Authors

George Hajipavli¹;  ¹ University of Oxford, UK

Discussion

Following communism’s collapse in Europe, a paradoxical phenomenon appeared in the form of certain communist successor parties (CSPs) adopting a national communist stance. Curiously, the effect appears to be limited to predominantly Orthodox Christian states, with Catholic, Protestant, and secular post-communist states opting for an internationalist approach – be it that of social democracy or traditional Marxism-Leninism. These national communist parties glorify the imperial or national past, pay tribute to the Orthodox Christian church and faith, reject cosmopolitanism, and laud communism or socialism. The contradiction arises from the incompatibility between nationalism and religiosity, and communism: V. I. Lenin, echoing Karl Marx, considered religion as the ‘opium of the people’, while Marx labelled nationalism a ‘pathology of modernity’. To unpack this puzzle, this study begins by invoking the role of religion, which surprisingly remains unconsidered in literature on the 'red-brown phenomenon'. Then, the study shows how extant approaches based on rational choice assumptions and institutionalist explanations fail to satisfactorily explain the variation exhibited, let alone offer a mechanism to account for the effect. This paves the way for a ‘political culture’ approach to be considered, taking into account recent advancements in behaviouralism, psychology, and the study of political culture. Thus, political culture becomes understood as an individually held ‘social ontology’, operationalised through the basic concept of ‘values’, which becomes meaningful and reproduced on a group-level, and is capable of structuring elite-level behaviour. The first part of the presentation utilises country- and individual-level quantitative data to demonstrate that a political culture explanation is likely to carry merit, as opposed to competing approaches. The data is drawn from a variety of sources to include WVS and EVS data, and original survey data. Then, original qualitative insight from Russia is offered to further explicate the role of a structural condition of Orthodox Christian ‘political culture’, which influences the incentives and disincentives made available to party elites. Consequently, this study allows us to reconsider the drivers of mass and elite behaviour in the post-communist region and the role of institutions, while revealing additional constraints to decisive regime and societal change. It further offers useful modifications to the 'revised modernisation approach', introduced by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, in explaining party-level outcomes, and explicating the 'cultural axiom', which is introduced but remains underdeveloped in their framework. It further enables us to revisit the rich debate on communist and authoritarian successor party competitiveness and adaptation, more than thirty years after communism's collapse.