The Direction and Meaning of Left-Right in Postcommunist Societies

Abstract Positioning on the left-right scale is often regarded as a heuristic that enables citizens to reduce the information costs involved in navigating the political world. Questions arise as to how citizens acquire it in former communist countries and what shapes their position on the left-right continuum. We address these questions using aggregate-level data from the 1990s to 2022 and survey data from 2002 to 2022. From the aggregate data, we find that citizens in postcommunist countries are consistently less likely than those in established democracies to adopt a left-right identification and this has not changed over time. From the survey data, we find no evidence that postcommunist citizens are coming to use left-right—socially, attitudinally, or via partisanship—in the same way as their counterparts in the established democracies.