Cultural heritage and the Romanian civil society

Introduction

Political values and actual behavior are important indicators for the level and type of democracy a given society has achieved. A democratic institutional framework will work only if minimal standards are shared within the respective community. (e.g., Tka 1995; Fuchs and Roller 1998).

The aim of this chapter is to shed light on the hypothetically established relation between the cultural conditions of a transition from communism to a liberal democracy and the political history of the respective territory. Therefore I am going to examine the relationship between political orientations and behavior of the Romanian population and the pre-communist past of the territory of contemporary Romania.

Some authors believe that the characteristics of a democratic community are significantly influenced by durable "inherited" cultural traditions. In order to classify nations or sub-national communities according to these traditions we employ the following indicators: (1) the dominant religion (Huntington 1996), (2) the empire in which ancestors of the present citizens lived for centuries (Reisinger 1999), (3) the length of time spent under a Leninist regime (Fuchs 1999 and Rohrschneider 1999), (4) the level of socio-economic modernity (Lipset 1959, 1994), and (5) the characteristics of the respective civil society in the past (Putnam 1993).

These authors agree that different patterns of behavior do not only reflect the present but also socialization experiences in the past that may be passed on even over generations. However, the assertion of still observable influences of the pre-communist era, even after forty years reign of an authoritarian regime is rather risky. The links between institutions, on the one hand, and political values, orientations and norms, on the other hand, which are somehow reciprocal in democratic communities, may be very asymmetric in authoritarian societies. In a democratic society, 'cultures set limits to elites as well as mass behavior - shaping the political and economic systems, as well as being shaped by them' (Inglehart 1997 p.15). Under an authoritarian regime, and especially in a communist country, cultural factors might matter less, since people's voice does not count much. Additionally, many political decisions were heavily influenced by the Soviets, i.e. a foreign power with completely different traditions. This hypothetical asymmetry between institutions and culture in non-democratic countries makes it more difficult for the latter to resist unchanged over a long period of time. However, if some values, orientations or behaviors preserved their distinct national and/or regional distribution despite radical and predominantly exogenous initiated transformations in the social, political and economic sphere during the last forty years, the cultural-historical perspective on political change gets significant support.

The following sections are based upon the assumption that cultural characteristics of a society influence the modalities of change. Specifically, I assume that the concept of a democratic community (Fuchs and Klingemann, 2000) includes values, norms and patterns of behavior that are relevant for the transition of the countries under consideration. My analysis will focus on some of these attributes of a democratic community as dependent variables. Data is taken from the World Values Survey.

Whereas most empirical studies explore the long-term effects of the historical context on democratic communities through a comparative analysis of nations, my strategy is to compare sub-national regions with different historical characteristics. Both types of research design are complementary, with specific strengths and weaknesses. A country level comparison allows for the inclusion of a larger number of units, i.e. there are twenty-eight post-Communist countries in transition (Rose, Mishler and Haerpfer, 1998, p. 68). A large number of cases reduce any kind of non-systematic measurement error. But the results of an analysis based on a comparison of sub-national segments are less affected by factors, which increase the error in cross-national comparisons, i.e. this setting control for the effect of nationally specific variables, such as current legal frameworks. Additionally translation errors within the questionnaire are systematic within a region of linguistic homogeneity

The main part of the analysis in this chapter is based upon a comparison of political values and behaviors in two large Romanian regions. With regard to theories, which ascribe a causal relation between the cultural heritage of communities and political attitudes of their members, these two regions are expected to display both, a different degree of democratization and a significant variation in terms of the type of democratic community. These expectations will be empirically tested with indicators developed on the basis of data from the 1995-1999 World Values Surveys.

I may indicate already here that the distribution of democratic attitudes in the two regions does not differ in the way predicted by the theory. This implies that cultural traditions are not immune to institutional change. Moreover, the theoretical partitioning of European territory along historical-cultural borderlines such as Catholic-Protestant/Slavic-Orthodox and "modern"/"traditional" as described by Ferdinand Braudel's longue dure (Wagner 2001) is problematic and needs further adjustment.

The Romanian democratic community in a comparative perspective

There are several cross-national surveys that include Romania. Their results provide largely consistent categorizations of the former communist countries based on the extent to which democratic attitudes and behavior are prevalent in the respective societies.

On the basis of the 1995-1999 World Values Survey data, Dieter Fuchs and Hans-Dieter Klingemann found a continuous but not very pronounced decline in the quality and the level of consolidation of democratic communities between West and East (2000: 34). The exceptions are the successor states of the Soviet Union and Albania, which, according to the two authors, cannot be classified as a democratic community.

Based on the New Democracy Barometer surveys, Richard Rose, William Mishler and Christian Haerpfer estimated for every post-communist country the share of respondents who support the present regime, and the share of those who support autocratic alternatives (1998). The Czech Republic scores highest with regard to the prevalence of democratic attitudes among their population, Belarus and Ukraine score lowest. Romania occupies a middle position, close to Bulgaria, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia.

Another comparative study (based on national surveys conducted in eleven former communist countries between 1990 and 1992) evaluates the level of respondents' satisfaction with the way democracy works in their countries. The largest proportion of satisfied respondents was to be found in Romania, whereas Ukraine, Hungary, Krasnoyarsk (a Russian region) and Estonia host the smallest share of content citizens (Fuchs and Roller 1998: 297).

A similar question was asked in a more recent series of cross-national surveys, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, conducted between 1996 and 2000. The level of satisfaction with the democratic process in different post-communist countries is summarized in Table 1.

Table 1. Level of satisfaction with the democratic process, 1998, %, Romania

The Czech Republic, East Germany and Poland display a very similar distribution of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Romanian respondents are slightly more satisfied with their current political regime than Hungarians and Lithuanians, whereas Ukrainians, the only respondents from a successor state of the Soviet Union in this survey, show a very low level of satisfaction.

Altogether, these results do not support the longue dure perspective straightforward, because no clear threshold between the Central European and the South Eastern European countries, including Romania, can be detected.

Different premises for two Romanian regions: The type of democratic community

The two regions that will be compared in this analysis are Transylvania (Region 1) and the rest of the country (Region 2), excluding the capital, Bucharest. As it will be discussed below, this choice maximizes differences in terms of the type of cultural heritage prevalent in the two regions. Bucharest, which is not a part of Transylvania, is excluded from the analysis because of the specific socio-demographic characteristics of its inhabitants.

It is important to note that migration between these two regions has been modest. Therefore, I exclude the possibility of a homogenization of political values and attitudes via a massive exchange between the respective sub-populations. According to the last census from 1992 less than 5% of the population in Transylvania was born outside this region, whereas the share of native Transylvanians living in region 2 was negligible. In 1966 and 1977 the corresponding values were even lower, and after 1992 migration between regions decreased further. (Rotariu and Mezei 1999)

Historically the two regions belonged to different empires and showed a distinct distribution of ethnic belonging and religious denomination of its residents, as well as different levels of social and economic modernity before WW II:

1. Transylvania was part of the Habsburg Empire until 1918, whereas the rest of the country belonged to the Ottoman Empire until 1877, after 1877 it remained independent.

2. Transylvania was more heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religious denominations than region 2. In 1930, 57.8% of Transylvanian inhabitants were Romanians, compared to 88.5% in the rest of the country (including Bucharest with 81.2%) (Livezeanu, 1995: 20,226). In 1857 about half of the Romanians from Transylvania were Greek-Catholics and the other half were of Orthodox denomination. Most of the non-Romanian inhabitants of Transylvania were Catholics and Protestants, whereas more than 90% of the Romanians from the rest of the country were Orthodox believers (Rotariu, Semeniuc and Pah, 1996: 10-11). The Greek Catholic Church was established in Transylvania in 1700 when the Habsburg regime persuaded the local Orthodox clergy that their acceptance of the Catholic dogma and the authority of the Pope would earn them a status equal to the Catholic and Protestant clergy. The communists abandoned the Greek Catholic Church in late 1948, and forced it to merge with the Orthodox Church (Stan and Turcescu 2000: 1482).

3. Several characteristics of the Transylvanian socio-economic development point to the fact that Transylvania entered the twentieth century on a significantly higher level of socio-economic modernity than region 2 (i.e. the rest of the country), and that this difference began to evolve before 1900 and is still persisting.

a) In Transylvania birth rates started to decrease around 1880, i.e. about 30 years earlier than in region 2, and at the same time as in Italy, Hungary, Serbia and Poland. This difference between Transylvania and region 2 still exists (Muresan 1999:179-180, Ghetau 1997:15) and it is also persistent when ethnic non-Romanians are excluded from the analysis. (Rotariu 1993)

b) The literacy rate was higher in Transylvania than in region 2: 51.1% compared to 39.3%, in 1897-1912, and 67% compared to 55.8%, in 1930 (Livezeanu 1998:48).

If we accept that higher levels of socio-economic modernity are generally connected with a stronger tendency to support democratic values, we expect a greater prevalence of democratic attitudes among the population of Transylvania.

The results of 1990, 1992 and 1996 general elections seem to support the idea that significant differences between the two regions with respect to political values exist, and that these differences survived the leveling power of the communist regime. The most successful party in these elections, the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR) , won significantly different shares of the electorate in the two regions. (Table 2.)

Table 2. The electoral support for PDSR in 1990, 1992 and 1996, %, Romania

The Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR), the largest party coalition during 1992 - 2000, which in general favored a faster reform of political and economic institutions than the PDSR did, enjoyed significantly greater support in Region 1 than in region 2. Even if we control for ethnic heterogeneity and the size of local community, significant differences between the two regions still remain (Table 3).

Table 3. The effects of region and size of locality on the proportion of the Romanians who voted in 1996 general elections for PDSR, and CDR respectively, in two multiple regression models^a.

Notes:

^a the unit of analysis is locality of residence.

^b the dependent variable in the first regression model is the proportion of votes for PDSR.

^c the dependent variable in the second regression model is the proportion of votes for CDR.

^d Region: people from the Region 1 are coded '1', those from the Region 2, '0'.

^e Size of locality: the number of Romanians above 18 years.

4. Empirical analysis

Contrary to the theory of durable cultural traditions and their influences we might presume that institutional arrangements characteristic for the communist regime suppressed any cultural effect. In democratic societies the respective institutional design is at least influenced by cultural factors. Under an authoritarian regime, and especially in countries under a strong Soviet influence, the existing rules and laws are rather disconnected from popular political values. Here, attitudes of the national political elites and their relations to the Soviet ruling class are probably of more influence for the shape of the present system than values popular among the population in the pre-communist era.

The two Romanian regions are predestinated to test the two hypotheses since the implementation of policies did not vary systematically across Romania. Differences between the two regions with regard to attitudes towards and support for democracy may therefore be rooted in a more distant past.

Most of my dependent variables describe citizens` attitudes towards democracy and serve as criteria for the distinction of different types of political communities (Dieter Fuchs and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, 2000). The data was taken from the Romanian World Value Survey (1993, 1998), and from the Romanian Public Opinion Barometer Surveys.

In my analysis I will proceed as follows: First, I discuss socio-economic standard variables for region 1 and 2. Second, regional differences with regard to attitudes towards democracy will be discussed. Third, I will focus on generational influences, i.e. I will discuss variations of the relationships between region and dependent variables across cohorts.

The distribution of the surveyed attitudes and behavioral dispositions in the two Romanian regions are presented in Table 4 - 6.

Table 4. Empirical evidence of citizen support of a set of criteria for a democratic community, 1998, %, Romania

DEM: Support of democratic rule; AUT: Support of autocratic rule; PSC: Support of political system of one's own country; CGI: Confidence in governmental institutions; VIO: Illegitimacy of violence; LAW: Law abidingness. Cell entries are percent positive support.

Table 5. Citizen support of different types of democratic community at cultural level, 1998, %, Romania

SRE: Self-responsibility; SOL: Solidarity; TRU: Trust in others; WET: work ethic; ETO: ethic tolerance. Cell entries are percent positive support.

Table 6. Citizen support for different types of democratic community at structural and process level,1998, %, Romania

PRO: private ownership; MAN: management of enterprise; PMO: political motivation; CIV: civic engagement. Cell entries are percent positive support.

A very broad conclusion after a simple comparison between the two Romanian regions is that differences exist, but not the ones predicted by the theory of the longue dure. Democratic attitudes are not more prevalent in region 1 and citizens from this region do not show less support for etatist values than people from region 2. On the contrary, there are significant differences in favor of Region 2 with regard to support for democracy (DEM), lack of support for autocratic rule (AUT), and the rejection of violence as a legitimate political measure (VIO). Additionally, citizens from region 1 show a lower level of solidarity with the poor (SOL), a less pronounced individualistic work ethic (WET), and a lower level of support for private ownership (MAN) than citizens from the second region. The only variables for which citizens from region 1 score higher than citizens from region 2 are those referring to participation, i.e. the share of volunteers in region 1 is significantly higher than in region 2, the same is true for citizens who signed petitions, participated in boycotts, and took part in demonstrations.

Ideally, we should compare similarly structured populations for every independent variable. WVS data allows controlling for effects of the level of formal education, the size of the local community, age and ethnicity. Table 7 shows the effect of region for each dependent variable with at least four response categories, estimated in a multiple regression model. Effects of region on dependent variables with two response categories, such as membership in associations, generalized trust, signing petitions, participating to boycotts, and taking place in demonstrations, are estimated with a logistic regression model (Table 8.).

Table 7. The effect of region on indicators for the quality of a democratic community, in multiple regression models^a, Romania

Notes: ^a each row describe a multiple regression model; dependent variable is specified in the first column, cell entries in the second and third column describe the effect of REGION ('0' for Region 1, '1' for Region 2) on dependent variable.

DEM: Support of democratic rule; AUT: Support of autocratic rule; PSC: Support of political system of one's own country; CGI: Confidence in governmental institutions; VIO: Illegitimacy of violence; LAW: Law abidingness. SRE: Self-responsibility; SOL: Solidarity; TRU: Trust in others; WET: work ethic; ETO: ethic tolerance; PRO: private ownership; MAN: management of enterprise; PMO: political motivation;

Table 8. The effect of region on political values and behavior, in logistic regression models^a, Romania

Notes: ^a each row describe a logistic model; dependent variable is specified in the first column, cell entries in the second, third, and forth column describe the effect of REGION ('0' for Region 1, '1' for Region 2) on dependent variable.

TRU: Trust in others; CIV: civic engagement.

The multivariate model confirms the results of the bivariate analysis: The hypothesis that the population of Region 1 is more democratically oriented than inhabitants of Region 2 is not simply rejected but rather reversed.

There are several possible explanations for this finding: It may be the case that the two regions were more similar in the distant past than we assumed and, therefore, there was no significant difference that could survive the communist regime. But it may also be the case that different political belief systems existed until the end of WW II and that they disappeared under the leveling effect of the totalitarian regime. Its new institutions inspired (and sometimes implemented) by the Soviet Union, '.represented a much stronger call for uniformity than the Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg or German empires had ever dared - or, for that matter, wanted - to raise.' (Berglund and Aarebrot 1997: 152).

Another empirical test would allow us to reduce the range of possibilities to some extent. An analysis of the relation between region and democratic attitudes by cohort, i.e. those born before the communist period and those born afterwards, may help to decide whether there have never been significant differences between the two regions or whether the leveling effect of the postwar institutional settings extinguished these differences. If the elderly in region 1 tend to be 'better democrats' than the elderly in region 2, we have found at least some support for a historical differentiation that did not survive communist rule. In all other cases, we are left with two distinct possibilities: 1) Before WW II the two regions did not vary with regard to prominent values and beliefs to the expected extent, or 2) the leveling effect of communist institutions was so strong that it cancelled even effect of an early socialization.

The overall result of this analysis is that people from the Region 1 who were born before the communist period do not tend to display more democratic attitudes than the elderly in region 2.

However, there is one indicator with a discriminative distribution across the two regions, and that can be employed as a criterion to classify types of democratic community. According to the results of the 1998 Romanian WVS data, Region 1 hosts a significantly higher share of citizens who are members in voluntary organizations than Region 2. The share of active membership in at least two organizations is 15.2% in Region 1, compared to 3.8% in Region 2. Although the questions on membership are proved to be among the least reliable survey questions in Romania , all available surveys document a marked advantage for Region 1 (Badescu 2003). Is the civil society thus more deeply rooted in Region 1 than in Region 2, or is this difference determined by other, non-cultural, factors? If the analysis is extended to other forms of civil activity, similar discrepancies between the two regions are revealed. People who signed a petition, took part to a boycott or participated to a demonstration are to be found more often in Region 1 than in Region 2 (cf. Table 9.).

Table 9. Types of political participation, 1998, %, Romania

Which factors account for this difference? There are three conditions for a broad extension of participatory processes: Civil values and attitudes, resources and capacities to mobilize civil activities (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995). In our case, it is hard to determine whether values play a significant role in explaining the discrepancy between the two regions. The different levels of voluntary membership and participation between the two regions may be entirely the result of better-developed recruitment and mediation networks in region 1. There are some arguments in favor for this explanation: First, there are attitudes and values usually associated with the notion of a civil community, which should be positively correlated with volunteering and participation (Putnam 1993). Yet the prevalence of these attitudes does not vary between the two regions in the expected direction (cf. Table 5.). Second, Region 1 is indeed characterized by better-developed social networks than Region 2 (Sandu 1999). Thus, the flow of information between citizens, which in turn influence their capacity of being mobilized for civil activities, is more intense in Region 1 than in Region 2. Third, a significant share of voluntary membership is tied to the existence of non-governmental organizations. A majority of these organizations was established with foreign aid from Western Europe, and many still depend on external support (Kuti 2001, Dakova at all. 2000). Region 1 hosts a considerably larger number of NGO's than Region 2 does, and this is probably a result of geographical convenience

To summarize this section, different levels of civil activism in the two regions do not necessarily imply a similarly distinguished distribution of democratic values, but may be rooted in different levels of the development of social and administrative infrastructures.

Conclusions

If democratic attitudes and patterns of behavior are among the most important influences upon the quality and the speed of the process of democratization, then the question about their resistance to institutional change has a clear significance. The analysis of changing cultural orientations under the influence of a communist regime and its specific institutional settings might provide insights into potentials as well as limitations for the transition to a liberal democracy.

The historical legacy theories assert that cultural factors shaped by the societal and institutional design of the pre-communist era have been transmitted into the present. There are two categories of explanations with regard to the way in which different distributions of values among communities are preserved over time. The first one implies that different distributions of values between two populations are persistent over time, even in two communities that faced the same radical change of institutional settings and societal resources. Another version of this type of explanation does not rely on the assertion that values are immutable but states that their reciprocal relationships with institutional design and societal resources are significant.

The analysis in this chapter focused on two Romanian regions that, according to Huntington's (1996) thesis of a cultural divide within Europe, are border areas of two different types of civilization. If we assume that this cultural divide has a lasting effect that is expressed in a distinct distribution of democratic values and patterns of behaviors, the two regions are expected to show significant variations in terms of the quality and the type of democratic community they host: 1) They belonged to different empires - one to the Habsburg, the other to the Ottoman empire, 2) they had very different distributions of religious denomination and ethnicity - one dominated by Roman and Greek Catholics, whereas the other region hosted a large majority of Orthodox believers, and 3) their levels of social and economic modernity before WW II varied significantly.

However, the distribution of values does not fit the expectations based on the historical legacy theories.

This finding indicates that at least one of the two assertions on which the historical legacy approaches are grounded, cannot be applied to the Romanian case:

1. The distribution of values and attitudes in the pre-communist era can be derived from historical circumstances, such as the empire a region belonged to, the dominant religion or the level of socio-economic modernity. This assumption might be especially problematic for neighboring regions that belonged to different empires, since the diffusion of attitudes and lifestyles cannot be sufficiently excluded (even if migration seems to be of no importance during the last 25 years).

2. The distribution of values and attitudes in the pre-communist era has been transmitted into the present (whatever the transmission mechanisms may be).

If the first assumption is true, one would expect that at least in the case of the elderly, i.e. those who were born before the WW II the expected difference can be detected. However, my analysis has shown that it does not, and, therefore, either the assertion of existing different pre-communist values is false, or the leveling effect of communist institutions cancelled early socialization experiences.

The more general implication is that the potential for democratic changes in East European countries is not primarily determined through historical legacies. Only if we take into account more detailed information about the distant past, the specificity of the national communist regimes and the characteristics of the post-communist democratic institutional settings, we may be able to assess how a political community will evolve.

List of Tables

Table 1. Level of satisfaction with the democratic process, 1998, %, Romania   

Table 2. The electoral support for PDSR in 1990, 1992 and 1996, %, Romania   

Table 3. The effects of region and size of locality on the proportion of the Romanians who voted in 1996 general elections for PDSR, and CDR respectively, in two multiple regression models^a.

Table 4. Empirical evidence of citizen support of a set of criteria for a democratic community, 1998, %, Romania

Table 5. Citizen support of different types of democratic community at cultural level, 1998, %, Romania.

Table 6. Citizen support for different types of democratic community at structural and process level,1998, %, Romania

Table 7. The effect of region on indicators for the quality of a democratic community, in multiple regression models^a, Romania   

Table 8. The effect of region on political values and behavior, in logistic regression models^a, Romania

Table 9. Types of political participation, 1998, %, Romania

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