This field research was undertaken in 1995, at a time when the transition to new political and economic systems after the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe was well underway, but the situation was still rather uncertain. The euphoric moment of apparent social solidarity in 1989 had given way to a fair degree of discontentment, disillusionment, and a resurgence in popularity of the former communist party. There was thus considerable preoccupation among researchers at the time with the idea of “democratic transitions” and determining a point at which a previously authoritarian state could be deemed both normatively legitimate (i.e. democratic) and stable.
While the democratic transitions literature dealt primarily with institutions, it embraced certain assumptions about the system-supporting attitudes, values, and behaviors of individuals. Testing these assumptions launched a whole industry of public opinion polling in Eastern Europe that purported to take the pulse of the fledgling democracies. Most of these studies were a rehash of modernization theory, positing, on the one hand, that people support new democratic regimes when it is in their economic interest to do so, or, on the other hand, that people, once exposed to the values, norms and practices of democracy eventually become habituated to them (or not). There was little recognition, however, that the ‘habituation’ of a society to anything, even a long-desired institutional transformation, might be experienced largely as a process of force. Nor was there any consideration of how ‘habituation’ might occur beyond some unexplained cognitive shift or change in affective preferences. And, finally, there was no worry whatsoever about the depth and durability of ‘democratic dispositions’ engendered by economic attainment.
This study sought to set aside assumptions about how proper democratic citizens “should” think and who they should vote for and instead asked, “How do people narrate their own experience with the transition from state socialism and the construction of a democratic order?” and “To what extent does the way people think about democracy align with the way they are experiencing it?” To understand how people narrated their own experience with political and economic transformation, I allowed the respondents as much liberty as possible to identify what they wanted to talk about, while also using a framework to guide the discussion and ensure that we covered topics of theoretical interest. Respondents were selected from a national random sample of citizens who participated in an earlier panel study in 1987 and 1993 conducted by IFiS-PAN (currently: Polish Panel Survey, POLPAN). Altogether, 79 interviews were conducted for which 76 full transcripts exist. One person refused to be recorded; five transcripts are missing or incomplete due to equipment malfunction. Respondents were selected anonymously from eight urban areas, including Warsaw, Gdańsk/Gdynia, Lublin, Silesia (Sosnowiec/Katowice), Leszno, Kalisz, Łódź and Toruń.
Interpretive analysis of the interviews showed that dissatisfaction with the post-transition political order at this point in time was not necessarily a consequence of entrenched anti-democratic sentiment or a failure to habituate to democratic norms. Rather, it showed that those who were most dissatisfied with the changes embraced qualitatively different types of democratic values and beliefs, namely those that reflected an interdependent conception of self, while the most enthusiastic supporters of the changes generally had the most highly independent conceptions of self. This makes sense, as the transition from state socialism, for all its flowery rhetoric about democracy and market societies, represented, above all, a profound shift in the legitimation of human agency in which a highly individualized, transactional notion of human behavior was privileged above all else.
The implications of these findings were that democratic institutions, procedures, and policy outcomes that are congruent with the way in which people see themselves will ultimately be more potent and successful than those that are incongruent with prevailing self-conceptions. Where interdependent self-concepts are predominant, institutions of interest mediation based upon more consensual or corporatist (rather than pluralist) models, policies promoting greater equality of outcomes, and practices that directly or indirectly facilitate social solidarities may enjoy the greatest measure of support. A full discussion of the study’s theoretical antecedents, methodology, and findings is available in the dissertation “The Psychological Basis of Democratic Transitions: Self and Politics in Poland,” by Denise V. Powers.
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Before making the dataset available in the Qualitative Data Archive / Social Data Repository, interview transcripts were anonymized. Places in the transcriptions that have been changed are marked in yellow.
