Children of Communism: Former Party Membership and the Demand for Redistribution

ABSTRACT

The paper looks at the persistence of egalitarian norms in post-Communist societies by focusing on the former members of the Communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia and their children. Using individual-level survey data, we distinguish between Russia and the CEE countries in this respect. While in the CEE there is some evidence that both former members of the Communist parties and their children have stronger preferences for redistribution than the rest of the population (the results for the children are more significant), in Russia, only children of Communists (but not Communists themselves) support redistribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Communist party
• inequality
• redistribution
• Russia
• visegrad group

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D31
• I31
• N00
• P36
• P52

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The term “Communist party” is used generically and encompasses all ruling parties of the Communist bloc countries, which in Eastern Europe occasionally had the name of a “Socialist party” (Germany, Hungary) or “workers” party’ (Poland).

2. In some cases, CP members’ signals of loyalty were extremely costly. In the early days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) members of the ruling party had, in addition to other obligations, to commit to the voluntary military service (in the GDR of that period, no military draft existed) (Christian, Gieseke, and Peters 2019).

3. On the flexibility of former CPs members in their supposed ideological commitments see 2023).

4. There is no clarity whether the effect was driven by the self-selection effects or by the acquisition of social skills within the party.

5. This fits anecdotal evidence of a very high share of former CP members in at least some branches of the Czech bureaucracy, see https://ruski.radio.cz/kazhdyy-shestoy-prokuror-byvshiy-chlen-kompartii-8141703.

6. Importantly, LiTS is not a panel dataset, which precludes us from using fixed effects to control for individual-specific unobserved heterogeneity; at the same time, even if we had panel data, dummy past membership in the CP could have been represented as a linear combination of individual fixed effects, which would make the use of fixed effects estimators impossible anyway.

7. At the same time, it means that we have to introduce a caveat for our analysis: we investigate the preferences of former CPs members, who lived long enough to be able to answer to the LiTS survey in the mid-2010s.

8. For recent applications of this approach, see Buggle and Nafziger (2021) and Mavisakalyan, Otrachshenko, and Popova (2021).

9. A recent example of applying this technique to study the impact of the CP membership on well-being is Otrachshenko, Nikolova, and Popova (2023).

10. Table 2 presents OLS results. For ordered probit results, see Table A4 in the Appendix A. As seen, the signs and significance remain similar.

11. Others advocate to refrain from using the concept of statistical significance altogether (Ziliak and McCloskey 2004; Amrhein, Greenland, and McShane 2019) or to redefine criteria for its usage (Altman and Krzywinski 2017).

12. As a further robustness check, we make sure that the egalitarian preferences are specific to the CPs legacy and not to any party membership. For this purpose, we estimate equation (1)(1) $Inequality\mathrm{\_}aversio{n}_{ic}={\beta }_0+{\beta }_{1}CP\mathrm{\_}membe{r}_{ic}+{\mathit{X}{ }^{\mathbf{\prime }}}_{\mathbf{i}\mathbf{c}}\mathit{\gamma }+{\mathit{\theta }}_{\mathbf{r}}+\epsilon$(1) using the respondent’s current party membership. The results are shown in Table A12 and suggest that in Russia, the current members of a political party have strong attitudes against reducing the gap between rich and poor (The results are likely driven by membership in the current party of power “United Russia” since 57% of respondents who answer to the party membership question positively also state that they are members of this party.). In the Visegrad countries, we find no differences in redistribution preferences between members and nonmembers of some current political parties. This reassures us that we find effects of CPs legacy and not merely of political activism.

13. Note that quartiles have been computed for the entire population and not for the CP members; thus, while within the entire population each quartile contains roughly 25% of respondents, the allocation of former CP members to these quartiles can be different.

14. Importantly, the results of Table 3 refer to the self-assessed income quartiles, i.e., are likely to be strongly influenced by subjective social status. On the systematic misperception of one’s position in the income distribution see Gimpelson and Treisman (2018).

15. There exists some empirical evidence that fathers and mothers have a different effect on value transmission (Perales et al. 2021); however, to our knowledge, no systematic theory on this topic exists.

16. At the same time, if we control only for opportunism/subjective perception of success, but not for the interaction term (see Appendix A Tables A10 and A11), CPs dummies remain significant – we essentially replicate the results from the main tables of the study. This could be related to the existence of other causal channels linking CP membership and outcome besides the mediators we control for, as well as to the imperfect ability of our proxies to capture opportunism/subjective perception of success.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Libman

Alexander Libman is Professor of Russian and East European Politics at the Freie Universitat Berlin. His research concentrates on historical legacies, comparative authoritarianism, as well as Russian and post-Soviet politics. His work was published, among others, in the American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics and World Politics

Olga Popova

Olga Popova is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Economics at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS, Regensburg). She is also a Research Associate at CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences, and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and Global Labor Organization (GLO). Her research interests are health and environmental economics, quantitative economic history, regional and individual inequalities, quality of life, and comparative economic analysis. Her recent publications include papers in the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Energy Policy, and Small Business Economics.