The “Pew Global Attitudes Project”:http://pewglobal.org/ has a new public opinion report out entitled “The Pulse of Europe 2009: 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall”:http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=267. The report is based on surveys in nine post-communist countries (Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine) that asked close to 60 questions in all of these countries; there are also surveys from five established democracies (US, Spain, France, Italy, and Great Britain) for comparative purposes. The full report, with marginals for all of the questions, can be “downloaded here”:http://pewglobal.org/reports/pdf/267.pdf, but here are a few particularly interesting tables:
We can see that in eight of the nine post-communist countries, a majority of the population continues to approve of the change to democracy; in four of these countries at least 70% of respondents approved. Ukraine is the clear outlier here, with support having dropped by 42% to only 30%. Particularly interesting in these findings is the fact that a greater proportion of Russians than Ukrainians continue to approve of the change to a multiparty system, despite the fact that the latter actually has functioning multiparty politics while one would be hard pressed to claim anything of the sort exists in the former.
Interestingly, support for the transition to a market economy remains almost as high across the region generally as support for the transition to multiparty politics. Once again, Ukraine anchors the bottom of the scale, but in this category it is joined now by Hungary, which has seem support for the transition to a market economy collapse almost in half, from 80% to 46%. With the Baltics and Hungary being among the hardest hit Eastern European countries in the current economic crisis, the fact that Hungary and Lithuania can both be found at the bottom of the table ought not to be too surprising.
As we look to the future, this final table raises interesting questions. Across the board, younger citizens are both more supportive of the transition to a market economy and to a multiparty political system. Only time will tell whether democracy and capitalism are always more favorable to the young than to the old or if this will turn out to be more of a cohort effect, with aggregate support for democracy and capitalism increasing over time people who have come of age under _post_-communism occupy an increasingly larger portion of the population. Of particular interest here is Russia, where a very sharp divide apparently exists between those under and over the age of 50 in terms of support for both multiparty democracy and market economies.