The Social Psychology of Democracies in Transition: 1989–2019

Anti-social behaviour: anomie and aggression

Ben Stanley

Department of Social Sciences, SWPS University

April 23, 2026

Today’s topics

Overview of today’s lecture

  • The anti-social legacies of transition (Sztompka’s “cultural trauma” framework)
  • Anomie — what it is, how it arises, and a Bulgarian case study
  • Aggression — psychological foundations, situational triggers, crime in CEE
  • Contemporary research: nostalgic deprivation, precarity, inequality, polarisation

The anti-social legacies of transition

Cultural trauma and the demands of transition

  • By 1990, the institutions of free, democratic, market society were largely in place — parliaments, constitutional courts, private firms, stock exchanges, pluralistic media.
  • But citizens had been trained for the opposite. The new institutions demanded one set of skills and values; citizens had been socialised in the opposite direction:
    • collectivism → individualism; cooperation → competition
    • egalitarianism → meritocracy; job security → risk-taking
    • leaning on the state → self-reliance
    • political passivity → participation; idealising the past → orientation to the future
  • Sztompka (2000) calls the resulting shock cultural trauma: a society’s internalised culture loses effectiveness, and the new one appears alien, imposed, coercive.

Objective and subjective trauma

  • Objective trauma — the hard costs of transition, unequally distributed:
    • unemployment, inflation, crime waves, organised crime
    • deterioration of living standards for sizeable groups
    • devaluation of savings; withdrawal of welfare; overturning of prestige hierarchies
  • Subjective trauma — how these costs were experienced:
    • a gap between elevated revolutionary hopes and everyday reality
    • the demonstration effect of Western prosperity
    • a sense of betrayal among those “on whose backs the revolutions were built”
  • The key insight: the same objective shock produces very different subjective traumas depending on expectations and comparison groups.

The trauma of political elites

  • New political elites often display incompetence, cronyism, nepotism, corruption.
  • Political scandals encourage the belief that all politics is corrupt — that politicians serve only their own interests, that no one can be trusted.
  • This revives an us-versus-them dichotomy: “common people” versus “rulers”.
  • Consequences:
    • Deepening alienation from politics and civic life.
    • Open manifestation of grievances and anger — sometimes spilling into violence.

The trauma of backlash

  • Rebellion against prior traumas produces its own secondary trauma:
    • Populists promise radical solutions. When the promises fail, mistrust and anger compound.
    • Radical promises reframe specific problems as systemic failure — closing off incremental solutions.
    • Distrust in public institutions becomes more acute, not less.
    • Large-scale migration (economic and political) reshapes both sending and receiving societies.
    • Public life polarises: political opponents become enemies, not rivals.

Anomie

What is anomie?

  • Anomie — normlessness, or a lack of shared social norms (Durkheim, later Merton).
  • Experienced as aimlessness, dread, despair: lives that lack meaning and structure, without clear guidelines for action.
  • Anomie arises in periods of rapid structural change, when the processes that reinforce social integration weaken.
  • The collapse of the communist welfare state generated risks for many groups, but these concentrated among the young: access to education, work, leisure, and politics all reshaped at once.

Anomie in transition: who, how, and with what consequences

  • Socio-economic gradient: economic divergence between groups produces discomfort, depression, loss of direction. Anomie concentrates among lower socio-economic groups and correlates with hostility and anxiety.
  • Gender: women in early CEE studies report greater anomie (meaninglessness, loneliness, powerlessness); men are more likely to act against social norms (aggression, rule-breaking).
  • Political consequences: widespread apolitical, fatalistic mentality in sections of the CEE public. Disillusionment + nostalgia → reduced willingness to engage in civic and political life.
  • A key transmission belt: anomie does not just produce withdrawal — it produces the conditions for populist appeals to land.

Anomie — Study of Bulgarian youth by Ådnanes

  • 560 students in Bulgarian universities.
  • Biased towards the middle and higher income groups in the country, and away from Roma and Turkish minorities.
  • Asked questions about: anomie / hopelessness / attitudes towards socio-political reform / attitudes towards future goals

Anomie — Measurement items

Item Mean agreement
With everything so uncertain these days, it almost seems as though anything could happen. 0.94
The trouble with the world today is that most people really don’t believe in anything. 0.84
I often feel that many things our parents stood for are just going to ruin before our very eyes. 0.70
With everything in such a state of disorder, it’s hard to know where one stands from day to day. 0.54
People were better off in the old days when everyone knew how they were expected to act. 0.21
  • Note the pattern: high endorsement of normlessness and disorder items, low endorsement of the nostalgic “old days were better” item. Anomie is not the same as nostalgia.

Anomie — Study of Bulgarian youth: results

  • Much higher levels of anomie among Bulgarian students than their Swedish counterparts, but less than in Albania.
  • Significant differences between female and male Bulgarian students, with females experiencing much greater anomie than men.
  • Feelings of normlessness were more common than feelings of psychological anomie or nostalgia for the past.

Anomie — Study of Bulgarian youth: factors

  • Factors explaining psychological anomie: gender (female) / low parental income / disappointment with the reform process
  • Nostalgia: disappointment with the reform process / negativity toward opening up to the West / wanting to hold on to traditions
  • Normlessness: wanting to hold on to traditions / negatively associated with career aspirations

Aggression

Aggression: definitions and foundations

  • Aggression = behaviour carried out with the intention of harming another person.
    • Instrumental (means to an end) vs. affective/hostile (expression of anger).
  • Humans are born with the capacity for aggression; whether it is expressed depends on person-level and situational factors.
  • Four sources of variation:
    • Biology — hormonal effects are conditional (testosterone produces aggression only when there is real potential to dominate or mate).
    • Culture — huge cross-cultural variation. Cultures of honour train men to respond aggressively to perceived disrespect.
    • Gender — men commit most physical aggression; women more often engage in relational aggression (rumours, shunning).
    • Learning — aggression is acquired by observation and imitation (Bandura), especially when respected models are seen to gain from it.

When does aggression escalate?

  • Frustration–aggression (Dollard et al.; Berkowitz): goal-blockage increases the probability of aggression, especially when illegitimate or unexpected.
    • Relative deprivation — having less than you feel you deserve — produces more frustration than absolute poverty.
  • Provocation and reciprocation: aggression begets aggression, unless the recipient sees the act as unintentional or mitigated.
  • Disinhibitors: alcohol, pain, heat.
  • Why this matters for CEE: the transition produced exactly these conditions — goal-blockage, unexpected loss, and a vivid comparison standard (Western prosperity, former-insider wealth).

Aggression — Crime in CEE

  • Crime in CEE countries is one of the effects of great political and economic changes accompanied by changes of social structure, greater crime opportunities and the weakening of social control.
  • Increase in theft at the beginning of the transformation period was a reaction to greater exposure, supply, and thus greater criminal opportunity.
  • The reaction to this sudden crime intensification was private action to secure oneself against thefts and burglary, with a ‘securitisation’ of social life.
  • Diversification of society and an increase of poverty resulted in the intensification of crimes with the use of force, robberies and assaults.

Three theories with traction

Relative deprivation

  • Post-communist transition is close to the archetypal case for relative-deprivation theory. Three reference points all shifted at once:
    • Temporal: comparison with pre-1989 expectations of what the transition would bring
    • Spatial: comparison with Western living standards (now visible, not abstract)
    • Intra-society: comparison with former insiders who became wealthy
  • Predictions borne out in CEE:
    • Polish workers who backed Solidarity and then saw factories close: betrayal narrative
    • Romanian workers watching former communist officials become businessmen: 2013–14 anti-corruption mobilisation
    • East German “Mauer im Kopf” (wall in the head): persistent subjective deprivation relative to West Germany, decades after reunification
  • Today: still the most empirically supported account of why transition costs produced political anger, not just hardship.

System justification and nostalgia

  • System justification (Jost): people defend the system they live under, even when it disadvantages them, to satisfy a need for predictability.
  • Post-communism inverts the usual case: the old system is gone, but many still defend it retrospectively.
  • Mechanisms:
    • Nostalgia ≠ memory of the past. It is a present-tense judgement dressed as memory — “things were better then” often encodes “things are bad now”.
    • Nostalgia rises with institutional dissatisfaction and social alienation (recent cross-national finding).
  • Cases: East German Ostalgie; Bulgarian 2023 survey (32.6% prefer the pre-1989 period); the rhetorical resources Fidesz and PiS draw on when they invoke a betrayed “authentic” pre-transition nation.

Social capital and institutional trust

  • Putnam’s framework: social networks and interpersonal/institutional trust facilitate cooperation, reduce crime, sustain democracy.
  • In CEE, transition eroded the formal institutions of social capital (parties, associations) faster than it built new ones. What filled the gap was often informal, particularistic, or criminal:
    • Hungarian kaláka (reciprocal favour networks) substituting for failing institutions
    • Bulgarian organised crime filling the void left by a weakened state
    • Czech privatisation scandals eroding trust in economic reforms
  • Today’s CEE institutional trust levels remain below EU averages in most cases. This is not a residual effect of communism — it is being actively reproduced by current political conflict.

From private distress to public aggression

The causal chain we’ll trace

  • Sztompka (2000) warned that the “trauma of backlash” could spill over into violence. The contemporary evidence lets us trace the mechanism step by step:
    • Precarity — subjective insecurity in finances, work, autonomy
    • → Anomie — normlessness, loss of direction, moral disorientation
    • → Nostalgic deprivation — the sense that “people like me” have lost status
    • → Populist mobilisation — political channel that gives the grievance a target and a narrative
    • → Polarisation and dehumanisation — political opponents become enemies
    • → Anti-social behaviour — political violence, hate crime, online aggression
  • The earlier parts of this chain have been measured by surveys; the later parts are showing up in police statistics, not ballot boxes.
  • The research we’ll now look at documents each step.

Nostalgic deprivation: three dimensions

  • Ferwerda, Gest & Reny (2025, EJPR): original IPSOS surveys, N = 19,296 across 19 European countries, fielded August 2020.
  • Nostalgic deprivation = the gap between one’s current status and perceived past status (“people like me”), measured on paired 0–10 sliders (now vs. 25 years ago).
  • Three distinct dimensions (correlated at r ≈ 0.3–0.45 — related but not interchangeable):
    • Economic: “how financially well off are people like you compared to others”
    • Social: “how central and important you are to your society”
    • Power: “how much power do people like you have”
  • Key theoretical move: nostalgic deprivation is sociotropic — it is nearly orthogonal to objective socio-demographic characteristics. People feel deprived regardless of their actual income or education.

Who feels deprived? Where?

  • Highest deprivation: Slovenia, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary — three of these had populists in government when the survey was fielded.
  • Notable: Poland displays relatively low deprivation despite a populist government — the authors flag this as an anomaly requiring explanation.

Does nostalgic deprivation predict populism?

  • Attitudes: strong effect in both regions, but roughly twice as large in the West (0.55 vs 0.29 on the composite measure).
  • Voting: the East/West gap is even sharper — 57 pp vs 17 pp.
  • Why so much weaker in the East? Ferwerda et al.’s explanation: populist incumbency. When populists govern, they lose the ability to channel deprivation narratives — and their supporters are less motivated by deprivation to begin with.

Precarity, not tenure: Zhirnov, Antonucci et al. (2024, ESR)

  • 10 countries (including Hungary, Poland, Romania), N > 60,000.
  • Decomposes precarity into three distinct dimensions:
    • Financial precarity — can’t cover unexpected expenses; can’t afford dental care
    • Precarity of tenure — fear of losing one’s job
    • Precarity at work — low autonomy, poor work–life balance, inadequate pay
  • Counterintuitive finding: the dimension most studied in prior voting research — precarity of tenure — has the weakest effect on populist voting. Its main effect is negligible once other precarity dimensions are controlled.
  • Financial precarity and precarity at work are the drivers.
  • Reframing: populist support is not really about “will I lose my job” — it is about “can I live with dignity on what I earn” and “do I have control over how I work”. A much broader, more diffuse form of insecurity than the precariat thesis suggested.

The incumbency paradox in CEE

  • Both papers converge on a striking finding for CEE: where populists are in government (Poland, Hungary), precarity and deprivation predict populist support negatively or not at all.
  • Ferwerda et al.: in 10 of 19 countries, the populist party was the incumbent. In most of those, deprivation predicted populist voting weakly or not at all.
  • Zhirnov et al.: in Poland and Hungary, financial and work precarity reduce the probability of voting for the incumbent populist right (PiS, Fidesz).
  • What this means:
    • Populist parties campaign on deprivation but cannot sustain that appeal once they govern.
    • Opposition to populist governments in CEE now draws disproportionately from the economically insecure — who have lost faith in populist promises.
    • The “symbolic link” between insecurity and populist attitudes remains strong everywhere. The “instrumental link” (attitudes → voting) is context-dependent.

The hinge: from anomie to polarisation

  • The mechanism that converts private distress into public aggression: inequality → anomie → polarisation (44-country study, Communications Psychology, 2024). Anomie statistically mediates the link between inequality and perceived polarisation.
  • What does polarisation do? It reshapes how people see political opponents:
    • From rivals (we disagree) → to enemies (they threaten us) → to less than human (they don’t deserve the normal moral protections).
  • This is the crucial step for our purposes. Populism mobilises deprivation electorally — but polarisation transforms it into something behavioural.
  • Once opponents are dehumanised, the threshold for acceptance of aggression against them drops sharply. This is what Sztompka predicted when he wrote that the trauma of backlash “may spill over into acts of violence”.

From attitudes to behaviour: rising political violence

  • Attitudinal data are now being matched by behavioural data across CEE and Western Europe:
    • Slovakia, May 2024 — assassination attempt on PM Robert Fico. First attempt on the life of a European head of government since 2003.
    • Slovakia, 2018 — murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, investigating political corruption. Triggered the largest protests since 1989.
    • Germany — physical or verbal attacks on elected representatives nearly doubled 2018–2023 (police figures: 2,790 incidents in 2023).
    • France — 32% increase in reported violence against politicians 2021→2022; another rise through 2023.
    • Poland — attacks on Pride marches (Białystok 2019, others); violence against LGBTQ+ activists rose in the PiS years.
    • Hungary — sustained anti-Roma violence; attacks on migrants and refugee-adjacent venues after the 2015 migration crisis.
  • The targets align with the dehumanising rhetoric of populist-authoritarian discourse: journalists, judges, LGBTQ+ people, Roma, migrants.
  • Aggression is no longer just a private pathology. It is being organised by political cleavage. This is the form the trauma of backlash has taken.

Anomie’s new channels: online aggression

  • Classical aggression research focused on face-to-face violence. Today, much anti-social behaviour is digitally mediated.
  • Mechanisms from this lecture that transfer directly online:
    • Disinhibition (like alcohol, anonymity reduces inhibitions against aggression)
    • Frustration–aggression (deprivation → lashing out, lower cost online)
    • Dehumanisation (text-only communication strips out cues that elicit empathy)
    • Social learning (aggressive behaviour is observed, imitated, rewarded with engagement)
  • CEE evidence:
    • Hungary, Poland, Slovakia among the highest rates of online political harassment reported by women and LGBTQ+ people in the EU (FRA data).
    • Online hate speech correlates at the regional level with offline hate crime.
  • The through-line: the same anomic distress that shows up in surveys as “nostalgic deprivation” shows up online as harassment, pile-ons, dehumanising memes — often directed at the very out-groups that populist discourse targets.

Conclusions

The full arc

  • We started with Sztompka’s prediction that the trauma of backlash would produce alienation, mistrust, and spill over into violence. Twenty-five years later, each link in that chain is empirically documented:
    • Precarity (Zhirnov/Antonucci et al. 2024) → subjective insecurity at work and in finances
    • → Anomie (Ådnanes 2007; ongoing) → private distress, loss of direction
    • → Nostalgic deprivation (Ferwerda et al. 2025) → the sense that “we” have lost status
    • → Populist mobilisation → political channel that names enemies
    • → Polarisation and dehumanisation (Communications Psychology 2024) → rivals become threats
    • → Political violence, hate crime, online aggression → the anti-social behaviours the lecture is about
  • The signature of our moment is that anti-social behaviour is becoming organised by political cleavage, rather than being randomly distributed. Aggression now has identifiable targets — journalists, judges, LGBTQ+ people, Roma, politicians — and they are the targets populist discourse names.

What this means for the course

  • The lecture is not ultimately about populism. It is about the psychological mechanisms that convert structural shock into anti-social behaviour — and about how that conversion has become politically channelled over the last decade.
  • CEE was the test case for this process: the post-1989 transition compressed decades of Western-European structural change into a single decade, producing a uniquely clear natural experiment.
  • The anti-social behaviours Sztompka could only describe qualitatively in 2000 — spikes in crime, scapegoating, anger — are now measurable at scale.

Questions for discussion

  • The mechanism connecting private distress to public aggression runs through polarisation. Can you have polarisation without aggression, or are they inseparable?
  • Online aggression transfers offline mechanisms (disinhibition, dehumanisation) into a setting where costs are lower and reach is wider. Should we expect online aggression to substitute for offline violence, or to normalise it?
  • If nostalgic deprivation is only weakly tied to objective conditions, then material policy responses may not defuse it. What would a psychological or cultural response to nostalgic deprivation even look like — and who could credibly deliver it?