This article, unlike the vast existing literature on political trust, focuses on trust in post-socialist countries and, more specifically, on trust of young people rather than on trust of general populations. Studying young people is important in the context of establishing democracy and the survival of democracy. The authors examine the continuous effect of socialism and stipulate that the legacy of the type of socialist regime is a major determinant of political trust in Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries. Utilizing individual-level data from an institutional survey, the authors find that distinguishing between different types of socialism is instrumental in explaining political trust. Results on the former Yugoslavia, however, suggest that the effects of socialism might be temporarily overshadowed in the short run by drastic post-socialist events such as warfare. The findings have implications for policies aimed at fostering political trust in post-socialist countries and for discerning future patterns of political and social developments.
See, e.g., Richard Rose, Political Trust, Turnout, and Governance Capital, Studies in Public Policy Number 386 (Glasgow, UK: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 2004).
2.
See, e.g., William Mishler and Richard Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust? Testing Institutional and Cultural Theories in Post-Communist Societies," Comparative Political Studies34, no. 1 (2001): 30-62, at 31.
3.
Mishler and Rose, ibid., present a discussion (and references) of the cultural theory on trust. Our approach and reasoning is similar to the longue-durée historical approach (see Braudel, Putnam et al., and Flyvbjerg) and to the literature on path dependence (see, e.g., Dobry, Stark and Bruszt). Fernand Braudel, "History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée," in On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958/1982), 25-55; Robert D. Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Michel Dobry, "Paths, Choices, Outcomes, Uncertainty. Elements for a Critique of Transitological Reason," in Democratic and Capitalist Transitions in Eastern Europe. Lessons for the Social Sciences, ed. Michel Dobry (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 2000); and David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4.
E.g., Ivana Makarová, ed., Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe, Proceedings of the British Academy 123 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Eric M. Uslaner and Gabriel Badescu, "Making the Grade in Transition: Equality, Transparency, Trust, and Fairness" (SSRN Working Paper, 2004), http://ssrn.com/abstract=824486; Gabriela Catterberg and Alejandro Moreno, "The Individual Bases of Political Trust: Trends in New and Established Democracies," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 18, no. 1 (2006): 31-48; and Rose, Political Trust, Turnout, and Governance Capital.
5.
E.g., Herbert Kitschelt, "Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies: Theoretical Propositions," Party Politics1, no. 4 (1995): 447-72.
6.
E.g., Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl, "The Great Divide Revisited: Ottoman and Habsburg Legacies on Transition," Kyklos60, no. 4 (2007): 539-58; and Kitschelt, "Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies."
7.
Kitschelt, "Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies"
8.
Jorg Forbrig, ed., Revisiting Youth Political Participation. Challenges for Research and Democratic Practice in Europe ( Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe Publishing, 2005).
9.
Uslaner and Badescu, "Making the Grade in Transition"; and Rose, Political Trust, Turnout, and Governance Capital.
10.
See Natalia Letki, "Socialization for Participation? Trust, Membership and Democratization in East-Central Europe," Political Research Quarterly57, no. 4 (2004): 665-79, at 670; and James R. Kluegel and David Mason, "Political Involvement in Transition: Who Participated in Central and Eastern Europe?" International Journal of Political Sociology40, no. 1 (1999): 41-60, at 46.
11.
E.g., Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, "Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development among New World Economies," Economia3, no. 1 ( 2002): 41-109; Martha de Melo, Cevdet Denizer, Alan Gelb, and Stoyan Tenev, "Circumstance and Choice: The Role of Initial Conditions and Policies in Transition Economies," World Bank Economic Review15, no. 1 (2001): 1-31; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation," American Economic Review91 (2001 ): 1369-1401; Ryszard Zukowski, "Historical Path Dependence, Institutional Persistence, and Transition to Market Economy: The Case of Poland," International Journal of Social Economics31, no. 10 (2004): 955-73; and Daniel Berkowitz and Karen Clay, "The Effect of Judicial Independence on Courts: Evidence from the American States," Journal of Legal Studies35, no. 2 (2006): 399-400.
12.
E.g., Eric M. Uslaner and Mitchell Brown, "Inequality, Trust and Political Engagement" (paper presented at the Third Annual Meeting University Working Groups, Special Program on the Social Dimensions of Inequality, Washington, DC, 2003), http://www.popcenter.umd.edu/events/rsf/papers/ Uslaner.pdf (accessed 13 March 2008); Alfonso J. Damico, M. Margaret Conway, and Sandra Bowman Damico, "Patterns of Political Trust and Mistrust: Three Moments in the Lives of Democratic Citizens," Polity 32, no. 3 (2000): 377-400; and Eldin Fahmy, Young Citizens: Young People’s Involvement in Politics and Decision Making (London: Ashgate, 2006).
13.
E.g., Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?"; William Mishler and Richard Rose, "What Are the Political Consequences of Trust? A Test of Cultural and Institutional Theories in Russia," Comparative Political Studies 38, no. 9 (2005): 1050-78; Uslaner and Badescu, "Making the Grade in Transition"; Letki, "Socialization for Participation?"; and János Kornai, Bo Rothstein, and Susan Rose-Ackerman, eds., Creating Social Trust in Post-Socialist Transition (London: PalgraveMacmillan, 2004).
14.
E.g., Patrick Bernhagen and Michael Marsh, "Voting and Protesting: Explaining Citizen Participation in Old and New European Democracies," Democratization 14, no. 1 (2007): 44-72; Letki, "Socialization for Participation?"; Henry E. Brady and Cynthia S. Kaplan, "Subjects to Citizens: From Non-voting, to Protesting, to Voting in Estonia during the Transition to Democracy," Journal of Baltic Studies 32, no. 4 (2001): 347-78; and Tatyana Karaman, "Political Efficacy and Its Antecedents in Russia," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 20, no. 2 (2004): 30-49.
15.
E.g., Fahmy, Young Citizens; Forbrig, Revisiting Youth Political Participation; and Daniel Stevens, Benjamin G. Bishin, and Robert R. Barr, "Authoritarian Attitudes, Democracy, and Policy Preferences among Latin American Elites,"American Journal of Political Science50, no. 3 (2006): 606-20.
16.
Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?" 31.
17.
E.g., Rose, PoliticalTrust, Turnout, and Governance Capital; Makarová, Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe; and James L. Gibson, "Social Networks, Civil Society, and the Prospects for Consolidating Russia’s Democratic Transition,"American Journal of Political Science45, no. 1 ( 2001): 51-68.
18.
Ivana Makarová, "Introduction: Trust/Risk and Trust/Fear," in Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe, Proceedings of the British Academy 123 , ed. Ivana Makarová ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1-24, at 12.
19.
Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?" 39; and Gibson, " Social Networks, Civil Society, and the Prospects for Consolidating Russia’s Democratic Transition," 53.
20.
Makarová, "Introduction ," 13; and Uslaner and Badescu, "Making the Grade in Transition"
21.
Gerard Roland , "Understanding Institutional Change: Fast-Moving and Slow-Moving Institutions," Studies in Comparative International Development38, no. 4 (2004): 109-31.
22.
Dimitrova-Grajzl, "The Great Divide Revisited "
23.
Kitschelt, "Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies"
24.
Herbert Kitschelt , Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gábor Tóka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19-38.
25.
Kitschelt, "Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies," 453.
26.
Ibid.; and Herbert Kitschelt, "Post-Communist Economic Reform. Casual Mechanisms and Concomitant Properties" (mimeo, Duke University, Department for Political Science, Durham, NC, 2001).
27.
Makarová, Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe; Uslaner and Badescu, "Making the Grade in Transition"; Catterberg and Moreno, "The Individual Bases of Political Trust"; and Rose, Political Trust, Turnout, and Governance Capital.
28.
Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?"; Catterberg and Moreno, "The Individual Bases of Political Trust"; Ji-Young Kim, "‘Bowling Together’ Isn’t a Cure-All: The Relationship between Social Capital and Political Trust in South Korea," International Political Science Review26, no. 2 (2005): 193-213; and Marc J. Hetherington, "The Political Relevance of Political Trust," American Political Science Review92 (1998): 791-808.
29.
Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?"
30.
Kim, "‘Bowling Together’ Isn’t a Cure-All"
31.
Catterberg and Moreno, "The Individual Bases of Political Trust"
32.
See, e.g., Thorsten Beck and Luc Laeven, "Institution Building and Growth in Transition Economies," Journal of Economic Growth11, no. 2 (2006): 157-86; and Erik Berglof and Patrick Bolton, "The Great Divide and Beyond: Financial Architecture in Transition ," Journal of Economic Perspectives16, no. 1 (2003): 77-100.
33.
Moreover, if performance indicators affect trust, but are simultaneously affected by exogenous variables, such as historical legacy, or by trust, then omitting them from our regressions effectively means that we estimate reduced form equations of political trust on exogenous variables.
34.
Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?" 31.
35.
See www.ceu.hu (mission).
36.
More information on placement of CEU students is available at the CEU Alumni Web site: http:// web.ceu.hu/careers/Alumni_placement.html.
37.
For the full list of participating countries, see http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/highereducation/EHEA2010/BolognaPedestrians_en.asp#P132_13851 .
38.
E.g., William L. Miller, Tatyana Y. Koshechkina, and Ase B. Grodeland , "Diffuse Trust or Diffuse Analysis? The Specificity of Political Distrust in Post-Communist Europe," in Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe, Proceedings of the British Academy 123, ed. Ivana Makarová ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 133-56; and Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?"
39.
R.E. Lane, Political Life: Why and How People Get Involved in Politics ( New York: Free Press, 1959); Richard L. Cole, "Toward a Model of Political Trust: A Causal Analysis," American Journal of Political Science17, no. 4 (1973): 809-17; and Damico et al., "Patterns of Political Trust and Mistrust "
40.
See, e.g., Rosario Espinal, Jonathan Hartlyn, and Jana Morgan Kelly, "Performance Still Matters: Explaining Trust in Government in the Dominican Republic," Comparative Political Studies39, no. 2 (2006): 200-223; and Uslaner and Badescu, " Making the Grade in Transition," 19.
41.
See Mishler and Rose, "What Are the Origins of Political Trust?"; Kim, "‘Bowling Together’ Isn’t a Cure-All"; and Catterberg and Moreno, "The Individual Bases of Political Trust"
42.
The literature on institutions and development (has demonstrated the validity of and) resorts to the use of ordinary least squares (OLS) to estimate regressions with ordinal dependent variables rather than ordered probit. See, e.g., Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, "Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution," Quarterly Journal of Economics117, no. 4 (2002): 1231-94; and Beck and Laeven, "Institution Building and Growth in Transition Economies."
43.
See Dimitrova-Grajzl, "The Great Divide Revisited," for a discussion on the effects of Ottoman and Habsburg legacies for transition; or Zukowski, "Historical Path Dependence, Institutional Persistence, and Transition to Market Economy," for a discussion on the interregional disparities within Poland attributed to the distant past of Russian, Prussian, and Habsburg influence in the country.
44.
Lane, Political Life; Cole, "Toward a Model of Political Trust"; Damico et al., "Patterns of Political Trust and Mistrust"; and Kim, "‘Bowling Together’ Isn’t a Cure-All."
45.
Edward N. Muller and Mitchell A. Seligson, "Civic Culture and Democracy: The Question of Causal Relationships," American Political Science Review88, no. 3 (1994): 635-52; and John Brehm and Wendy Rahn, "Individual-Level Evidence for the Causes and Consequences of Social Capital," American Journal of Political Science41, no. 3 (1997): 999-1023.
46.
Uslaner and Badescu, "Making the Grade in Transition"; and Catterberg and Moreno, "The Individual Bases of Political Trust"
47.
Uslaner and Brown, "Inequality, Trust and Political Engagement," 13.
