Communist Legacies and Left-Authoritarianism
Abstract
Communist regimes were avowedly leftist authoritarian regimes, a relative rarity among autocracies. The growing literature on regime legacies would lead us to expect that postcommunist citizens would be more likely to exhibit “left-authoritarian” attitudes than their counterparts elsewhere. Finding that this is the case, we rely on 157 surveys from 88 countries to test if a living through Communism legacy model can account for this surplus of left-authoritarian attitudes. Employing both aggregate and micro-level analyses, we find strong support for the predictions of this model. Moving beyond previous legacy studies, we then test a variety of hypothesized mechanisms to explain how exposure to communist rule could have led to the regime congruent left-authoritarian attitudes. Of the mechanisms tested, greater state penetration of society is associated with a strong socialization effect and religious attendance—and in particular attending Catholic religious services—is associated with weaker socialization effects.
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Biographies
Grigore Pop-Eleches is a professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and works on political attitudes in authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes. His most recent book (joint with Joshua Tucker), Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes, was published by Princeton University Press in 2017. His research has also appeared in journals such as The Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and Quarterly Journal of Political Science.
Joshua A. Tucker is a professor of Politics, affiliated professor of Russian and Slavic Studies, and affiliated professor of Data Science at New York University. He is the director of NYU’s Jordan Center for Advanced Study of Russia, a co-director of the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics and the SMaPP laboratory, and a co-author/editor of the award-winning politics and policy blog The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post. His research has appeared in over two-dozen scholarly journals, and his most recent book (joint with Grigore Pop-Eleches) is the co-authored Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes (Princeton University Press, 2017).
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