Russian Society, Democratic Values, and the Legacy of the Early-1990s Economic Shock

• In Event: Political Institutions and Governance in Russia: Historical Perspectives on Elite Control, Property Rights, and Democratic Values

Abstract

While many have speculated that the economic pain of the early 1990s left Russians with an abiding distaste for the values that animated the transition from communism, the quantitative evidence as to a lasting effect remains sparse. We draw on a large, regionally representative survey conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation (POF) in 2010 to demonstrate that in regions where Russians’ embrace of liberal values declined most in the early 1990s (as measured by the decline in support for Boris Yeltsin), the support for democratic values and institutions remained weakest a generation later. Instrumenting for the early-1990s change in values with variables capturing Soviet-era economic distortions and controlling for contemporaneous variables that could affect support for democratic values and institutions, we connect a region’s vulnerability to the market liberalization shock of 1992 to its diminished support for liberal political values in both the shorter and longer runs. We speculate that a possible explanation for why the effect of the early-1990s endures was the amplification of the economic shock by an “identity shock” related to Russia’s post-imperial loss of status. As suggestive evidence of this hypothesis, we use multiple waves of the World Values Survey (WVS) to show that in Russia, the demand for democratic values declined more in the first half of the 1990s than in other former communist countries, opening a “values gap” that persisted through at least 2017; additionally, we use regional markers unique to the 2017 WVS to demonstrate that our results from the POF 2010 data are robust to a more recent survey with a similar measure of support for democratic values and institutions.

Authors

• William Henszey Pyle, Middlebury College

• Michael V. Alexeev, Indiana U Bloomington