Legacies of communism
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Today’s topics
Overview of the lecture
The lecture is organised around four guiding questions. First, what are historical legacies, and what analytical work does the concept do when we apply it to the study of post-communist societies? Second, what kinds of legacies have scholars studied in Central and Eastern Europe, and how might we classify them? Third, what does it mean to say that citizens’ attitudes today are a function of living through communism — and how do Pop-Eleches and Tucker model the effects of direct exposure to communist rule? Fourth, what does it mean to say that those attitudes are instead a function of living in a post-communist country — that is, a product of present-day contextual conditions rather than of past socialisation?
Introduction
Why do legacies matter? Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s starting point
Pop-Eleches and Tucker begin from a striking empirical observation: post-communist citizens are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets, and more supportive of state-provided welfare, than citizens elsewhere in the world (see their Figure 1.1). The intuitive answer is that this must somehow be a legacy of communism — but the intuition does not, by itself, tell us how that legacy operates. Pop-Eleches and Tucker distinguish two candidate explanations that are related but not the same, and that carry very different implications for how we understand attitudinal differences, how long we expect them to persist, and what role communist legacies actually play.
| Candidate explanation | What it claims |
|---|---|
| Living through communism | Attitudes are a function of direct exposure to communist rule during one’s formative years. |
| Living in a post-communist country | Attitudes are shaped by present-day contextual factors — economic conditions, political institutions, or the demographic composition of society. |
Consider a citizen who grew up in Poland under martial law in the 1980s. The first explanation would say her attitudes toward the state are shaped by what she experienced and learned during those years. The second would say her attitudes are shaped by the economic volatility she experienced during the post-1989 transition. Disentangling these two influences is the empirical challenge at the heart of Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s work.
Post-communist attitudinal differences
Using World Values Survey data across multiple waves (2–5), Pop-Eleches and Tucker document systematic attitudinal differences between post-communist and non-post-communist citizens across four domains. These differences are not explained away by controlling for income, education, or other standard demographic factors, which suggests that something distinctive about the post-communist experience — and not simply material disadvantage — is driving the pattern. Importantly, even citizens in relatively prosperous post-communist countries differ from comparable non-post-communist citizens, which further challenges purely economic explanations.
| Attitude domain | Post-communist vs. non-post-communist | Statistically significant? |
|---|---|---|
| Democracy support | Significantly lower | Yes |
| Market support | Significantly lower | Yes |
| Welfare state support | Significantly higher | Yes |
| Gender equality support | Slightly lower | No |
Pew Research Center data from 2019 illustrate these patterns: in Poland, 85% approve of the change to a multiparty system and 85% approve of the change to a market economy. These are high figures, but they are still 10–15 percentage points lower than comparable figures in Western European countries surveyed at the same time, and the proportion of Poles who say ordinary people have benefited from the changes since 1989 has only recently risen from 21% in 2009 to 41% in 2019. The motivating question is why these systematic differences persist — and whether communism is indeed responsible.
The Polish case in 2023
The lecture illustrates the persistence of historical patterns with several maps of Poland. Voting for Law and Justice and for Civic Coalition in the 2023 parliamentary election, the distribution of the Polish railway network in 1952/53, and the percentage of houses without indoor toilets all display regional patterns that align, in part, with the boundaries of the nineteenth-century imperial partitions. These patterns offer an empirical puzzle: why should contemporary political and material divides map so clearly onto historical boundaries that have long since ceased to exist as formal political units?
What are historical legacies?
Three components of a legacy
Although the phrase “communist legacies” appears around 1,700 times on Google Scholar, there is no clearly established theoretical or empirical blueprint for analysing legacy effects on attitudes. Pop-Eleches and Tucker address this gap by disaggregating the notion of a legacy into three basic components.
| Component | Definition | Polish partitions example |
|---|---|---|
| Outcome | A situation that is not fully explicable given present circumstances. | Patterns of voting in Poland today vary across the lines of the nineteenth-century partitions, even though no “Former Prussian Partition Party” or “Former Austrian Partition Party” exists. |
| Antecedent | A past event, tendency, process, or reality identified as a cause or correlate of the outcome. | Higher levels of voting for conservative parties can be observed in areas that formerly belonged to the Russian and, in particular, Austrian partitions. |
| Mechanism | The process that links the antecedent to the outcome. | The Austrian empire was relatively tolerant of the Roman Catholic Church; greater religious tolerance produced higher church attendance, which in turn produced more conservative social attitudes. |
Legacies as after-effects of defunct causes
What is crucial about historical legacies is that they derive from explanatory mechanisms that no longer operate. The cause that originally produced the outcome has ceased to exist, yet its effects continue to be felt in the present. This temporal structure is what distinguishes a legacy from a straightforwardly contemporary causal explanation. The communist state no longer exists; the KGB, the Securitate, and the Stasi are gone; and yet the habits of mind and the patterns of social interaction that were formed under their shadow persist. Understanding how and why these effects endure — and how they eventually fade or transform — is one of the central theoretical challenges for the study of post-communist societies.
Stefan Nowak’s concept of the “sociological void” in Poland — the idea that communist rule destroyed intermediate social institutions between the family and the state, leaving citizens with an intensely personal “we” surrounded by an alien and hostile public sphere — illustrates the point. Nowak developed this concept in the 1970s to describe a contemporary social reality. Thirty years later, scholars continue to use it to interpret patterns of low civic participation and weak institutional trust in Polish society, even though the communist state that created the void has been gone for decades.
What kinds of legacies have been studied in CEE?
Cultural legacies: an overview
The cultural legacies of communism are among the most widely studied and debated. They were produced by a system that was itself internally coherent, and they continue to reinforce each other in the post-communist period. The combination of political avoidance, low trust, weak civic engagement, and economic ambivalence creates a distinctive post-communist political culture that is, in important respects, more vulnerable to authoritarian backsliding and populist mobilisation than the political cultures of consolidated Western democracies. At the same time, cultural legacies are not uniform across the region: they were shaped by the intensity and character of communist rule in different countries, by the strength of pre-communist civic traditions, and by the subsequent experience of transition.
Three thematic strands are particularly important:
- Collective trauma and historical memory. Decades of repression, surveillance, and state violence created deep societal wounds, and public discourse has often focused on victimhood narratives.
- Nostalgia for communist-era stability. The phenomenon of “Ostalgie” in the former East Germany and similar patterns elsewhere involve selective remembering of social benefits while downplaying oppression.
- Interrupted cultural development. Cultural expression was restricted to state-approved forms, and limited exchange with the West produced distinct aesthetic sensibilities.
Avoidance of politics
Under communist rule, political participation was typically coerced or performative: citizens were required to vote in elections that were not genuine contests, to attend rallies whose outcomes were predetermined, and to express public support for a party whose legitimacy they often privately doubted. The systematic gap between the official world of politics and the private world of genuine belief and preference created a lasting association between political engagement and dishonesty, futility, and risk.
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Coerced or performative political participation under communism | Lower voter turnout compared to established Western democracies |
| Disillusionment with manipulated political processes | Reluctance to join political parties or movements |
| Association of politics with corruption and dishonesty | Preference for technocratic governance over ideological politics |
| Vulnerability to populist appeals promising to “clean up” political systems |
Poland’s 2019 parliamentary elections recorded turnout of 61.7%, the highest since the restoration of democracy in 1989. This was widely celebrated as a democratic achievement — yet it remains notably below turnout figures in most established Western European democracies. In the 2001 and 2005 elections, turnout fell to 46% and 41% respectively, figures that reflect the depth of the disengagement Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s data document.
Low levels of trust
The systematic destruction of trust — in institutions, in public figures, and in strangers — is one of the most extensively documented legacies of communist rule. Communist regimes operated elaborate surveillance systems staffed in part by ordinary citizens who acted as informants, penetrating not only workplaces and public organisations but also families and friendship networks. The arbitrary application of law, the unpredictable use of state power, and the systematic gap between official norms and actual practice reinforced the lesson that institutions could not be relied upon and that survival required the cultivation of a small circle of genuinely trusted personal relationships.
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Widespread surveillance by secret police (Stasi, Securitate, StB, KGB) | Lower interpersonal trust compared to Western Europe |
| Informant networks penetrating families and social circles | Weak social capital and limited civic networks |
| Arbitrary application of law and unpredictable state actions | High distrust of government institutions and officials |
| Reliance on close personal networks rather than formal institutions | |
| Difficulties in establishing rule of law and tackling corruption |
Comparative surveys consistently find that citizens in post-communist Central and Eastern European countries report lower interpersonal trust than citizens in Western Europe. In the World Values Survey, the proportion of Polish respondents who agree that “most people can be trusted” has been around 20–25%, compared with figures of 60–70% in Scandinavian countries. This trust gap persists even after controlling for economic development.
Economic beliefs
Living through the command economy, and then through the often painful transition to a market economy, has left a distinctive imprint on the economic beliefs of post-communist citizens. Guaranteed employment, low-cost housing, and subsidised basic goods created expectations of economic security from the state that did not simply vanish when the system changed. The transition itself — which in many countries was accompanied by sharp rises in unemployment, dramatic increases in inequality, and the enrichment of a small elite through the privatisation of state assets — reinforced scepticism about the fairness of market outcomes.
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Experience with command economy and state ownership | Ambivalent attitudes toward free markets |
| Economic hardships during transition to market economy | Support for strong welfare states and economic security |
| Uneven distribution of benefits from privatisation | Resentment toward oligarchs who benefited from privatisation |
| Scepticism of foreign economic influence | |
| Nostalgia for guaranteed employment and social services | |
| Higher acceptance of state intervention in strategic sectors |
In Hungary in 2019, 70% of respondents approve of the change to a market economy — yet in the same survey, Hungarians show among the highest levels of nostalgia for communist-era social provision and the lowest levels of satisfaction with how ordinary people have benefited from the changes since 1989. These apparently contradictory findings are consistent with the view that post-communist citizens have internalised market norms in the abstract while remaining deeply sceptical about their distributive outcomes in practice.
Nationalist views
Nationalism is, paradoxically, both a legacy of communism and a reaction against it. Official ideology promoted a form of socialist internationalism that formally suppressed national identities, particularly when they conflicted with Soviet bloc unity. But this suppression had the unintended consequence of intensifying national identity as a form of resistance: to be Polish, Czech, Lithuanian, or Hungarian was, in important respects, to define oneself against the official Soviet identity being imposed from above. The post-1989 ideological vacuum created conditions in which the reconstruction of national identity became a central political project.
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Suppression of national identities under internationalist communist ideology | Resurgence of ethnic and national identities after 1989 |
| Use of nationalism as resistance against Soviet domination | Border disputes and ethnic tensions (Yugoslavia as the most extreme case) |
| Post-1989 vacuum of unifying ideology | Nation-building projects centred on pre-communist historical narratives |
| Strong emphasis on sovereignty in EU relations | |
| Resistance to immigration and multiculturalism | |
| Political mobilisation around ethnonational identities |
The Hungarian government’s promotion of a narrative of Hungarian victimhood at the hands of external forces — the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Soviets, and now the EU and George Soros — illustrates how the post-communist reconstruction of national identity continues to shape political life, drawing on deeply rooted national memory traditions while deploying them in the service of contemporary political goals.
Low levels of civic participation
The weakness of civil society in post-communist countries has direct implications for the quality and resilience of democracy. Under communism, the state colonised the forms of collective life that in Western democracies provide the infrastructure of civic engagement: trade unions were transmission belts for party policy, cultural organisations were vehicles for ideological socialisation, and political organisations were, by definition, appendages of the single party. Genuine civic associations were either prohibited or driven underground.
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Forced participation in state-controlled organisations | Weaker civil society organisations compared to Western Europe |
| Suspicion of collective action outside close personal networks | Lower rates of volunteering and charitable giving |
| Habits of passive resistance rather than active engagement | Difficulties in sustaining grassroots movements |
| Greater reliance on foreign funding for NGO activities | |
| Limited citizen engagement in policy-making processes | |
| Development of “NGO elites” disconnected from broader society |
GLOBSEC survey data illustrate the paradox of post-communist civil society: while large majorities support the right of NGOs and academic institutions to criticise government, only minorities believe that civil society groups are actually concerned with issues that ordinary people care about. In the Czech Republic, only 36% think civil society groups are interested in relevant issues; in Slovakia, only 35%.
Regional variations and exceptions
The cultural legacies of communism are not uniform. Different countries experienced different degrees of communist control — Yugoslavia’s more open system differed significantly from Romania’s extreme repression under Ceaușescu. Pre-communist legacies also varied, distinguishing Central European from Eastern European historical experiences. The success of the post-1989 transition differed between the Baltic states and the Czech Republic, which reformed rapidly, and slower reformers elsewhere. EU integration has produced some convergence with Western norms in certain areas, though the recent democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland challenges the narrative of inevitable liberalisation.
Interactions between cultural legacies
The cultural legacies of communism reinforce each other in mutually supportive ways. Low trust reduces civic participation, which in turn further erodes trust. Nationalist views generate scepticism of liberal values, and political avoidance increases vulnerability to populism. The combination produces distinctive post-communist political cultures characterised by an “empty formalism” in institutional development — a gap between formal rules and informal practices, and hybrid political systems that combine democratic and authoritarian elements.
Material legacies: an overview
Alongside the cultural legacies of communism, the region inherited a set of material legacies that continue to shape social and political life. While some have been partially addressed through the investment that accompanied EU accession, others persist in ways that continue to generate regional inequality and economic vulnerability. The material legacies are not independent of the cultural legacies: the experience of material deprivation during transition reinforced economic scepticism and welfare-state preferences, while the regional disparities generated by uneven deindustrialisation have sustained the social divisions that fuel nationalist mobilisation and political polarisation.
Lack of infrastructure
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Prioritisation of industrial development over public infrastructure | Ageing transportation networks (railroads, roads, bridges) |
| Central planning inefficiencies and resource misallocation | Deteriorating housing stock in panel block buildings |
| Focus on quantity over quality in construction | Outdated urban utilities (water, heating, electrical systems) |
| Deferred maintenance due to chronic budget constraints | Digital infrastructure gaps compared to Western Europe |
| Substantial infrastructure investment needs upon EU accession | |
| Regional disparities between capital cities and rural areas |
Environmental destruction
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Disregard for environmental concerns in industrial planning | Notorious ecological disaster zones |
| Absence of effective environmental regulations | Toxic industrial sites requiring expensive remediation |
| Ideological belief in man’s domination over nature | Legacy pollution in soil and groundwater |
| Production targets prioritised over ecological considerations | Health effects in populations near industrial centres |
| High energy intensity and carbon emissions per unit of GDP | |
| Environmental cleanup costs affecting economic transition |
Dominance of the state sector
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Ideological commitment to state ownership | Challenges of privatisation (corruption, asset-stripping) |
| Nationalisation of virtually all economic assets | Continued state ownership in strategic sectors |
| Limited private economic initiative permitted (varying by country) | Weak private entrepreneurial traditions |
| Bureaucratic management of the economy through ministries and planning agencies | Path dependencies in economic organisation |
| Public expectations of state economic intervention | |
| Difficulties in establishing effective corporate governance |
Excessive focus on heavy industry
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Soviet-inspired industrialisation model | Outdated industrial plants requiring modernisation or closure |
| Ideological emphasis on working class and industrial production | Environmental damage around industrial centres |
| Military-industrial complex priorities | Regional economic crises in former industrial areas |
| COMECON specialisation and trade patterns | Skills mismatches in the labour force |
| Difficult transitions to service and knowledge economies | |
| Industrial restructuring costs (economic and social) |
Institutional legacies: an overview
The institutional legacies of communism are perhaps the most directly consequential for the quality of democracy, because they concern the formal and informal rules and organisations through which political power is exercised. Communist institutions did not simply disappear in 1989: in many cases they were adapted, renamed, or partially reformed rather than replaced. David Stark called the resulting arrangements “recombinant” — blends of new democratic forms with old authoritarian practices. Personnel continuities — particularly in the judiciary, the security services, and the bureaucracy — ensured that informal norms and habits of the communist period survived the formal change of regime.
Persistence of old regime elements
Path dependency and institutional inertia, the lack of alternative models immediately available, the role of former elites in the transition process, and the pragmatic need for institutional continuity during transition all contributed to the survival of old regime elements. As a result, formal institutions frequently bear new names but retain similar practices; personnel continuities remain in bureaucracy, judiciary, and security services; old structures were adapted rather than eliminated; “recombinant property” mixes state and private ownership; and informal networks maintain influence across regime change.
Large welfare systems
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| Socialist ideological commitment to social provision | Extensive but underfunded welfare systems |
| Employment-based benefits as form of social control | Universal healthcare systems facing quality and financing challenges |
| Legitimation strategy for authoritarian regimes | Generous pension systems creating fiscal pressures |
| “Social contract” offering welfare in exchange for political compliance | Public expectations of comprehensive social protection |
| Reform resistance from beneficiaries and providers | |
| Social policy as a key political battleground |
Weak party systems
| Causes | Post-communist manifestations |
|---|---|
| One-party dominance undermining political pluralism | High electoral volatility and party system instability |
| Politics organised around opposition to the regime rather than policy differences | Personality-driven rather than programme-based parties |
| Limited experience with democratic party competition | Weak party organisation and membership |
| Suppression of civil society organisations that could form party bases | Frequent emergence of “new” anti-establishment parties |
| Difficulties in forming stable governing coalitions | |
| Vulnerability to populist and anti-system movements |
Communist-era constitutions and legal systems
The formalistic legal tradition under communism, the gap between constitutional rights and practical enforcement, legal systems designed for one-party states, and the instrumental view of law as a tool of political power have all left traces in post-communist legal orders. Constitutional reforms built on existing frameworks; formal democratic institutions often coexist with authoritarian practices; executives remain strong relative to legislatures and courts; legal cultures emphasise hierarchical authority; implementation gaps persist between formal rules and practices; and judicial independence remains weak in many countries. The Polish judiciary crisis that began in 2015, when the Law and Justice government moved to bring the Constitutional Tribunal under political control, illustrates how these institutional weaknesses can be exploited by political actors seeking to consolidate power.
Centralised administrative structures
Centralised economic planning required administrative control; democratic centralism was a foundational organisational principle; local autonomy was limited; and bureaucratic coordination substituted for market mechanisms. These features have produced continued executive dominance over decision-making, hesitant and incomplete decentralisation reforms, administrative bottlenecks and inefficiencies, gaps between formal and informal decision-making processes, weak local government capacity, and top-down implementation of EU-prompted reforms.
Mutually reinforcing effects across legacies
Cultural, material, and institutional legacies reinforce each other in complex ways. Infrastructure gaps perpetuate regional divisions and nationalist tensions; environmental damage fosters distrust in institutions and political cynicism; state economic dominance shapes economic beliefs and business practices; industrial decline feeds nostalgia and undermines trust in market reforms; weak party systems enhance personalised politics and low trust; and welfare expectations influence economic beliefs and electoral politics.
Specific cross-legacy interactions include the way material deprivation during transition strengthened nationalist narratives, the way environmental movements provided early civic participation opportunities, the way privatisation experiences deepened distrust of political elites and reforms, the way regional economic disparities exacerbated low social trust and political polarisation, and the way institutional continuity maintained networks that hindered trust-building.
Generational dimensions of legacies
Older generations experienced both systems directly, while younger generations inherit cultural attitudes without the material experiences that produced them. The two groups have different perspectives on the trade-offs between security and opportunity. Whether generational replacement will be sufficient to overcome the transmission of legacies through socialisation and culture is one of the central open questions in the field.
Multiple eras, multiple legacies
There are clearly a variety of legacies of potential importance when thinking about individual and group-level aspects of social behaviour in post-communist states. Even if we limit our point of departure to the nineteenth century, we still have several distinct eras that might have given rise to different kinds of legacies: the era of empire, the interwar period, the Second World War, the communist era, and the early years of transition from communism.
Living through communism
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s primary explanation
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s central empirical contribution is to show that the attitudes of post-communist citizens are better explained by the experience of living through communism than by the characteristics of the post-communist context in which they currently live. The core mechanism they identify is that communist regimes actively attempted to create a “Socialist Man” — a new type of citizen whose values and behaviours would be aligned with the precepts of Marxism-Leninism. Unlike most authoritarian regimes, which demand compliance without necessarily seeking to transform private beliefs, communist states invested heavily in political socialisation through schools, workplaces, party meetings, and mass organisations, with the explicit aim of producing genuine attitude change. Each additional year spent under communist rule should therefore increase alignment with pro-regime attitudes: less support for democracy and markets, more support for state welfare.
Intensity and resistance to communist exposure
Pop-Eleches and Tucker recognise that exposure to communist socialisation is not uniform. They introduce the concepts of intensity and resistance as modifiers that help explain variation in the effects of communist exposure across individuals and countries, using a sunburn analogy to capture the logic of their model. Just as the effect of sun exposure on the skin depends on both the duration and intensity of exposure, and on the individual’s sensitivity to UV radiation, so the effect of communist socialisation depends on the duration, intensity, and character of the exposure and on the individual’s susceptibility to it.
| Modifier | Country-level | Individual-level |
|---|---|---|
| Temporal exposure | Years of communist rule vary across countries. | Age and birth cohort determine years of exposure. |
| Intensity | Stalinist regimes delivered far more intense socialisation than post-totalitarian regimes. | Attending secondary school under communism intensifies exposure. |
| Resistance | Higher pre-communist literacy enabled resistance via nationalist narratives (Darden and Grzymała-Busse). | Catholicism offered an alternative community hostile to communist precepts. |
A citizen who spent her entire childhood and adolescence in Stalinist Romania was exposed to a more intensive dose of communist socialisation than one who grew up in the more relaxed atmosphere of Gorbachev-era Hungary — and the latter, if she was a practising Catholic, had access to a source of resistance that could partially buffer the effects of the regime’s socialisation efforts. These modifiers help explain why communist legacies vary across individuals and countries, and they point to the mechanisms by which exposure shaped attitudes.
Living in a post-communist country
The alternative explanation
Even in the absence of direct exposure to communist rule, post-communist citizens might differ from others because of the specific characteristics of the countries they currently live in. Pop-Eleches and Tucker identify three categories of present-day factors that might explain post-communist attitudinal differences without invoking the legacy of communism directly.
| Category | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Sociodemographic makeup | The age distribution, education levels, and income distribution of post-communist societies. |
| Economic conditions | Current economic circumstances — most importantly, falling real incomes during the transition to markets. |
| Political institutions | The character and quality of the political institutions with which citizens interact in their daily lives. |
Pre-communist conditions also matter: the level of economic development, literacy, urbanisation, religious tradition, and prior regime type before 1945 may explain attitudinal divergence independently of the communist period. Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s empirical contribution lies in demonstrating that these contextual factors are less important than direct exposure in explaining the four attitude domains they study, though disentangling communist-era from post-communist influences is a persistent methodological challenge.
Implications for future convergence
If the “living through” explanation is more important than the “living in” explanation, then we should expect post-communist attitudes gradually to converge with Western European norms as the generations that experienced communism are replaced by those who did not. One way to test the relative importance of the two explanations is to compare the attitudes of citizens who were born after the end of communism with those who experienced communist rule directly. If the legacy works primarily through direct socialisation, post-1989 birth cohorts should show less divergence from comparable Western citizens than older cohorts. If it works primarily through the post-communist context, birth cohort should not matter. Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s data provide partial support for the socialisation hypothesis, although the picture is complicated by the intergenerational transmission of attitudes through family socialisation.
Key takeaways
The legacy concept requires three components — outcome, antecedent, and mechanism — and legacies are distinctive because they are after-effects of defunct causes. Scholars of post-communist CEE have identified cultural, material, and institutional legacies that reinforce each other to produce a distinctive regional political culture. Pop-Eleches and Tucker argue that direct exposure to communist socialisation — modified by intensity and resistance — explains attitudinal differences better than present-day contextual factors alone. The sunburn analogy captures how duration, intensity, and individual sensitivity combine to produce varied legacy effects across individuals and countries. Whether post-communist attitudes will converge with Western European norms depends on whether socialisation or context is the more powerful mechanism — and on how durably attitudes are transmitted across generations even after the socialising regime has disappeared.