Raluca Toma2; Marina Popescu2; Gabor Toka1; 1 Central European University, Austria; 2 Median Research Centre, Romania
Discussion
It is a recurrent finding in at least some of the postcommunist countries that survey responses to a whole range of questions about policy-relevant socio-political attitudes are poorly correlated with vote choice given what one may expect on the basis of cross-national surveys and the degree of ideological polarization found in these countries with expert survey data on party positions. This, at least, seems to be the case when the survey items in questions go beyond capturing responses to emotionally loaded but substantively ill-defined terms like “left-right” or “liberal-conservative”, and detect genuine attitudes towards actual policy alternatives. We advance possible historical, institutional and methodological explanations for such a difference and confront them with comparative evidence. We carry out systematic comparisons between older established Western and newer East European democracies with the available cross-national survey data sets, and – to address the possibilities that the finding is due to the reliance of cross-national surveys on items that do much better in capturing divisive policy dimensions in established than new democracies or to a gradual democratic learning occurring in the latter – a particularly extensive collection of single-country survey data from Romania covering 30 years. Our findings emphasize the possibility of enduring causes for such differences in the state of democratic political development in most new democracies.
