Political support in east-central Europe

In this chapter we examine the relevance for the new democracies of Eastern Europe of arguments about challenges to representative democracy in Western Europe. As in several other chapters, we focus on generalized political support: we are interested in mass attitudes conventionally thought to affect the stability of political regimes. After reviewing how the theoretical arguments might be applied to development in Eastern Europe, we derive some hypotheses about support for political regimes. These hypotheses are then confronted with recent data from four East European countries. Two limitations to the study have to be made clear from the outset, however. The first is geographic: we consider only Poland, Hungary, and the two republics which, prior to 1993, constituted Czechoslovakia. For simplicity, these four countries are denoted as East-Central Europe. The second limitation is the lack of sufficiently long and densely populated time-series data to allow us to identify clear trends. Thus, in many instances, only tentative conclusions can be reached about the plausibility of our hypotheses.