Social-psychological theories and communist legacies
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Recap: two explanations for post-communist attitudes
The previous lecture established the central empirical puzzle with which this course is concerned: post-communist citizens differ systematically from others in their attitudes toward democracy, markets, and welfare. Drawing on World Values Survey data, Pop-Eleches and Tucker (in Communism’s Shadow, Chapter 1) showed that these differences cannot be explained away by controlling for income, education, or other standard demographic variables. They propose two candidate explanations. The first, living through communism, holds that direct exposure to communist rule during one’s formative years shaped attitudes through the active political socialisation programmes in which communist regimes invested so heavily. The second, living in a post-communist country, holds that present-day contextual factors — such as economic conditions, the sociodemographic composition of society, or the character of political institutions — are responsible for observed differences.
Their key finding is that direct exposure is the stronger explanation, especially when that exposure occurred during the formative years of childhood and adolescence. Today’s lecture turns to the theoretical question of how that exposure operates: through what social-psychological mechanisms do communist-era experiences produce the durable attitudinal patterns that Pop-Eleches and Tucker document?
Intensity and resistance
Pop-Eleches and Tucker use a sunburn analogy to describe the effect of communist exposure: its impact depends on both dose and sensitivity. Three dimensions shape this relationship:
| Dimension | Description |
|---|---|
| Temporal exposure | Number of years lived under communist rule |
| Intensity | Stalinist vs. post-totalitarian regime type; whether secondary schooling took place under communism |
| Resistance | Pre-communist literacy (which enabled nationalist counter-narratives) and Catholicism (which provided an alternative community hostile to communist precepts) |
These modifiers map directly onto social-psychological concepts. Intensity reflects the strength of the socialisation signal (as in social learning and conformity theories), while resistance reflects the availability of alternative identity resources (as in social identity theory and collective memory theory).
System justification theory
Core concepts
System justification theory, developed by John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji (Jost & Banaji 1994; Jost, Banaji & Nosek 2004), proposes that people are motivated not only to justify their own position and that of their group but also to justify the existing social system, even when that system disadvantages them. Internalising system-legitimising beliefs reduces cognitive dissonance and the anxiety of living in an unjust or threatening environment. The theory distinguishes three justification motives:
| Motive | Object of justification |
|---|---|
| Ego-justification | One’s own outcomes and position |
| Group-justification | The outcomes and position of one’s in-group |
| System-justification | The existing social order as a whole |
One of its more counterintuitive predictions is that disadvantaged groups sometimes hold the most system-justifying beliefs, a phenomenon sometimes described as false consciousness: accepting the legitimacy of the existing order is psychologically less costly than confronting the injustice of one’s own disadvantage.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Communist regimes were expert at cultivating system-justifying beliefs. Their ideology presented the socialist system as historically inevitable and morally superior, framed critique as deviance, mental illness, or enemy activity, and thereby allowed citizens to reduce the dissonance of living under an authoritarian system in which the gap between rhetoric and reality was often vast. The long-term effect is that citizens trained to justify the existing order may apply the same cognitive habit to any system that follows, including post-communist democratic or hybrid regimes. This can inhibit democratic demand and critical civic engagement, producing a fatalistic acceptance of inequality and corruption captured in the refrain “this is just how things are”.
The paradoxical corollary is retrospective system justification, known in East Germany as Ostalgie. Citizens who participated in and implicitly endorsed the communist system reconstruct its past selectively, emphasising its genuine benefits (social security, predictability, full employment) while minimising its costs (repression, surveillance, the destruction of civil society). This protects the self-image of those who complied with a system about which they are now ambivalent. Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s 2013 finding that post-totalitarian socialisation during ages 6–17 was the strongest demobilising factor is consistent with the idea that early system-justifying training produces durable reductions in civic demand.
Collective memory theory
Core concepts
Collective memory theory, drawing on the foundational work of Maurice Halbwachs (1925, 1950) and developed by scholars including Jeffrey Olick and James Pennebaker, argues that memory is not purely an individual cognitive phenomenon but is socially constructed and maintained through shared narratives, commemorations, and rituals. Groups selectively remember and forget in ways that serve their present-day collective needs: what is remembered, how it is framed, and whose experiences are centred are products of social negotiation rather than of neutral retrieval. Important concepts include collective trauma (shared experiences of suffering that shape group identity), mnemonic communities (groups defined partly by what they remember together), and the contestation of memory between groups holding rival narratives about the same past.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Communist regimes attempted to control collective memory comprehensively. Official histories erased inconvenient facts, including the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyń massacre, and the democratic inter-war period. Commemorations centred on party triumphs and liberation narratives, while unofficial memory was suppressed but survived in family stories, samizdat literature, and religious ritual. Religion played a crucial role as a carrier of alternative collective memory: the Catholic Church in Poland preserved national memory outside state control, and religious festivals and pilgrimages maintained collective identity under surveillance.
After 1989, post-communist societies faced the politically explosive challenge of memory politics: how to acknowledge communist crimes without delegitimising the many citizens who had compromised, collaborated, or simply survived. Lustration debates, truth commissions, monument removals, and conflicts over the commemoration of wartime and communist-era events continue to animate post-communist politics. The example of Katyń — the Soviet execution of approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and intellectuals in 1940, which Soviet authorities attributed to Nazi Germany until Gorbachev formally acknowledged Soviet responsibility in 1990 — shows how the legacies of communist-era memory management still structure contemporary political life. Selective nostalgia (Ostalgie) also reflects the tendency of collective memory to reconstruct the past in terms of present discontents.
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s 2013 finding that religiosity predicts higher civic participation fits this account: religious communities are mnemonic communities that maintain civic traditions and identity resources that communist regimes tried to destroy.
Cognitive dissonance theory
Core concepts
Cognitive dissonance theory, developed by Leon Festinger (1957), proposes that people experience psychological discomfort — dissonance — when they hold two inconsistent cognitions or when their behaviour conflicts with their beliefs. Motivated by this discomfort, people reduce dissonance by changing one of the inconsistent beliefs, by adding new cognitions that render the inconsistency less apparent, or by minimising the importance of the conflict. If one cannot change the behaviour, one tends to change the attitude to match it: this is the mechanism through which coerced behaviour can produce genuine attitude change over time.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Life under communism generated chronic cognitive dissonance on a massive scale. Citizens who publicly endorsed the regime while privately doubting it, who participated in rituals of collective affirmation they found meaningless, and who denounced colleagues or kept silent about injustices they witnessed, faced a persistent gap between performance and belief. Over time, many partially internalised the attitudes they were forced to perform. Timur Kuran’s concept of preference falsification describes the social mechanism by which private preferences are systematically hidden under authoritarian rule, with profound consequences for the apparent stability of such regimes and for what happens when they suddenly collapse.
Post-communist dissonance takes its own forms. Citizens who collaborated with or benefited from communist institutions face dissonance about their past conduct, resolved through nostalgia, denial, or victim narratives. Rapid economic change created dissonance between market ideology and lived experience of inequality, resolved through anti-market attitudes or nationalist framing. The speed with which many communist intellectuals converted to anti-communism after 1989 illustrates the dynamic, though it also carries the darker implication that individuals capable of such rapid ideological reorientation may not be reliable democratic citizens.
Learned helplessness
Core concepts
Learned helplessness, developed by Martin Seligman on the basis of his and Steven Maier’s animal experiments (Seligman 1975), describes what happens when organisms repeatedly experience uncontrollable outcomes: they learn to stop trying to influence their environment, even when control subsequently becomes possible. Its three components are cognitive (the belief that outcomes are uncontrollable), motivational (reduced effort and initiative), and emotional (passivity and depression). Individuals differ in their attribution style: whether they attribute helplessness internally (stable and global) or externally (unstable and specific).
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Decades of communist rule systematically taught political helplessness. Individual political action had no effect on outcomes: elections were rigged, dissent was punished, and complaints to authorities were futile or dangerous. The adaptive response was withdrawal from the political sphere into private life, producing what Václav Havel called “living within the lie”. Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless (1978) captures this phenomenology through the figure of the greengrocer who places a “Workers of the world, unite!” placard in his shop window not because he believes in it but because not placing it would require him to justify a deviation from the expected norm.
Citizens who learned that politics is uncontrollable do not spontaneously re-engage when formally free to do so. Low external efficacy (“politicians don’t care what I think”) combined with low internal efficacy (“I don’t understand politics”) reproduces passivity. This mechanism is central to Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s Socialization Legacy proposition: demobilisation learned through years of communist socialisation persists into the post-communist period, with post-totalitarian early exposure (ages 6–17) emerging as the single strongest predictor of the participation deficit. The “post-totalitarian” character of late communist rule, which relied more on internalised compliance than on open terror, is precisely what proves most damaging for subsequent civic participation.
Just world theory
Core concepts
Melvin Lerner’s just world theory (Lerner 1980) proposes that people have a deep need to believe that the world is fair and that people get what they deserve. This belief is functional — it reduces anxiety about random suffering and motivates long-term investment — but it also has dysfunctional consequences, including victim-blaming and the justification of existing inequalities as deserved outcomes of merit. Just world beliefs vary across cultures and are shaped by socialisation: strong just world beliefs can sustain acceptance of inequality and elite privilege, while weak just world beliefs may fuel resentment and populist mobilisation.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Communist regimes promoted a distinctive collective just world ideology. The socialist system was just by definition; suffering was the deserved fate of class enemies and political deviants; and individuals who conformed and contributed would be rewarded with security. When the transition to markets produced visible inequality and the rapid enrichment of a small elite through privatisation, these just world beliefs were severely disrupted. Citizens came to view the post-communist world as unjust, with those who benefited doing so through illegitimate means. This reactive resentment has fuelled anti-elite sentiment, support for redistribution, and vulnerability to populist appeals promising to restore what had been stolen — captured in the popular saying “the first million was stolen”. In Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and elsewhere, populist parties have won elections in part by promising to recover what was taken by a corrupt transition elite.
Relative deprivation theory
Core concepts
Relative deprivation theory, developed by Stouffer et al. (1949) and formalised by Ted Gurr (1970), proposes that the sense of injustice and the political discontent it generates are driven not by absolute levels of deprivation but by perceived discrepancies between what one has and what one believes one deserves or expects by comparison with a relevant reference group. Gurr distinguishes egoistic deprivation (comparison of self with comparable others) from fraternal deprivation (comparison of one’s group with another group). A classic application is Davies’ J-curve: revolutions occur not at the peak of misery but after a period of improvement that is then frustrated.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Under communism, relative deprivation was managed through information control. Citizens were largely shielded from knowledge of Western living standards, and the relevant comparison group was typically fellow citizens experiencing the same conditions. Occasional contact with Western goods and media created desire but limited systematic comparison. In the late-communist period, as information flows increased, comparison with the West intensified relative deprivation — “why do we live like this when they live like that?” — contributing to the delegitimation of communist regimes.
After 1989, post-communist citizens faced three simultaneous and mutually reinforcing frames of relative deprivation:
| Comparison | Content |
|---|---|
| Temporal | Current hardship compared with remembered communist-era stability |
| Spatial | Post-communist situation compared with Western Europe |
| Within-country | Ordinary citizens compared with transition winners |
All three produced grievance at once. Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s Differential Stimuli proposition — that worse economic transitions produce larger civic participation deficits — is consistent with relative deprivation dynamics. Countries with prolonged and painful transitions show the greatest demobilisation, while those with rapid and smooth transitions (such as the Baltic States) show smaller deficits. Relative deprivation translates into demobilisation when institutions seem unable to respond to grievance.
Terror management theory
Core concepts
Terror management theory (TMT), developed by Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon (1986) on the basis of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, proposes that awareness of mortality creates existential anxiety that people manage by investing in cultural worldviews that provide symbolic immortality and meaning. Cultural worldviews — religious, national, or ideological — promise continuity and significance beyond individual death. Mortality salience (reminders of death) increases the intensity of investment in those worldviews and hostility toward those who challenge them. TMT predicts that threat leads to stronger in-group identification, stronger out-group hostility, and greater appeal of charismatic leaders who promise collective redemption.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
The post-communist transition involved high mortality salience in both figurative and literal senses. The social order collapsed, economic insecurity produced genuine health crises and elevated death rates (particularly among middle-aged men in Russia and other former Soviet states, through alcoholism and cardiovascular disease), and the meaning system that had provided a comprehensive account of history and society was suddenly destroyed. The existential anxiety this produced elicited exactly the responses TMT predicts: intensified investment in alternative worldviews offering continuity and meaning. Nationalism provides symbolic immortality through the nation’s historical narrative; religion offers literal immortality and collective meaning; and ideological movements, including authoritarianism, offer belonging and certainty.
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s 2013 finding that religiosity positively predicts civic participation may partly reflect TMT dynamics: religious communities provide worldview support and mortality management, sustaining civic engagement against demobilising pressures.
Contact theory
Core concepts
Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis (Allport 1954), extended in a meta-analysis by Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp (2006), proposes that under appropriate conditions direct contact between members of different groups reduces prejudice and intergroup hostility. Allport specified four necessary conditions:
- Equal status between the groups in the contact situation
- Common goals
- Institutional support for the contact
- Cooperative rather than competitive interaction
Extended contact effects have also been documented: knowing someone who has cross-group friendships can itself reduce prejudice. Contact theory implies that segregation and restricted interaction perpetuate prejudice, while well-designed contact interventions can shift attitudes.
Communist-era and post-communist applications
Communist regimes imposed a distinctive contact environment that satisfied few of Allport’s conditions. Formal internationalist ideology coexisted with ethnic homogenisation through forced resettlements, expulsions, and border changes. Contact with Western citizens was restricted, while contact with Soviet citizens was mandatory but often resented. Roma, Jewish, and other minority populations experienced discrimination despite official equality. The result was a post-communist contact deficit: limited experience of genuine multicultural interaction left societies vulnerable to out-group threat narratives, while EU freedom of movement created new contact opportunities that were simultaneously a source of anxiety.
One of the most counterintuitive findings in the social psychology of immigration attitudes is that post-communist countries with the least actual immigration experience — Poland, Hungary, Slovakia — often show the most hostile attitudes toward immigrants and refugees. In the absence of the corrective experience of actual contact, threat narratives can dominate unchallenged. The contrast with Germany, where higher immigration coexists with considerably more positive out-group attitudes, illustrates the logic of the contact hypothesis.
Integrating theory with evidence: Pop-Eleches & Tucker (2013)
The civic participation deficit
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s 2013 article “Associated with the Past?” in East European Politics and Societies applies their theoretical framework to the question of why post-communist citizens participate less in civic life than comparable non-post-communist citizens. Using World Values Survey data, they document a robust post-communist participation deficit across multiple forms of civic activity: membership in voluntary associations, signing petitions, attending demonstrations, and contacting officials. The deficit persists after controlling for standard socioeconomic predictors, which rules out straightforward explanations based on poverty or education.
Three propositions
They propose three explanations for the deficit:
| Proposition | Content |
|---|---|
| Socialization Legacy | Citizens socialised under communism internalised passive civic orientations — politics was something done to them, not by them |
| Demographic Legacy | Communist demography, especially the suppression of religiosity, reduced the supply of civic resources (religious citizens participate more everywhere) |
| Differential Stimuli | Post-communist economic and institutional context provides weaker stimuli for participation — economic crisis demobilises, and weak institutions offer fewer meaningful participation opportunities |
Empirical findings
The post-communist participation deficit is large and robust, and is not explained away by controls for income, education, or urbanisation. Demography — above all religiosity — explains approximately 40% of the deficit: religious citizens participate significantly more in civic life, communism systematically suppressed religiosity, and lower post-communist religiosity therefore produces fewer civic participants. Poland is a partial exception, as its relatively high religiosity, sustained by the Catholic Church’s resistance to communism, insulates it from this particular mechanism.
Post-totalitarian early socialisation — exposure to the regime during ages 6–17 — is the single strongest demobilising factor. More years of post-totalitarian schooling translate into lower civic participation. Stalinist exposure is surprisingly weaker, perhaps because overt terror is less effective than softer post-totalitarian pressure at producing internalised passivity. Economic performance matters: worse transitions produce larger participation deficits. The type of post-communist political institutions, however, does not independently explain civic participation.
Connecting theory and evidence
The following table links each theory discussed today to the Pop-Eleches and Tucker mechanism it helps explain and to the relevant empirical finding:
| Theory | P-E&T mechanism | Key finding |
|---|---|---|
| Social learning | Socialization Legacy | Post-totalitarian schooling demobilises |
| Social capital | Demographic Legacy | Religiosity sustains civic networks |
| Learned helplessness | Socialization Legacy | Political passivity internalised early |
| Conformity | Socialization Legacy | Passivity becomes the norm |
| Collective memory | Demographic Legacy | Religion preserves civic traditions |
| Relative deprivation | Differential Stimuli | Economic crisis demobilises |
| Social identity | Demographic Legacy | Religious in-group sustains participation |
| Terror management | Demographic Legacy | Religion provides existential meaning |
What the theories add to the evidence
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s empirical findings are compelling but under-theorised at the individual level. The theories surveyed here help to fill the gap in three ways. First, they explain why post-totalitarian early exposure demobilises so effectively: social learning transmits passive civic models, conformity makes non-participation the norm, and learned helplessness internalises a sense of political futility. Second, they explain why religiosity protects against the deficit: religious communities generate bridging social capital, provide in-group civic norms, preserve alternative collective memories, and offer the worldview support that terror management theory identifies as crucial. Third, they explain why economic performance matters more than political institutions: relative deprivation translates grievance into demobilisation when institutions seem unresponsive, while system justification encourages passive acceptance of economic injustice.
Implications for democratic consolidation
The social-psychological legacy of communism creates a structurally thin civil society. Participation habits cannot easily be rebuilt through institutional reform alone, and generational replacement may be slower than expected if passive civic norms are transmitted culturally as well as through direct exposure. Religious communities remain the most robust source of civic capital, but they also carry conservative values that may resist liberal democratic norms. The combination of demobilised citizens and weak civic institutions creates conditions for democratic backsliding: low civic participation reduces accountability pressure on governments, and populist parties can mobilise identity grievances in a civic vacuum. Contact theory suggests that integration and exposure to out-groups could help to counter these dynamics, but post-communist societies have limited experience of managed diversity on which to draw.
Social identity theory
Core concepts
Social identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the late 1970s and 1980s (Tajfel & Turner 1979, 1986), proposes that people derive part of their self-concept from membership in social groups. The theory identifies three key processes: social categorisation (classifying ourselves and others into groups), social identification (internalising group membership as part of the self-concept), and social comparison (evaluating one’s own group against relevant out-groups). People are motivated to maintain positive distinctiveness for their in-group — to see it as superior in some relevant respect to the groups with which it is being compared.
When that positive distinctiveness is threatened, people employ defensive strategies: individual mobility (leaving the group where possible), social creativity (redefining the terms of comparison), or social competition (challenging the out-group directly). Tajfel’s classic minimal group experiments showed that even trivially assigned group memberships are enough to trigger in-group favouritism, suggesting that the tendency to form and maintain group identities is deep and does not require a substantive basis.
Communist-era applications
Under communist rule, the state attempted to impose a homogenised socialist identity that suppressed national, religious, and class identities. Forced collective identities — workplace brigades, party membership, and youth organisations — created in-group structures centred on regime compliance. Simultaneously, unofficial in-groups built around family, church, and underground networks became repositories of what many citizens experienced as their authentic identity. Paradoxically, the suppression of national identity often intensified it as a source of positive distinctiveness: being genuinely Polish, Lithuanian, or Czech, rather than a Soviet-style citizen, became a form of resistance and dignity. Religious identity, especially Catholicism in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, functioned as a key alternative in-group.
Post-communist applications
After 1989, the collapse of official in-group structures created an identity vacuum. New political parties, civic organisations, and national symbols competed to fill it, but many citizens struggled to locate themselves within unfamiliar democratic categories. The persistence of an us-versus-them cognitive style has left post-communist politics particularly sensitive to out-group threats — against immigrants, minorities, and Western institutions — and has provided fertile ground for nationalist parties that activate social identity dynamics. Democratic backsliding in the region is often framed in identity terms as a conflict between the “true people” and corrupt elites.
Pop-Eleches and Tucker’s 2013 finding that religiosity is the strongest demographic predictor of civic participation connects directly to this mechanism: religious in-group membership provided an alternative community that survived communism and continues to generate civic resources. The role of the Catholic Church in Poland illustrates this vividly, both through its institutional contribution to Solidarity in 1980 and through its continuing role in Polish civic life, although its conservative social positions have also become a source of polarisation.