Assessing Socialist Past and Sociodemographic Present

Since the mid-2000s, there has been no study of characteristics of political elites at large in East Central European countries. Accordingly, an assessment of long-term trends is not possible beyond narrow case studies of elite sub-segments. This research note introduces a new dataset covering officeholders for 3,277 position/years in six countries (the Czech Republic, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine) for seven reference years from 1990 to 2020. It points to results about broad development trends of political elites concerning sociodemographic characteristics and elite continuity. These include a high degree of sociodemographic homogeneity of elites across countries and time. Concerning the role of the old elites of the socialist regimes, there are considerable differences between the countries, caused among others by different approaches to lustration.