bus-stop crowd has low entitativity; a platoon has high entitativity; an online community is contested.
• Emergent property: groups behave in ways no individual member would alone. This is why political analysis cannot reduce to individual psychology.

Types of groups

Size, composition, and the diversity paradox

• Size: as group size rises, members participate less, commit less, show more turnover. Larger groups exhibit more conflict, poorer coordination.
• Diversity of members:
  • Costs — interpersonal friction, communication overhead
  • Benefits — flexibility, innovation, broader external networks
• CEE transition illustrates the trade-off: rapid formation of new organisations with unfamiliar diversity (former dissidents, former party members, returning emigrés). Costs were visible early; benefits took a decade or more to emerge.

Why groups form

• Functional — serving a useful purpose (firms, courts, parliaments)
• Survival — evolutionary advantages of cooperation (kin, clan, nation)
• Psychological — inclusion, control, affection (Schutz)
• Informational — social comparison: checking one’s beliefs against others
• Collective efficacy — more is achievable together than alone
• Attraction — similar attitudes, beliefs, status, proximity

The promise

• Groups are often assumed to make better decisions than individuals.
  • Pooled resources — cognitive, informational, skill
  • Error-correction — divergent perspectives catch mistakes
  • Legitimacy — collective decisions carry more authority
• When the promise is kept: juries, peer review, adversarial litigation, well-designed deliberative mini-publics.
• When the promise fails: cohesive groups under time pressure, with directive leaders, lacking outside input.

Groupthink

• Groupthink (Janis 1972): cohesive in-groups suppress realistic appraisal of alternatives in favour of concurrence.
• Symptoms:
  • Pressure to conform — sanctions for dissent
  • Self-censorship — members suppress disagreement
  • Mindguards — gatekeepers protect the group from inconvenient information
  • Illusions of invulnerability and morality — “we made the decision, so it must be right”
  • Biased perception of out-groups — enemies dismissed as stupid, weak, or evil

Group polarisation

• Group polarisation: after discussion, group-average opinion becomes more extreme in the direction of the pre-discussion mean, not more moderate.
• Mechanisms:
  • Biased information sampling — arguments consistent with the group’s leaning are more likely to be voiced
  • Social approval — members shift toward what they believe the group values
  • Perceived norm — members overshoot to align with an imagined consensus

Affective polarisation: an update

• The frontier has moved from issue polarisation to affective polarisation — dislike, distrust, and dehumanisation of partisan out-groups (Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendusky, Malhotra, Westwood 2019, Annual Review of Political Science).
• Originally diagnosed in the US, the pattern is now documented across European democracies, including CEE (Reiljan 2020; Wagner 2021; Garzia, Ferreira da Silva, Maye 2023).
• Mechanisms specific to digital environments:
  • Algorithmic curation amplifies in-group content
  • Cross-cutting exposure does not reliably reduce hostility, and may increase it (Bail et al. 2018; Wojcieszak et al. 2021)
• CEE relevance: PiS / anti-PiS, Fidesz / opposition, SMER / progressive publics are now classic affective-polarisation cases.

Group conflict

• Attribution errors — out-group behaviour is attributed to disposition, not situation. “They voted that way because they are stupid”, not “because the incentives in their region made it rational.”
• Communication breakdown — harsh criticism, personality clashes, reflexive opposition to anything the out-group proposes.
• Escalation of commitment — once a group commits, members defend the position more strongly when attacked, even as evidence accumulates against it (sunk costs, face-saving, ego-involvement).

Letki (2004)

• Natalia Letki, Socialization for Participation? Trust, Membership and Democratization in East-Central Europe, Political Research Quarterly 57(4): 665–679.
• The big question: in new democracies, what predicts ordinary citizens’ willingness to engage in politics?
• Why it matters: democracy needs participants. Without citizens who vote, discuss politics, join parties or associations, the institutional architecture of democracy floats free of its society.
• Letki frames this as the psychological and behavioural prerequisite for democratic consolidation, separate from institutional design or GDP growth.

Civic culture and its critics

• 1989 Western expectation: CEE publics would be passive, disengaged, anomic (Sztompka, Howard).
• Alternative fear: pre-1989 protest habits would destabilise the new democracies.
• What actually happened: high initial enthusiasm and turnout; flourishing parties and civic activity; then rapid decline through the early-mid 1990s.
• By the mid-1990s the region was heterogeneous: some countries (Czechia, Hungary, Bulgaria) approached Western levels of involvement; others (Poland, Russia, Ukraine) lagged.

Letki’s hypotheses

• H1 Membership in voluntary associations predicts political involvement.
• H2 Higher interpersonal trust predicts higher political involvement.
• H3 Trust + membership interact — the combination predicts more than either alone.
• H4 Former communist-party members are more politically involved than the rest of the population.
• H5 Greater country-level democratic experience raises political involvement.

Data and design

• World Values Survey 1993–94: Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine.
• Dependent variable: political involvement index (0–3) — political discussion, support for a party, party membership.
• Key independent variables:
  • generalised social trust (Rosenberg-style 4-item scale)
  • voluntary-association membership (community / professional-lifestyle / labour)
  • self-reported communist-party membership
  • country-level democracy score

Levels of political engagement, 1993–94

Main findings

• Community-association membership has the largest effect — almost twice as powerful as professional or labour-association membership.
• Social trust is statistically significant but weak — much weaker than the Putnam framework would predict.
• Former CP members are significantly more politically involved than non-members in the new democracies.
• Democratic experience (country-level exposure to free elections) is a strong positive predictor.
• The membership/trust effects do not depend on the country’s level of democracy — they are independent of institutional context.

The illustrative case

“A citizen from the Czech Republic, who in the past had been a member of a communist party and at the time of the survey was a member of one of the community associations, would score 27.4 percent higher on the index of political involvement in comparison with the citizen of Russia, who has never been involved in a communist party or community associations.” (Letki 2004)

The paradox of communist-party membership

• Naïve expectation: former CP members are reluctant post-1989 participants — displaced, resentful, compromised.
• Letki’s finding: they are more involved.
• Why? Two complementary mechanisms:
  • Skills transfer — organisational, persuasive, meeting-running skills carry across regimes
  • Socialisation for participation — membership in any political organisation cultivates the habit of participation
• Theoretical implication: participation in a non-democratic organisation can produce positive social capital for democracy — a finding the classical framework does not predict.

What this says about social capital

• Putnam: informal trust → civic engagement.
• Letki: trust is a weak predictor; organisational membership is a strong one.
• What works is a specific institutional experience, not a diffuse cultural quality.
• Implication: building democratic engagement requires investing in associations, not in “trust-building” rhetoric.

What this says about democratisation

• Exposure to democratic processes is itself a predictor of individual-level involvement.
• Russia, Belarus, Ukraine (1993–94) showed the lowest involvement partly because their populations had the least experience of democracy.
• Reverse mechanism: when democratic institutions are undermined — Hungary 2010+, Poland 2015–2023, Slovakia 2024+ — we should expect disengagement to rise over time. The mechanism that builds engagement can also unwind it.

Letki next to other course theories

Update 1: Howard and the “weak civil society” thesis

• Marc Morjé Howard, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge UP, 2003): post-communist publics are systematically less associationally engaged than either established democracies or younger Latin-American or Asian ones.
• Three drivers:
  • Mistrust of formal organisations as Soviet-era residue
  • Persistence of informal networks that substitute for formal joining
  • Disappointment with post-1989 outcomes
• Letki’s results — modest absolute levels of engagement, with associations doing the heavy lifting within that low ceiling — are consistent with Howard’s diagnosis.

Update 2: Pop-Eleches & Tucker, Communism’s Shadow (2017)

• Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker (Princeton UP, 2017) provide the most systematic test of communist-legacy effects to date.
• Three findings particularly relevant to Letki:
  • Living under communism leaves a persistent negative imprint on interpersonal trust and on participation in formal civic organisations.
  • Effects are strongest for those who came of age under late communism; weaker for cohorts socialised before or after.
  • But communist exposure and former-regime membership operate differently: passive exposure depresses participation; active CP membership (Letki’s variable) elevates it.
• This refines Letki: the legacy is not uniform; it depends on the type and intensity of regime contact.

Update 3: Letki and Mieriņa (2015) on networks and inequality

• Natalia Letki & Inta Mieriņa, “Getting support in polarized societies: income, social networks, and socioeconomic context”, Social Science Research 49 (2015).
• Letki herself returns to social capital, but reframes the question: who benefits from informal networks?
• Finding: in economically polarised societies, the poor have larger support networks than the wealthy — but extract less from them, because they are trapped among equally resource-poor contacts.
• This complicates the 2004 picture: informal networks do not simply substitute for formal associations. Under inequality, they become regressive — the people who most need them to compensate for institutional weakness gain the least from them.
• CEE relevance: post-communist societies combine relatively low associational membership and high inequality, so the regressive-network effect bites hardest there.

Update 4: protest as a participation channel

• The classic Putnam/Letki measures (party membership, association membership) under-count the protest repertoire that has dominated CEE politics in the 2010s and 2020s:
  • Polish Czarny Protest (2016) and Women’s Strike (2020) — Korolczuk & Graff (2018)
  • Polish KOD mobilisation 2015–2017 (Ekiert & Kubik 2017)
  • Slovak For a Decent Slovakia following the Kuciak murder (2018)
  • Recurrent Hungarian opposition mobilisations (Greskovits 2020)
  • Romanian anti-corruption protests, 2017–2019
• These movements pulled in many first-time participants — people without prior associational membership — which Letki’s design would mark as “low engagement”.

Update 5: digital information and group polarisation

• Wojcieszak and colleagues (2021) on selective exposure show that:
  • Echo-chamber effects are real but smaller than popular discourse assumes
  • The strongest polarising effect comes not from exposure but from exposure framed as conflict by political elites
• For CEE, this means elite framing — Kaczyński’s “they / us”, Orbán’s nation-vs-Brussels rhetoric, Fico’s media populism — is doing more polarising work than algorithms alone.

Synthesis: what holds, what has shifted

• Holds well: associational membership is a stronger predictor of formal political engagement than diffuse trust; democratic experience matters; legacy effects of communism are real and persistent.
• Has shifted:
  • the channels of participation now include protest and networked mobilisation that Letki’s design did not capture
  • affective polarisation has become the dominant pathology, replacing earlier worries about apathy
  • the direction of democratic-experience effects has reversed in backsliding cases — exposure to dedemocratisation is itself a socialising experience

What we’ve learned

• Groups are not aggregated individuals. They generate emergent dynamics — groupthink, polarisation, escalation, in-group bias — alongside pooled resources, shared identity, and mutual learning.
• Political engagement in CEE was, and remains, predicted most strongly by associational membership, democratic experience, and — counter-intuitively — prior communist-party membership.
• Diffuse interpersonal trust matters less than the classical Putnam framework predicts in transition contexts.
• The post-Letki literature deepens rather than overturns these findings: legacies are persistent but heterogeneous; participation has migrated toward protest and networked mobilisation; affective polarisation is the new central pathology.

Questions for discussion

• If former CP members transfer their skills to democratic participation, what does this imply about the moral framing of “collaboration” versus “cooperation” in transition?
• Can democratic CEE institutions be designed to resist affective polarisation, or is it now a structural feature of mediated mass politics?
• Letki’s findings are from 1993–94. Thirty years on, where do you expect the largest departures — and which of the post-Letki updates seems most important to you?
• Groupthink warns against cohesive decision-making bodies. But some CEE challenges (defending courts, EU-level bargaining, sustained protest) reward cohesion. When is cohesion an asset and when is it a liability?