Authoritarian nostalgia in post-communist Europe

Abstract

What explains authoritarian nostalgia in post-communist Europe? My introduction justifies the selection of East Central Europe and the timeframe for study. In the second chapter, I define authoritarian nostalgia as the condition of a citizen's greater political support for the old relative to the new regime in newly democratised countries, building on the political support literature. I demonstrate how authoritarian nostalgia can seriously undermine democratic consolidation, if exploited by aspiring autocrats standing for election. In spite of its relevance, authoritarian nostalgia has not yet been appreciated as an independent concept in the literature. In the third chapter, I introduce the specific area context of post-communist East Central Europe. I show how East Central Europe is made up of "the Lands in Between" (West) Germany and Russia, including Russia herself and the European parts of her former Soviet empire, and how the region exhibits four country clusters with shared traits. I explain my specific case selection and the exclusion of the Balkans from that selection. I demonstrate how the existing post-communist literature does not sufficiently answer my research question. I also introduce the three major cross-national opinion poll datasets that the rest of my analysis relies on.