Overview of today’s lecture

• What social norms are, and how they differ from attitudes and beliefs
• Social-psychological mechanisms linking authoritarian legacies to civic life
• Three generations of research on “good citizenship” in CEE:
  • Coffé & van der Lippe (2010): the dutiful/engaged baseline
  • Schnaudt et al. (2021): the framework expanded (sustainability, populist-authoritarian norms)
  • Vachudova et al. (2024): citizenship in action — protest against democratic backsliding
• Why the post-communist region is not a monolithic bloc — and why the 2002 picture no longer describes today’s CEE

What is a social norm?

• The word ‘norm’ has three distinct meanings:
  • A statistical regularity (“most people go for a walk on the weekend”)
  • A shared sense of what is appropriate (“take your shoes off indoors”)
  • A rule with obligatory force regardless of expectations (“you shall not kill”)
• Social norms have three components:
  • a collective evaluation of how behaviour ought to be
  • a collective expectation of how it will be
  • sanctions against deviation
• Norms differ from attitudes (what we find desirable) and beliefs (what we think is true): norms govern what we think is appropriate, regardless of attitudes or beliefs.

When does a norm hold?

• A social norm is followed when people believe
  • that sufficiently many others follow it (empirical expectations), and
  • that sufficiently many others think it should be followed and may sanction deviation (normative expectations).
• Four levels of compliance with a behavioural regularity:
  • Not social — personal attitude or moral conviction
  • Weakly social — following a rule because others do
  • Strongly social — the social norm proper (both expectations above)
  • Institutional — legal norm, backed by state coercion

Social influence & conformity

• Asch’s classic experiments: individuals align their behaviour with what they perceive others expect, even against their own judgement.
• People follow a rule when they believe others follow it (empirical expectations) and believe others think they should follow it (normative expectations).
• Under authoritarian rule, the salient norm was against autonomous civic action. Years of exposure leave citizens reading the “expected” behaviour as passivity.

Social identity: public vs. private spheres

• People derive identity from group membership, and distinguish sharply between in-groups and out-groups.
• Under communism, the state and its mandatory organisations were the quintessential out-group; family and close friends were the trusted in-group.
• This produced an enduring split: strong orientation toward private networks, persistent wariness of public institutions and formal civic engagement.

System justification & its limits

• People tend to legitimise the system they live under, even when disadvantageous, to satisfy a psychological need for stability and predictability.
• Applied to post-communism, this predicts that citizenship norms carry forward adaptations to the prior regime — duty to the state, obedience to law — rather than engaged participation.
• But the strength of this effect should vary with how the prior regime was experienced: harder communism, stronger carryover; more resistance, weaker carryover (Schwartz & Bardi 1997).

From theory to CEE cases

• These mechanisms lead to concrete, testable expectations for citizenship norms in CEE:
  • Conformity: citizens in harder-communist systems should show lower engaged citizenship (norm was passivity).
  • Public/private split: expect higher duty-based norms (voting, law-abiding) than engaged norms (activism, voluntary association).
  • System justification: expect cross-country variation tracking the type of communism experienced, not a uniform “Eastern” pattern.

Three generations of research

• We will trace these expectations through three successive waves of work:
  • 2010 — Coffé & van der Lippe test them on ESS 2002 data from four CEE countries. Establishes the dutiful vs. engaged distinction as the dominant framework.
  • 2021 — Schnaudt, van Deth, Zorell & Theocharis argue the framework has been overtaken by events. They propose two new facets: sustainability and populist-authoritarian norms of citizenship.
  • 2024 — the East European Politics and Societies special issue moves beyond surveys: studies 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)

• An investigation of civil society in four CEE countries from the perspective of the citizen.
• Weakness of civil society and lack of political and social involvement of CEE citizens can partly be explained by the legacies of communism and the fragility of transition-era institutions.
• But how much weight should we attach to social norms?
• “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 an interest in organisational membership (political parties, civic society organisations) and political and electoral participation.
• Little research was conducted on the issue of citizens’ own understandings of what “being a good citizen” means.
• Coffé and van der Lippe (2010) investigate definitions of good citizenship held by citizens in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.

East/West differences

• In Western Europe, citizens prioritise critical and deliberative principles, followed by law-abidingness and solidarity.
• In Eastern Europe, law-abidingness ranks first, critical/deliberative values second.
• Why? The communist experience:
  • Party membership was the only available political identification.
  • Regimes repressed autonomous non-state activity and forced citizens into mandatory, state-controlled organisations — inoculating them against voluntary civic engagement.

Four communisms, four legacies

• Schwartz & Bardi (1997): the impact of communism on values and norms is weaker where resistance and opposition were stronger. So we expect variation across CEE.
• Czech Republic — “hard-line” communism after 1968; high domestic legitimacy of the one-party state; ideological conformity.
• Poland — significant economic reform in the 1980s; pluralist and participatory legacy of Solidarity; the Church as a protected space for dissent.
• Hungary — “Goulash communism”: opposition arose from within the communist elite; greater private freedoms under continued state control.
• Slovenia — “soft transition” from a favourable economic position; weakest continuity with communist administrative structures; often groups with Western democracies, not Eastern ones (Denters et al. 2007).

Measuring “good citizenship”

• Coffé & van der Lippe use ESS 2002 data. Respondents rated how important (0–10) each of the following is for being a good citizen:
  • vote in elections; obey laws and regulations
  • be active in voluntary associations; be active in politics; form an independent opinion; support others who are worse off
• Principal components analysis yields two dimensions:
  • Citizen duty — voting, obeying laws (vertical, loyalty to state)
  • Engaged citizenship — activism, solidarity, autonomy (horizontal, participatory)
• Individual-level predictors tested: religiosity, church attendance, education, gender, age (year of birth), marital status, occupational status, institutional trust, social trust.

Cross-national differences in citizenship norms

• Hungary: duty high, engagement low. Slovenia: the inverse.
• Czech Republic: lowest on both. Poland: high on both.

What predicts citizenship norms?

Reading the predictor map

• Institutional trust is the only predictor positive for both norm 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. Horizontal trust is not a universal democratic good.
• Year of birth is negative almost everywhere: younger cohorts hold weaker norms of citizenship. The generational replacement thesis (Sztompka 1996) is not supported.
• Church attendance matters in Hungary, Slovenia, and Czech Republic — but not Poland, where the communist regime could not penetrate the Church.
• Education, gender, marital status, paid work are country-specific catalysts, not universal ones.
• Takeaway: the same individual-level variable does different work in different post-communist contexts — further evidence against treating CEE as a bloc.

What Coffé & van der Lippe conclude

• Eastern European citizens show lower civic/political engagement than Western Europeans — attributable to the communist legacy. But CEE is not monolithic:
  • Czech Republic — lowest on both dimensions.
  • Hungary — strongly duty-based, weakly engaged (traditional view).
  • Slovenia — strongly engaged, weakly duty-based (modern view).
  • Poland — high on both.
• Institutional trust is the one universal positive predictor.
• Social trust flips sign (positive in CZ/HU, negative in PL/SI). The same variable does different work in different post-communist contexts.

Why the dutiful/engaged dichotomy was due for revision

• Schnaudt, van Deth, Zorell & Theocharis (Politics, 2021): the dutiful/engaged distinction is now incomplete. Two developments have outpaced the framework:
  • Growing demand for sustainable lifestyles (Fridays for Future, ecological citizenship). Being a “good citizen” increasingly means acting as a responsible consumer for future generations.
  • Rising public support for populist-authoritarian ideas — loyalty to “the people”, distrust of experts and mainstream media, defence of tradition against elites.
• Both point to new facets of what it means to be a good citizen — facets that standard survey instruments (ESS, ISSP) do not capture.

Four facets of citizenship

• To these four, Schnaudt et al. add:
  • Sustainability — ecological and cultural conservation as civic duty.
  • Populist-authoritarian — loyalty to “ordinary people”, rejection of “technocratic” rule, group conformity, reliance on feelings over expertise.
• Tested on original 2019 German data: both new facets are empirically distinct from the conventional four.

Why this matters for CEE

• In Hungary (Fidesz since 2010) and Poland (PiS 2015–2023), the governing parties actively promoted populist-authoritarian citizenship norms:
  • The “good citizen” as defender of the nation against Brussels, liberal elites, LGBTQ+ activists, and migrants.
  • State-funded media, museums, and school curricula used to entrench these norms.
• The Coffé & van der Lippe instrument, built from six ESS items, cannot register this shift — it only measures dutiful and engaged citizenship.
• Methodological implication: the cross-national ranking from 2002 may still be valid for what it measures, but it no longer captures the full terrain of citizenship in CEE.

From what citizens think to what they do

• Vachudova, Dolenec & Fagan (2024), Civic Mobilization against Democratic Backsliding in Post-Communist Europe (EEPS special issue).
• Argument: studying citizenship norms via surveys misses where the action now is. CEE has seen the largest protests since 1989 in the last decade — in defence of liberal democracy.
• The issue theorises two distinct triggers for mobilisation:
  • 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 (Bulgaria, Romania).
• The type of democratic erosion shapes how citizens mobilise and what they demand.

What motivates CEE protesters? (Blackington et al. 2024)

• Original survey of ~300 protesters in Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania (2021–2022).
• 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 democratic institutions is the top reason for protesting in all four cases.
• But the type of erosion shapes the solution protesters seek:
  • Backsliding countries (PL, CZ): remove the government, reverse recent policies. ~65% of Polish protesters name “remove government” as the main solution.
  • Stagnation countries (BG, RO): reform institutions that have malfunctioned since
    1989. ~60% of Romanian protesters select the long-run reform option.

A generation gap: Blackington (2024)

• 82 interviews with Polish pro-democracy protesters in 9 cities (2019–2022) + original protester survey.
• All 71 interviewees over 55 cited lived experience of communism as central to their decision to protest.
• ESS data: before 2015, older and younger Poles protested at similar (low) rates. After 2015, older-cohort protest participation roughly quadrupled.
• Mechanism: political socialisation under authoritarianism produces a “reservoir” of citizens who recognise democratic fragility and mobilise to defend it.
• This directly contradicts Sztompka’s (1996) generational-replacement thesis that civic engagement would rise as post-communist cohorts replaced older ones. In Poland, it is the old who carry engaged citizenship, not the young.

Engaged citizenship, reimagined

• The Coffé & van der Lippe survey items measure engaged citizenship via voluntary association membership, political activism, solidarity, and autonomy of opinion.
• The 2024 findings suggest this under-reports engagement in CEE, because:
  • Protest participation is episodic — a survey question about last-year membership misses someone who attended ten KOD protests in 2017.
  • Engagement is reactive — it spikes in response to backsliding, so a single cross-section (like ESS 2002) catches it only by chance.
  • Engagement is defensive — protecting what exists, not joining something new. This maps awkwardly onto survey items about voluntary associations.
• Implication: the Coffé & van der Lippe ranking may have been a snapshot of a pre-crisis equilibrium. The crisis changed what engaged citizenship looks like.

The limits of protest

• Protesters across all four countries also share pessimism about short-term impact:
  • Most don’t believe their protests change government policy in the short run.
  • The most commonly cited actual impact is raising public awareness and modelling civic engagement for younger generations.
• The EU 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.
• Sobering finding: protest has been consequential where it articulates with electoral politics (Czech Republic 2021, Poland 2023, Slovakia 2020), but unable to shift outcomes in Hungary or Serbia, where the playing field is too skewed.

Where the field stands now

• The dutiful/engaged framework remains useful but is no longer sufficient.
  • It misses sustainability and populist-authoritarian norms (Schnaudt et al.).
  • It understates defensive, episodic engagement in times of democratic crisis (Vachudova et al.).
• The cross-country ranking from Coffé & van der Lippe (CZ lowest, HU dutiful, SI engaged, PL both) captures a 2002 equilibrium that the 2010s illiberal turn has disrupted.
• What has held up:
  • CEE is not a monolithic bloc — variation is driven by how communism was experienced and by how post-2010 politics has played out.
  • Institutional trust remains central to whatever form engaged citizenship takes.
  • The generational story has flipped: older cohorts are the engaged ones, not (as Sztompka predicted) the young.

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 collapse back to the 2002 baseline?
• Does the EU still have a role as a supporter of democratic norms in CEE, or has that moment passed?