¹ Arguably, the same is true of more established democracies.

² Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 1Google Scholar.

³ There has been an active debate on whether citizens possess enough information to guide policy. For two opposing perspectives, see Page, Benjamin I. and Shapiro, Robert Y., The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Delli Carpini, Michael X. and Keeter, Scott, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

⁴ We focus only on the quantitative study of responsiveness. There are many qualitative case studies of responsiveness. For a survey, see Manza, Jeff and Lomax Cook, Fay, ‘A Democratic Polity? Three Views of Policy Responsiveness to Public Opinion in the United States’, American Politics Quarterly, 30 (2002), 630–667CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Scholars typically focus on dyadic representation in first-past-the-post electoral systems where politicians represent territorial constituencies and party representation in proportional electoral systems where parties represent national electorates. Powell has also looked at the correspondence between the decisive legislator and the median voter, which might be called collective correspondence. See Bingham Powell, G., Elections as Instruments of Democracy: Majoritarian and Proportional Visions (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁶ For representative examples, see Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., ‘Constituency Influence in Congress’, American Political Science Review, 57 (1963), 45–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, Warren E., Pierce, Roy, Thomassen, Jacques, Herrera, Richard, Homberg, Soren, Esaiasson, Peter and Wessels, Bernhard, Policy Representation in Western Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

⁷ Achen, Christopher, ‘Measuring Representation: Perils of the Correlation Coefficient’, American Journal of Political Science, 21 (1977), 805–815CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Quaile Hill, Kim and Hurley, Patricia, ‘Dyadic Representation Reappraised’, American Journal of Political Science, 43 (1999), 109–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For early attempts, see Monroe, Alan D., ‘Consistency between Public Preferences and National Policy Decisions’, American Politics Quarterly, 7 (1979), 3–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Page, Benjamin I. and Shapiro, Robert Y., ‘Effects of Public Opinion on Policy’, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), 175–190CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Mayhew, David, Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking and Investigations, 1946–1990 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Stimson, James A., MacKuen, Michael B. and Erikson, Robert S., ‘Dynamic Representation’, American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 543–565CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Erikson, Robert S., MacKuen, Michael and Stimson, James A., The Macro Polity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Page criticizes the high degree of aggregation in their measures of public opinion and policy. The present analysis is sector-specific. See Page, Benjamin I., ‘The Semi-Sovereign Public’, in Jeff Manza, Fay Lomax Cook and Benjamin Page, eds, Navigating Public Opinion: Polls, Policy and the Future of American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

¹² Canes-Wrone, Brandice and Shotts, Kenneth W., ‘The Conditional Nature of Presidential Responsiveness to Public Opinion’, American Journal of Political Science, 48 (2004), 690–706CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Eichenberg, Richard and Stoll, Richard, ‘Representing Defense: Democratic Control of the Defense Budget in the United States and Western Europe’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 47 (2003), 399–423CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soroka, Stuart N. and Wlezien, Christopher, ‘Opinion–Policy Dynamics: Public Preferences and Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom’, British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2005), 665–689CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wlezien, Christopher, ‘Patterns of Representation: Dynamics of Public Preferences and Policy’, Journal of Politics, 66 (2004), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Kitschelt, Herbert, Markowski, Radoslaw, Mansfeldova, Zdenka and Toka, Gabor, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Luna, Juan P. and Zechmeister, Elizabeth J., ‘Political Representation in Latin America: A Survey of Elite–Mass Congruence in Nine Countries’, Comparative Political Studies, 38 (2005), 388–416CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ Offe, Claus, ‘Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in East Central Europe’, Social Research, 58 (1991), 865–892Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Sztompka, Piotr, ‘The Intangibles and Imponderables of the Transition to Democracy’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 24 (1991), 295–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Marody, Miroslawa, ‘Perceptions of Politics in Polish Society’, Social Research, 57 (1990), 257–274Google Scholar; Schöpflin, George, ‘Obstacles to Liberalism in Post-Communist Politics’, East European Politics and Societies, 5 (1990), 189–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Bunce, Valerie and Csanádi, Mária, ‘Uncertainty in Transition: Postcommunism in Hungary’, East European Politics and Societies, 7 (1993), 240–276CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Morjé Howard, Marc, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Greskovits, Bela, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin American Transitions Compared (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

²¹ Przeworski, Adam, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Luna and Zechmeister, ‘Political Representation in Latin America’. However, as we mentioned above, Kitschelt found relatively high levels of party representation in four post-communist countries (Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems).

²³ Haggard, Stephen and Kaufman, Robert, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Williamson, John, ed., The Political Economy of Policy Reform (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1994)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems; Tworzecki, Hubert, Learning to Choose: Electoral Politics in East-Central Europe (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Pacek, Alexander C., ‘Macroeconomic Conditions and Electoral Politics in East Central Europe’, American Journal of Political Science, 38 (1994), 723–744CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, Andrew, ‘Hyperaccountability: Economic Voting in Eastern Europe’, Electoral Studies, 27 (2008), 533–546CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tucker, Joshua, Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990–1999 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Stokes, Susan, ed., Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience.

²⁸ There are strong normative reasons for favouring the median voter. If citizens voted directly on policies, the position of the median would win these referendums. See Powell, , Elections as Instruments of Democracy, pp. 163–165Google Scholar.

²⁹ Bartels, Larry M., Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Gilens, Martin, ‘Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 69 (2005), 778–796CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Soroka, Stuart N. and Wlezien, Christopher, ‘On the Limits to Inequality in Representation’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 41 (2008), 319–327Google Scholar.

³⁰ Achen, Christopher H. and Bartels, Larry M., ‘Musical Chairs: Pocketbook Voting and the Limits of Democratic Accountability’ (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 2004)Google Scholar.

³¹ Their effects are mediated by presidential popularity. There is less responsiveness when a president is very popular or very unpopular. See Canes-Wrone and Shotts, ‘The Conditional Nature of Presidential Responsiveness to Public Opinion’.

³² Powell, Elections as Instruments of Democracy.

³³ In fact, Powell finds greater correspondence in consensus democracies.

³⁴ Berg, Andrew, Borensztein, Eduardo R., Sahay, Ratna and Zettelmeyer, Jeromin, ‘The Evolution of Output in Transition Outcomes: Explaining the Differences’ (IMF Working Paper, No. 73, 1999)Google Scholar; DeMelo, Mathias, Denizer, Calvo and Gelb, Alan, ‘From Plan to Market: Patterns of Transition’ (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, No. 1564, 1996)Google Scholar; Fischer, Stanley, Sahay, Ratna and Vegh, Carlos, ‘Stabilization and Growth in Transition Economies: The Early Experience’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 10 (1998), 45–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Transition Report (London: EBRD, 1995 to date).

³⁵ The World Bank index consists of three components: internal liberalization, external liberalization and private sector entry, which are averaged to produce an overall score that ranges from 0 to 1. The EBRD index has eight measures that are averaged to produce a total reform score. These measures are of: small-scale privatization, large-scale privatization, governance and enterprise restructuring, competition policy, banking reform, securities markets and non-bank financial institutions, price liberalization, and trade and foreign exchange liberalization. The scores range from 1, the level of a centrally planned economy, to 4.33, the level of advanced industrial economy, with steps of 0.33 in between. The two measures are highly correlated with each other with r ranging from 0.6 to 0.8 depending on the sample.

³⁶ Karlheinz Reif, George Cunningham and Malgorzata Kuzma, Central and Eastern Eurobarometer Survey Series, www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/series/00018. We considered other cross-national surveys such as the World Values Survey, the New Democracies Barometer and the International Social Survey Project, but all of them suffered from either sporadic coverage or failure to include policy-relevant questions.

³⁷ It was suspended after 1997 and resumed in 2001 as the Candidate Countries Eurobarometer. The project surveys approximately 1,000 nationally representative individuals in each country. It uses a multi-stage random probability sample design and weights responses by education, age and region.

³⁸ The survey occasionally included other countries, but only for short periods.

³⁹ ‘Don't know’ and non-responses were excluded from this calculation. We tested whether the percentage of ‘Don't know’ and non-responses affected our results and found that it had no effect.

⁴⁰ The survey included an alternative question that might have been a better match. This question read: ‘The way things are going, do you feel that [our country's] economic reforms are going [too fast/about the right speed/too slow/there are no economic reforms]?’ Unfortunately, this question was only asked from 1991 to 1995 and only in a small number of countries. The correlation between the change in the support for the market question and the change in the assessment of reforms question is 0.45, suggesting that they may be measuring similar feelings.

⁴¹ This is an unweighted average of country-years.

⁴² Similarly, far more respondents answered that reforms were going too slowly than answered that they were going too fast.

⁴³ For a recent summary, see Kim, Byung-Yeon and Pirttila, Jukka, ‘Political Constraints and Economic Reform: Empirical Evidence from the Post-communist Transition in the 1990s’, Journal of Comparative Economics, 34 (2006), 446–466CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ Hellman, Joel, ‘Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Post-communist Transitions’, World Politics, 50 (1996), 203–234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Leaving out the lagged dependent variable does not alter the main results.

⁴⁶ Falcetti, Elisabetta, Raiser, Martin and Sanfey, Peter, ‘Defying the Odds: Initial Conditions, Reforms, and Growth in the First Decade of Transition’, Journal of Comparative Economics, 30 (2002), 229–251CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fidrmuc, Jan, ‘Political Support for Reforms: Economics of Voting in Transition Countries’, European Economic Review, 44 (2000), 1491–1513CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heybey, Berta and Murrell, Peter, ‘The Relationship Between Economic Growth and the Speed of Liberalization During Transition’, Journal of Policy Reform, 3 (1999), 121–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kim and Pirttila, ‘Political Constraints and Economic Reform’; Merlevede, Bruno, ‘Reform Reversals and Output Growth in Transition Economies’, Economics of Transition, 11 (2003), 597–651CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ EBRD, Transition Report; UNU-WIDER, World Income Inequality Database V 2.0b, (2007), accessed at www.wider.edu/research/Database/en_GB/database.

⁴⁸ We define reform progress as the annual change in the levels of the WB and EBRD reform scores.

⁴⁹ We plot changes in reform rather than cumulative reform because reform tends to increase monotonically.

⁵⁰ We also conducted estimations where we left out the lagged dependent variable or substituted the cumulative reform score to deal with ceiling effects, but found that the results were substantially the same.

⁵¹ Observers frequently commented on the speed with which reforms had to be carried out.

⁵² We also experimented with controls for negotiations with the European Union (EU) and external debt to capture international effects on reform. The EU variable was never significant and the external debt variable had only sporadically significant effects with higher debt levels leading to more reform. Neither variable altered the importance of public support.

⁵³ We conducted a number of diagnostic tests on these estimations. In particular, we tested for auto-correlation, heteroscedasticity, functional form and normality. All the test results suggested no problems except normality. We used a bootstrapping method to check whether our inferences were affected by the non-normality of the residuals, but found no evidence of it.

⁵⁴ Kim and Pirttila find similar results. See Kim and Pirttila, ‘Political Constraints and Economic Reform’.

⁵⁵ Przeworski, Democracy and the Market; Stokes, Public Support for Market Reforms in New Democracies.

⁵⁶ Indeed, governments are often criticized because of their indifference to levels of inequality. By contrast, post-communist citizens appear to be particularly sensitive to inequality. See Michael Bernhard and Ekrem Karkoc, ‘Moving West or Going South: Economic Transformation and Institutionalization in Post-communist Party Systems’, Comparative Politics, forthcoming.

⁵⁷ Bootstrapping the standard errors is specifically aimed at correcting for the generated variable bias, that is, the bias arising from using the predicted values as regressors. Bootstrapped standard errors were calculated from the distribution of each of the 1,000 estimated parameters obtained in these replications.

⁵⁸ We also estimated GMM models developed by Arellano and Bover and Blundell and Bond to correct for biases in dynamic fixed effects. The results are substantially similar to those presented above and are available from the authors upon request. Arellano, Manuel and Bover, Olympia, ‘Another Look at the Instrumental Variable Estimation of Error-Components Models’, Journal of Econometrics, 68 (1995), 29–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blundell, Richard and Bond, Stephen, ‘Initial Conditions and Moment Conditions in Dynamic Panel Data Models’, Journal of Econometrics, 87 (1998), 115–143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁹ House, Freedom, Freedom in the World 2005 (Lanham, Md.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2005)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ King, Charles, ‘Post-Postcommunism: Transition, Comparison, and the End of Eastern Europe’, World Politics, 53 (2000), 143–172CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Anna Vachudova, Milada and Snyder, Tim, ‘Are Transitions Transitory? Two Types of Political Change in Eastern Europe since 1989’, East European Politics and Societies, 11 (1997), 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶¹ We present the simple lags here because of the limited number of cases.

⁶² We reversed the Freedom House scores so that higher numbers reflect higher degrees of democracy.

⁶³ These countries are Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

⁶⁴ For evidence on unequal responsiveness in the United States, see Bartels, Unequal Democracy; and Gilens, ‘Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness’.

⁶⁵ There were several difficulties with calculating the income quartiles. First of all, the question on income was not asked in all the surveys. Secondly, it was impossible to calculate exact quartiles because respondents had to choose from set categories. We aggregated the categories that best approximated quartiles, which meant that quartiles sometimes come closer to quintiles and sometimes to thirds. Thirdly, we expect that there is greater measurement error in the income variable because incomes were quite uncertain early in the transition as several countries suffered from hyperinflation. For this reason, we put greater faith in the education variable.

⁶⁶ Soroka and Wlezien find equivalent results in the United States. See Soroka and Wlezien, ‘On the Limits to Inequality in Representation’.

⁶⁷ Adams and Ezrow find similar effects for most subgroups of the population, but they did find that opinion leaders (politically engaged citizens) were more influential. We were unable to test this possibility here; see Adams, James and Ezrow, Lawrence, ‘Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders’, Journal of Politics, 71 (2009), 206–223CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Soroka and Wlezien, ‘On the Limits to Inequality in Representation’.

⁶⁸ The generally high rate could also be attributed to international pressure.

⁶⁹ Bartels, Unequal Democracy; Gilens, ‘Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness’.

⁷⁰ For a number of reasons, these hypotheses would be more difficult to test on the non-democracies. In the case of parliamentary composition, not only were these countries mostly presidential, but their party systems were often incoherent and their parliaments included large numbers of independents. Pre-election periods were also difficult to determine because of the presence of non-simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections. Finally, due to presidentialism and unconsolidated party systems, it was difficult to determine which governments were coalitions or had majority support.

⁷¹ Bugajski, Janusz, Political Parties of Eastern Europe: A Guide to Politics in the Post-Communist Era (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁷² Mair, Peter and Mudde, Cas, ‘The Party Family and Its Study’, Annual Review of Political Science, 1 (1998), 211–229CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷³ Benoit, Kenneth and Laver, Michael, Party Politics in Modern Democracies (London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ We used a number of alternative measures to probe the robustness of this result. For example, we excluded Christian Democratic parties because their policy stance is ambiguous, we used expert assessments of left–right ideology from Benoit and Laver and from Kitschelt et al., and we calculated ratios instead of differences. In all cases, the results were substantively similar. One may object that some social democratic parties – for example, the Hungarian MSZP or the Polish SLD – were actually reformist parties. But in fact this judgement is based on their performance in office and is thus endogenous to the dependent variable. Prior to winning elections, both ran fairly traditional left-wing campaigns. See Benoit and Laver, Party Politics in Modern Democracies; Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems.

⁷⁵ This may explain why worries about the election of ex-communists mostly turned out to be groundless.

⁷⁶ However, there is some ambiguity in the fact that the substantive size of the coefficients is considerably larger in the pre-electoral period. We attribute the generally weak results here to the small sample sizes.

⁷⁷ Falcetti et al., ‘Defying the Odds’; Kim and Pirttila, ‘Political Constraints and Economic Reform’.

⁷⁸ Balcerowicz, Leszek, Socialism, Capitalism, Transformation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ Roberts, Andrew, ‘What Kind of Democracy Is Emerging in Eastern Europe’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 22 (2006), 37–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ Müller-Rommel, Ferdinand, Fettelschoss, Katja and Harfst, Philipp, ‘Party Government in Central and Eastern European Democracies: A Data Collection (1990–2003)’, European Journal of Political Research, 43 (2004), 869–893CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸¹ Bates, Robert H. and Krueger, Anne O., eds, Political and Economic Interactions in Economic Policy Reform: Evidence from Eight Countries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)Google Scholar; Haggard and Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions; Williamson, The Political Economy of Policy Reform.

⁸² Bunce, Valerie, ‘Democratization and Economic Reform’, Annual Review of Political Science, 4 (2001), 43–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steven Fish, M., ‘The Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-Communist World’, East European Politics and Societies, 12 (1998), 31–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hellman, ‘Winners Take All’.

⁸³ Druckman, James N. and Jacobs, Lawrence R., ‘Lumpers and Splitters: The Public Opinion Information that Politicians Collect and Use’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 70 (2006), 453–476CrossRefGoogle Scholar.