The Direction and Meaning of Left-Right in Postcommunist Societies
The Direction and Meaning of Left-Right in Postcommunist Societies (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edaf024) was written by Ruth Dassonneville and Ian McAllister in 2025. It was published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research (vol. 37, no. 3).
In this paper, 'established democracies' are distinguished from former Soviet states as having a stable democratic state going back to the 1950s.
For some hypotheses, the authors calculate country-year aggregate statistics. The authors collect panel data from 4 different sources: WVS waves 1-7, CSES modules 1-5, ESS rounds 1-10, and the EES of 2004-2019. Altogether, these encompass 1994-2022 and 43 countries. Examples of aggregate statistics are mean self-reported left-right position, and proportion of 'don't know' responses.
- In some cases, they pool these across sources. In others, they model each source separately.
- They also re-aggregate these to 5 year increments (e.g. 1995-1999, 2000-2004, and so on) to imply change over time.
The authors find that postcommunist states have higher proportions of 'don't know' responses to left-right position survey questions. They do not find a significant trend over time, suggesting the gap is persistent. These are robust to exluding refusals from the 'don't know' classification.
For other hypotheses, they use a cumulative file from the ESS covering 2002-2022. This also covers fewer countries. Examples of panel metrics are Likert scales asking about agreement with policies to reduce income inequality.
The authors find that demographics such as socioeconomic status are highly predictive of agreement with policies to reduce income inequality in established democracies, but are not statistically significant predictors in postcommunist states. They do not find a significant trend over time, suggesting the gap is persistent.
Similarly, self-reported left-right position is highly predictive of agreement with policies to reduce income inequality in established democracies. The variance of the same predictor in postcommunist states is much larger, such that it is not a statistically significant predictor in about half the the panels. There is not a clear linear trend over time.
These same analyses are repeated for support for immigration and gay rights. There is substantial variation among postcommunist states here, e.g. Slovenian respondents are very similar to established democracies; Hungarian and Polish respondents increasingly feature correlation between self-reported left-right position and support for gay rights, and so on.
The authors also reformulate this analysis in terms of absolute differences between individual positions and the position of the party which they self-report identifying with. The authors note that postcommunist states have a higher mean absolute difference. There is not a significant difference between the two classes however.
Altogether, the authors are suggesting that left-right classifications of politics are not transferrable to postcommunist states. Plausible reasons include:
- recent experience of policy reversal; the leftist communist states often pushed austerity whereas the rightist postcommunist parties advocated for high investment and high spending
- instability of party systems, as demonstrated by recurring success of new parties rather than estblablished parties
- cult of personality politics rather than ideologically-informed politics
These doubts about left-right classifications can be easily imagined to affect other world regions.
Reading notes
More than anything, I think this research goes towards quantifying the lasting societal impacts of communism.