Social influence and social norms
The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition
Overview of today’s lecture
The lecture pursues four interlocking concerns. First, it clarifies what social norms are and how they differ from attitudes and beliefs, building on the social-psychological classics of conformity, social identity, and system justification. Second, it shows how these mechanisms link the authoritarian legacies of communism to the civic life of post-communist societies. Third, it traces three successive generations of scholarship on “good citizenship” in CEE: Coffé and van der Lippe (2010) on the dutiful/engaged baseline; Schnaudt, van Deth, Zorell and Theocharis (2021) on the expanded framework incorporating sustainability and populist-authoritarian norms; and Vachudova, Dolenec and Fagan’s (2024) work on citizenship enacted as protest against democratic backsliding. Fourth, it argues that the post-communist region is not a monolithic bloc, and that the cross-country picture visible in 2002 no longer describes today’s CEE.
When does a norm hold?
A social norm is followed when people believe, first, that sufficiently many others follow it (what Bicchieri calls empirical expectations), and second, that sufficiently many others think it should be followed, and may sanction deviation (normative expectations). This dual-expectation structure is what distinguishes a genuine social norm from mere conformity or from personal moral conviction. It also explains why norms can persist even when large proportions of a population privately disagree with them — the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance — and why they can collapse rapidly once a critical mass of people stops following them and this becomes visible.
It is useful to arrange compliance with a behavioural regularity on four levels:
| Level | What sustains compliance |
|---|---|
| Not social | A personal attitude or moral conviction; the individual would follow the rule even if alone |
| Weakly social | Following a rule because others do (empirical expectation only) |
| Strongly social | A social norm proper, resting on both empirical and normative expectations |
| Institutional | A legal norm, backed by state coercion |
Ordinary theatre applause provides an illustration: almost everyone does it (statistical regularity), most people feel they ought to do it and would feel odd sitting silent (appropriateness), and those who do not clap may attract disapproving looks (normative sanction). No law or absolute moral principle requires it. If one person stands, empirical expectations shift (people are standing), normative expectations shift (perhaps I should too), and a new norm is bootstrapped into existence for the evening.
System justification and its limits
John Jost’s system justification theory proposes that people have a motivated tendency to defend, bolster and justify existing social arrangements, even when those arrangements disadvantage them personally. The tendency satisfies a psychological need for stability and predictability: rationalising the status quo reduces the cognitive and emotional costs of uncertainty. Applied to post-communism, the theory has a double implication. During communism, citizens rationalised a system that constrained their autonomy and curtailed their opportunities, producing the norms of passivity and compliance that characterised the homo Sovieticus archetype. After communism, these very norms were themselves subject to system justification, because changing them would require acknowledging that the adaptations one had made under communism were not merely prudent but complicit.
Crucially, the strength of this effect should vary with how the prior regime was experienced. Harder communism should mean stronger carryover; greater resistance should mean weaker carryover. Shalom Schwartz and Anat Bardi (1997) formalised this prediction, and it will structure the comparative analysis that follows.
From theory to CEE cases
The three frameworks converge on concrete, testable expectations for citizenship norms in Central and Eastern Europe.
| Mechanism | Prediction for CEE |
|---|---|
| Conformity | Citizens in harder-communist systems should show lower engaged citizenship, because the historically salient norm was passivity |
| Public/private split | Citizens should show higher duty-based norms (voting, law-abiding) than engaged norms (activism, voluntary association) |
| System justification | Cross-country variation should track the type of communism experienced, not a uniform “Eastern” pattern |
These predictions have been tested in three successive waves of research.
Three generations of research
The rest of the lecture traces these waves:
- 2010. Coffé and van der Lippe test the predictions on European Social Survey 2002 data from four CEE countries. They establish the distinction between dutiful and engaged citizenship as the dominant framework in the field.
- 2021. Schnaudt, van Deth, Zorell and Theocharis argue that this framework has been overtaken by events. They propose two additional facets of citizenship: sustainability and populist-authoritarian norms.
- 2024. The East European Politics and Societies special issue edited by Vachudova, Dolenec and Fagan moves beyond surveys altogether to study what CEE citizens are actually doing when democracy is under attack.
The framework has not been replaced, but the object of study has shifted: from norms held in private to norms enacted in the streets.
Coffé and van der Lippe (2010): the baseline
Hanna Coffé and Tanja van der Lippe’s 2010 article represents an important methodological contribution to the study of civic culture in post-communist Europe, precisely because it shifts the unit of analysis from behaviour to norms. Earlier research had focused on what citizens do: whether they vote, whether they join associations, whether they participate in political organisations. This behavioural focus is limited because behaviour is shaped by context as well as by dispositions. Citizens who would like to vote may be inhibited by electoral systems that discourage participation; citizens who would like to join voluntary associations may have no suitable associations available. By asking what citizens think good citizenship requires — measuring the normative content of citizenship rather than its behavioural expression — Coffé and van der Lippe get closer to the underlying social norms that shape civic culture. Their research question is deceptively simple: What do people themselves think it means to be a good citizen?
Civic-mindedness in CEE
During the first decade of transition, research was dominated by interest in organisational membership (in political parties and civil-society organisations) and in political and electoral participation. Relatively little research was conducted on citizens’ own understandings of what “being a good citizen” means. Coffé and van der Lippe investigate these understandings in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
East/West differences
The East/West comparison in citizenship norms reveals a consistent, theoretically interpretable pattern. In Western European countries, the highest priority is placed on critical and deliberative principles of citizenship: forming independent opinions, participating actively, holding governments to account. Law-abidingness comes second, and solidarity third. In Eastern European countries this ordering is inverted: compliance with law and authority ranks first, and critical/deliberative values second.
The difference is not a matter of mere cultural preference. It reflects the differential experience of two distinct political traditions: Western democracies in which active citizenship has been normalised over generations, and communist systems in which the only officially sanctioned form of citizenship was conformity with the directives of the party-state. Party membership was the only available political identification; regimes repressed autonomous non-state activity and forced citizens into mandatory, state-controlled organisations — effectively inoculating them against voluntary civic engagement.
Four communisms, four legacies
The variation within Central and Eastern Europe is theoretically as interesting as the variation between East and West. Schwartz and Bardi’s (1997) hypothesis generates specific predictions about the four countries under study.
| Country | Communist experience | Expected legacy |
|---|---|---|
| Czech Republic | “Hard-line” communism after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968; high domestic legitimacy of the one-party state; ideological conformity; small and marginalised opposition | Deepest civic deficit; weak norms on both dimensions |
| Poland | Significant economic reform in the 1980s; mass mobilisation of Solidarity; the Catholic Church as a protected space for dissent | Pluralist and participatory legacy; strong on both duty and engagement |
| Hungary | “Goulash communism”: opposition arising from within the communist elite; greater private freedoms under continued state control | Strong duty-based norms, weaker engagement |
| Slovenia | “Soft transition” from a favourable economic position within Yugoslavia; weakest continuity with communist-era administrative structures; often groups with Western democracies (Denters et al. 2007) | Strong engaged citizenship, weaker duty |
Measuring “good citizenship”
Coffé and van der Lippe use 2002 European Social Survey data. Respondents rated, on a scale from 0 to 10, how important each of the following is for being a good citizen: voting in elections; obeying laws and regulations; being active in voluntary associations; being active in politics; forming an independent opinion; and supporting others who are worse off. Principal components analysis of these six items yielded two dimensions.
| Dimension | Items | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Citizen duty | Voting in elections; obeying laws and regulations | Vertical; loyalty to state |
| Engaged citizenship | Activism in voluntary associations and politics; solidarity with the worse off; independent opinion | Horizontal; participatory |
The individual-level predictors tested in the regression models include religiosity, church attendance, education, gender, year of birth, marital status, occupational status, institutional trust and social trust.
Cross-national differences in citizenship norms
The descriptive findings match the theoretical predictions, with revealing nuances. Standardised mean component scores from Coffé and van der Lippe (2010), Table 2:
| Country | Citizen duty | Engaged citizenship | Profile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Czech Republic | -0.39 | -0.39 | Lowest on both; deepest civic deficit |
| Hungary | +0.35 | -0.21 | Strong duty, weak engagement: the “traditional” profile |
| Poland | +0.19 | +0.25 | Strong on both: dual inheritance of Solidarity and Church |
| Slovenia | -0.30 | +0.26 | Strong engagement, weak duty: the “modern” profile |
Hungary shows duty-based norms that are dominant but engaged citizenship that is notably weak. Slovenia shows the reverse. The Czech Republic is the striking outlier, scoring lowest on both dimensions and confirming the Schwartz/Bardi prediction that hard-line Czechoslovak communism produced the deepest civic deficit. Polish citizens score high on both, reflecting the dual inheritance of Polish civic culture: the participatory legacy of Solidarity and the law-abiding, institutionally-oriented tradition of Polish Catholicism. Together, these differences underline that CEE cannot be treated as a monolithic bloc.
What predicts citizenship norms?
The regression analysis tests a range of individual-level predictors across all four countries and both dimensions. The findings resist simple generalisation, which is exactly the point: the same variable often does different work in different contexts.
| Predictor | Finding |
|---|---|
| Institutional trust | Universally positive: significant for both dimensions in all four countries — the most robust finding in the paper |
| Social trust | Flips sign: positive in Czech Republic and (partly) Hungary; negative in Poland and Slovenia |
| Year of birth (younger) | Negative almost everywhere: younger cohorts hold weaker norms of citizenship |
| Church attendance | Significant in Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, but not Poland, where the Church was a site of autonomous opposition |
| Higher education | Country-specific; predicts duty in Hungary and Poland |
| Female | Country-specific; predicts duty in Hungary and Slovenia, engagement in Slovenia |
| Married | Country-specific; predicts duty in Hungary and Poland |
| In paid work | Country-specific; negative effect on engaged citizenship in Slovenia |
Two findings deserve particular attention. First, the negative coefficient on social trust in Poland and Slovenia is striking. It suggests that in societies with strong private networks of thick trust, high social trust may function as a substitute for civic engagement rather than a foundation for it: those who trust their friends and family feel less need to engage with the broader public world. Second, the negative coefficient on year of birth (younger cohorts are less civic-minded) directly contradicts the optimistic generational-replacement thesis associated with Piotr Sztompka (1996), who had predicted that civic engagement would rise as post-communist cohorts replaced those socialised under communism.
The finding that institutional trust predicts civic-mindedness while social trust has mixed effects also illustrates the conceptual distinction between “thick” and “thin” trust. Thick trust — trust in specific, known individuals — does not automatically generalise to thin trust in strangers and institutions. Post-communist societies tend to have high thick trust within private networks and low thin trust outside them. It is the latter, the willingness to cooperate with relative strangers toward common goals, that democratic civil society requires and that communism most effectively suppressed.
What Coffé and van der Lippe conclude
Eastern European citizens show lower civic and political engagement than their Western European counterparts, which can plausibly be attributed to the communist legacy. But the region is not monolithic: the Czech Republic is lowest on both dimensions; Hungary is strongly duty-based and weakly engaged (a “traditional” profile); Slovenia is strongly engaged and weakly duty-based (a “modern” profile); and Poland is high on both. Institutional trust emerges as the one universal positive predictor, while social trust flips sign across the four countries. The same variable does different work in different post-communist contexts.
The framework expanded: Schnaudt et al. (2021)
Christian Schnaudt, Jan van Deth, Carolin Zorell and Yannis Theocharis argue in a 2021 article in Politics that the dutiful/engaged dichotomy is now incomplete. Two developments have outpaced the framework. The first is the growing demand for sustainable lifestyles, visible in movements such as Fridays for Future. Being a “good citizen” increasingly means acting as a responsible consumer who protects resources and the environment for future generations. The second is the rising public support for populist-authoritarian ideas: loyalty to “the people”, distrust of experts and mainstream media, and defence of tradition against cosmopolitan elites. Both developments point to new facets of good citizenship that standard survey instruments — such as those used by the European Social Survey or the International Social Survey Programme — do not capture.
Schnaudt et al. propose an expanded map of the citizenship concept. The conventional four aspects can be set out as a 2x2 of rights and duties, by principle:
| Domain | Rights | Duties |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy principle | Be informed; keep an eye on government | — |
| Participation principle | Contribute to decision-making | — |
| Loyalty / social order | — | Accept rules; refrain from harmful behaviour |
| Solidarity principle | — | Support those worse off |
To this conventional quartet Schnaudt et al. add two further facets:
| New facet | Content |
|---|---|
| Sustainability | Ecological responsibility and cultural conservation framed as civic duty: the good citizen protects resources for future generations |
| Populist-authoritarian | Loyalty to “ordinary people”; rejection of “technocratic” rule; group conformity; reliance on feelings rather than expertise; defence of tradition against liberal elites |
Using original German data from 2019, Schnaudt et al. show that both new facets are empirically distinct from the conventional four — they are not just repackaged versions of dutiful or engaged citizenship.
Why this matters for CEE
The implication for Central and Eastern Europe is substantial. In Hungary under Fidesz (since 2010) and in Poland under PiS (2015–2023), the governing parties actively promoted populist-authoritarian citizenship norms. The “good citizen” was reframed as the defender of the nation against Brussels, liberal elites, LGBTQ+ activists and migrants. State-funded media, museums and school curricula were mobilised to entrench this conception. The Coffé and van der Lippe instrument, built from six ESS items, cannot register this shift because it only measures dutiful and engaged citizenship. The cross-national ranking from 2002 may still be valid for what it measures, but it no longer captures the full terrain of contemporary CEE citizenship. In Hungary in particular, Fidesz has been explicit: the good citizen defends Hungarian Christian civilisation against Brussels, George Soros, migrants and the LGBTQ+ community. These norms have been institutionalised in textbooks, the national curriculum, state media and the language of law.
Citizenship in action: the 2024 EEPS special issue
The November 2024 special issue of East European Politics and Societies, edited by Milada Vachudova, Danijela Dolenec and Adam Fagan, marks a further methodological shift. Where Coffé and van der Lippe studied what CEE citizens think, and Schnaudt et al. updated the dimensions of that thought, the EEPS special issue studies what CEE citizens are doing in defence of liberal democracy. The framing argument is that CEE has seen the largest protests since 1989 in the last decade, and that these protests have been in defence of liberal democracy against its own elected governments.
The issue distinguishes two distinct triggers for mobilisation:
| Trigger | Pattern | Representative cases |
|---|---|---|
| Democratic backsliding | Sudden, incumbent-led attacks on previously consolidated institutions | Poland under PiS; Czech Republic under Babiš; Hungary under Fidesz |
| Democratic stagnation | Gradual entrenchment of rent-seeking across successive governments in democracies that never fully consolidated | Bulgaria; Romania |
The type of democratic erosion shapes how citizens mobilise and what they demand.
What motivates CEE protesters?
Blackington, Dimitrova, Ionita and Vachudova (2024) report an original survey of approximately 300 protesters across Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, conducted in 2021 and 2022. Across all four countries, the dominant motivation is civic duty. Protesters describe their participation in almost identical language: “civic duty”, “responsibility”, “moral obligation”. Concern about the quality of democratic institutions is the top reason for protesting in all four cases.
But the solution protesters seek differs by the type of erosion they face:
| Country | Type of erosion | Main solution sought |
|---|---|---|
| Poland | Backsliding | Remove the government and reverse recent policies (~65% of Polish protesters) |
| Czech Republic | Backsliding | Remove the government and reverse recent policies |
| Bulgaria | Stagnation | Reform institutions that have malfunctioned since 1989 |
| Romania | Stagnation | Long-run institutional reform (~60% of Romanian protesters) |
The shared language of civic duty is theoretically significant. The classical duty dimension measured by Coffé and van der Lippe — obeying laws, voting, participating — has been repurposed under conditions of democratic crisis. Duty-based citizens are no longer only those who comply with authority; they are also those who resist authority when authority itself violates the norms of democratic governance. Duty and engagement converge when the legitimacy of the system is in question.
A generation gap reversed: Blackington (2024)
Courtney Blackington’s lead article in the EEPS special issue draws on 82 interviews with Polish pro-democracy protesters across nine cities between 2019 and 2022, supplemented by an original protester survey. The finding is striking. Of the 71 interviewees over 55, every single one cited lived experience of communism as central to their decision to protest. Population-level European Social Survey data confirm the pattern: before 2015, older and younger Poles protested at roughly similar (low) rates; after 2015, older-cohort protest participation roughly quadrupled.
The proposed mechanism is that political socialisation under authoritarianism produces a durable reservoir of citizens who recognise democratic fragility when they see it, and who mobilise to defend the institutions they themselves struggled to build. This directly contradicts Sztompka’s (1996) generational-replacement thesis. In Poland, it is the older cohorts who carry engaged citizenship into the streets in defence of liberal democracy, not the young. The KOD (Komitet Obrony Demokracji) movement that emerged after 2015 illustrates the pattern vividly: its core membership was drawn disproportionately from citizens in their 50s, 60s and 70s, many of them former Solidarity activists, church-based opposition participants, or people who had lived through martial law. Younger Poles have been highly active too, but in different kinds of mobilisation — the 2020 women’s strike, climate protests, LGBTQ+ rights demonstrations — rather than in the specifically institutional defence of liberal democracy.
Engaged citizenship, reimagined
Why do the classical Coffé and van der Lippe items under-report contemporary CEE engagement? The 2024 findings suggest three reasons:
| Feature of contemporary engagement | Why survey items miss it |
|---|---|
| Episodic | A question about last-year voluntary-association membership misses the citizen who attended ten KOD protests in 2017 but joined no formal organisation |
| Reactive | Engagement spikes in response to backsliding, so a single cross-section (such as ESS 2002) catches it only by chance |
| Defensive | Protects existing institutions rather than joining something new, mapping awkwardly onto survey items about voluntary associations and activism |
The implication is that the 2002 ranking documented by Coffé and van der Lippe may have been a snapshot of a pre-crisis equilibrium that the illiberal turn of the 2010s has since disrupted.
The limits of protest
Protesters across the four countries surveyed by Blackington et al. share a striking pessimism about the short-term impact of their own mobilisation. Most do not believe that protest changes government policy in the short run. The most commonly cited actual impact is raising public awareness and modelling civic engagement for younger generations. The European Union is no longer seen as a reliable pro-democracy ally: only in Poland do protesters view the EU as supportive; elsewhere it is seen as indifferent. A sobering conclusion emerges: protest has been consequential where it articulates with electoral politics (Czech Republic in 2021, Poland in 2023, Slovakia in 2020), but it has been unable to shift outcomes in Hungary or Serbia, where the playing field is too skewed.
Where the field stands now
The dutiful/engaged framework established by Coffé and van der Lippe in 2010 remains useful but is no longer sufficient. It misses the sustainability and populist-authoritarian norms identified by Schnaudt et al. It understates the defensive, episodic engagement documented by the EEPS special issue. The cross-country ranking from 2002 — Czech Republic lowest, Hungary duty-heavy, Slovenia engagement-heavy, Poland both — captured a pre-crisis equilibrium that the 2010s illiberal turn has disrupted.
What has held up is the broader argument of the framework. Central and Eastern Europe is not a monolithic bloc: variation is driven both by how communism was experienced and by how post-2010 politics has played out. Institutional trust remains central to whatever form engaged citizenship takes. What has been most substantially revised is the generational story: the optimistic Sztompka (1996) prediction that civic engagement would rise as communist-era cohorts were replaced has been empirically reversed for at least one important class of engagement, the defence of liberal democratic institutions under threat. In that domain, the older cohorts are the engaged ones, not the young.
The live question for the course is no longer whether post-communist citizens will converge on a Western European civic norm, but whether any common civic norm is emerging at all in a Europe where democratic institutions are themselves increasingly contested. CEE, once the laboratory of post-communist democratisation, has become the laboratory of democratic defence.
Questions for discussion
- Is “good citizenship” a stable normative ideal, or is it contested political terrain that illiberal actors can actively redefine?
- If engaged citizenship in CEE is now largely reactive — mobilised by threat — what happens when the threat recedes? Does it persist, or does it collapse back to the 2002 baseline?
- Does the European Union still have a role as a supporter of democratic norms in CEE, or has that moment passed?
Key references
- Blackington, C. (2024). Generational mobilisation and the defence of liberal democracy in Poland. East European Politics and Societies, special issue.
- Blackington, C., Dimitrova, A., Ionita, S., & Vachudova, M. A. (2024). Civic duty and democratic defence: protesters across four CEE countries. East European Politics and Societies, special issue.
- Coffé, H., & van der Lippe, T. (2010). Citizenship norms in Eastern Europe. Social Indicators Research, 96(3), 479–496.
- Schnaudt, C., van Deth, J. W., Zorell, C., & Theocharis, Y. (2021). Revisiting norms of citizenship in times of democratic change. Politics, 41(4).
- Schwartz, S. H., & Bardi, A. (1997). Influences of adaptation to communist rule on value priorities in Eastern Europe. Political Psychology, 18(2), 385–410.
- Sztompka, P. (1996). Looking back: the year 1989 as a cultural and civilizational break. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 29(2), 115–129.
- Vachudova, M. A., Dolenec, D., & Fagan, A. (eds.) (2024). Civic Mobilization against Democratic Backsliding in Post-Communist Europe. Special issue of East European Politics and Societies.
Social influence and conformity
Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments of the early 1950s remain among the most widely cited demonstrations of the power of social influence over individual judgement. When confederates unanimously gave obviously wrong answers about the length of lines, a substantial minority of real participants went along with the majority view at least some of the time, even when the correct answer was plainly visible. The key mechanism was not that participants’ perceptions had actually changed, but that they adjusted what they were willing to say in public in order to avoid being seen as deviant.
The implications for civic behaviour in post-communist societies are direct. If people align their expressed behaviour with what they perceive the group expects, then the internalised norms of non-participation cultivated by decades of communism can persist long after the formal institutions that enforced them have disappeared. Under authoritarian rule, the salient norm was against autonomous civic action, and years of exposure leave citizens reading “expected” behaviour as passivity. The legacy of authoritarian systems thus operates not only through direct repression, but through the internalisation of conformity norms that make autonomous civic action appear deviant, risky, or simply pointless. The dual-expectation structure of norms is what makes this legacy so durable: citizens do not need to believe in the value of passivity, they only need to believe that others follow it and that others expect them to follow it.