William Pyle (Middlebury College) - Russian Society, Democratic Values, and the Legacy of the Early-1990s Economic Shock

BOFIT Seminar - William Pyle (Middlebury College) - Russian Society, Democratic Values, and the Legacy of the Early-1990s Economic Shock

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 actual evidence as to a lasting effect is sparse. We draw on the 2017 wave of the World Values Survey (WVS) and a regionally representative survey conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation in 2010 to demonstrate that where Russians’ embrace of liberal values declined most in the early 1990s (as measured by the drop in electoral support for Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1996), the support for democratic values remains weakest a generation later. Instrumenting for the early-1990s change in values with two variables that capture features of late-Soviet-era industrial structure (i.e., manufacturing employment as a share of total employment and “revealed comparative disadvantage”), and controlling for contemporaneous variables that could affect attitudes, 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. The economic trauma of the early 1990s, that is, endures in the worldview of Russians well into the twenty-first century. To complement this finding, we use multiple waves of the 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 up a “values gap” that persisted through at least 2017.

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