Political Involvement in Transition: Who Participated, and Electoral Dynamics, In Central and Eastern Europe?

Using surveys conducted in 1991, this paper examines the sociodemographic, experiential and ideological determinants of nonelectoral and electoral political participation in eight postcommunist states of eastern Europe, with comparisons to Germany and the United States. Comparing the postcommunist states to the capitalist ones, we find the determinants of participation in the former largely conform to the patterns in the west, with education playing an especially large role. In the postcommunist states, we found that youth, political anger and antisocialist ideology were important determinants of political protest and party sympathy, but not of the decision to vote in the initial elections. This may have contributed to the elite-mass divisions in these countries, where the elite promoted market-oriented reforms, and the populations responded with II left turns II in subsequent rounds of elections