Determinants of Support for Democracy in East Central Europe: A SEM Approach

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

Paper presentation by Bilyana Petrova in the framework of the Political Behaviour Colloquium.

Survey research on Central and Eastern Europe has revealed that citizens of the post-communist world display highly skeptical attitudes toward democracy. Despite a substantial body of literature that has attempted to understand the origins and determinants of these attitudes, no consensus has emerged. A major challenge has been to distinguish between individual support for democracy as an ideal political regime and satisfaction with the way democracy is practiced in one’s country. While some scholars have attempted to disentangle these concepts by operationalizing them with single indicators or aggregate indices, we argue that such approaches do not capture their highly abstract and subjective nature.

Using a novel approach that incorporates structural equation modeling (SEM) with latent variables, we attempt to improve measurement validity and to better understand the relationships between perceptions of governance, the economy, and support for democracy.

We find evidence to support our argument that positive assessments of political performance on the ground drive support for democracy as a political regime. The relationships between individual evaluations of a given political regime and support for that regime type suggests that we should not rush to view post-communist citizens’ mindset as anomalous in comparison to citizens from other young democracies beyond this region. Rather, post-communist skepticism of democracy might be generalized to contexts characterized by flawed implementation and unmet expectations of this form of government.