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⁷ See Rose, Richard, ‘Escaping From Absolute Dissatisfaction: A Trial and Error Model of Change in Eastern Europe’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4 (1992), 371–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rose, Richard and Mishler, William T. E., ‘Mass Reaction to Regime Change in Eastern Europe: Polarization or Leaders and Laggards?’ British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 159–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁰ The survey was commissioned as part of the Economic and Social Research Council's East-West Programme (grant no. Y 309 25 3025) to study ‘Emerging Forms of Political Representation and Participation in Eastern Europe’ awarded to Geoffrey Evans, Stephen Whitefield, Anthony Heath and Clive Payne.

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¹² The robustness of the estimates of country rankings obtained with the ‘support for democracy’ question was also checked using other, related, items. Although not measuring support for democracy directly, these questions enquired about respondents' views on whether democracy gives ordinary people a say in politics, is a ‘foreign’ practice, is a good means of solving social conflicts, is better for the rich than the poor. Responses to these items exploring the meaning of democracy were correlated with support for democracy in similar ways in each country, and more or less the same country ranking emerged for these items as for the answer to the support question.

¹³ The classic example of the approach being, of course, Almond, G. A. and Verba, S., The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ See, for example, Brown, A. and Gray, J., eds, Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (London: Macmillan, 1977).Google Scholar Furthermore, we have argued against the political culture explanation of the recent Russian election results. See Whitefield, Stephen and Evans, Geoffrey, ‘The Russian Election of December 1993: Public Opinion and the Transition Experience’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 10 (1994), 38–60.Google Scholar Similar negative findings have been reported in Reisinger, William M., Miller, Arthur, Hesli, Vicki L. and Mayer, Kristen Hill, ‘Political Values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: Sources and Implications for Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 183–223.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁵ In the West, at least, such ‘sociotropic’ motives have been argued to be more important for political preferences than simple ‘pocket-book’ self-interest. For an elaboration see, for example, Kinder, D. and Kiewiet, D., ‘Sociotropic Politics: The American Case’, British Journal of Political Science, II (1981), 129–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁸ Objections can also be raised to the other measures. Unemployment is significantly affected by the method of calculation. In Russia and Ukraine, for example, large numbers of effectively unemployed people are paid benefit via their old enterprise rather than through a separate account. The importance of the private sector is probably massively underreported. The measured fall in real wages is likely to be greatly affected by whether it is calculated weekly, monthly or (as here) annually.

¹⁹ Przeworski, , Democracy and the Market, p. 184.Google Scholar

²⁰ These items are derived from the established tradition of survey research into the concept of political efficacy originating in Campbell, A., Gurin, G. and Miller, W. E., The Voter Decides, (Evanston Ill., Row Peterson, 1954).Google Scholar This concept and its related indicators were usually employed in the political culture approach to comparative analysis: for example, Almond, and Verba, , The Civic CultureGoogle Scholar; Barnes, S. H., and Kaase, M. et al. , Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies (Beverley Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979)Google Scholar; but it is clearly also interpretable within a rational choice framework concerned with the perceived pay-offs of democratic systems.

²¹ Principal components analysis indicated there were two dimensions to these responses. However, as the key distinction appeared to concern the direction of the question wording (‘acquiescence response bias’), the items were assumed to reflect one substantive dimension. See Heath, Anthony, Evans, Geoffrey and Martin, Jean, ‘The Measurement of Core Beliefs and Values: The Development of Balanced Socialist/Laissez-Faire and Libertarian/Authoritarian Scales’, British Journal of Political Science, 24 (1994), 115–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Evans, Geoffrey and Heath, Anthony, ‘The Measurement of Left–Right and Libertarian–Authoritarian Values: Comparing Balanced and Unbalanced Scales’, Quality and Quantity, 29 (1995), 191–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for treatments and consequences of acquiescence in similar data.

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²⁶ Just under 5 per cent of Russians reported identifying with a party, compared with over 23 percent of ethnic Estonians.

²⁷ See Przeworski, A. and Teune, H., The Logic of Comparative Social Enquiry (New York: Wiley, 1970)Google Scholar, for an elaboration of this approach to cross-national analysis, the aim of which is to replace country names with theoretically relevant variables (an example of this approach – also using individual level data – can be found in Geoffrey Evans, ‘Is America Different? Explaining Cross-National Variation in Support for Welfare Redistribution’ (unpublished, Nuffield College, 1995).

²⁸ It should be kept in mind that general evaluations of democracy and the market are asked immediately after those enquiring about respondents' normative commitments, whereas the other indicators of political and economic experience are only obtained much later in the interview. It is likely, therefore, that the effects of the general evaluations will be overestimated when compared with the other indicators.

²⁹ This is calculated by subtracting the residual variance explained by the country dummy variables from the original variance explained by them in Model I. The residual variance explained is that which is accounted for by the country dummy variables net of the contribution of the economic experience variables in Model 2. Therefore: ((0.09355 − 0.05463)/0.04917) × 100% = 20.8% of the country effect is accounted for by the indicators of economic experience.

³⁰ Examination of the political experience indicators showed that ‘no point in voting’ and, although to a lesser degree, ‘party support’ have more pronounced effects than the other measures. The indicators were therefore entered into the model separately in order to display these patterns. All models were also run using composite scales: the substantive conclusions are the same regardless of which method is used.

³¹ A possible criticism of this comparison is that the greater number of indicators used to measure political experience compared with economic experience biases the results in favour of the former. However, even if only the two most direct and equivalent market and democracy experience indicators (‘democracy evaluation’ and ‘market evaluation’) are used, the results are still consistent with those presented here. The extra indicators of both political and economic experience are used in these anlyses because they provide the most comprehensive measures of the key explanatory concepts of political and economic experience available in our data.

³² This is not the same as arguing that economic factors have no effects. Rather, it appears that they have little in the way of direct effects. It is possible the effects of economic experience are channelled through their effect on politics. See, for example, Burkhart, Ross E. and Lewis-Beck, Michael S., ‘Comparative Democracy: The Economic Development Thesis’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), 903–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Given that there is a moderately strong relationship between economic and political experience (the canonical correlation between the two sets of indicators is 0.51), this may well be the case for the data we have presented. Nevertheless, the differences between countries do seem to be far more closely related to the way in which the political system differs than to differences in economic factors. The model developed by Burkhart and Lewis-Beck may prove accurate in the long run but does not account for current country differences in the region, which are anyway not included in their study. The absence of a link between aggregate economic performance and levels of commitment to democracy, however, is not surprising given the speed with which new democracies have been established. The variety of institutional arrangements which have emerged in postcommunist societies is highly unlikely to have been the result of economic development in the five to six years since the transition.

³³ In the early stages of capitalism in Western Europe, democracy was supported by the new middle classes against the aristocracy (see Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, edited by Burns, J. H. and Hart, H. L. A. (London: Athlone Press, 1970)).Google Scholar By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the middle classes had developed fears about the effect of democracy on their liberty and property (see Mill, J. S., On Liberty, edited by Acton, H. B. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1972).Google Scholar See Rueschemeyer, D., Stephens, E. H. and Stephens, J. D., Capitalist Development and Democracy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992)Google Scholar for a historical survey of the nature of the relationship.

³⁴ For empirical analyses of the values of Western mass publics, which show that liberal democratic values are independent of, or even negatively related to pro-market values, see McClosky, H. and Zaller, J., The American Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fleishman, J. A., ‘Attitude Organization in the General Public: Evidence for a Bidimensional Structure’, Social Forces, 67 (1988), 159–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Heath, , Evans, and Martin, , ‘The Measurement of Core Beliefs and Values’Google Scholar; and Evans, Geoffrey, Heath, Anthony and Lalljee, Mansur, ‘Measuring Left–Right and Libertarian–Authoritarian Values in the British Electorate, British Journal of Sociology, 46 (forthcoming, 1995).Google Scholar

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