Eastern European Public Opinion on Economic Issues: Privatization and Transformation

Introduction Over five years have passed now since the beginning of the transformation process in Eastern Europe. While some important theoretical progress has been made towards a deeper understanding of this development, many questions remain. (1) A similar statement applies to the state of empirical knowledge of the changes in transition countries. This paper tries to contribute some empirical results to this discussion. More specifically, it aims at enriching understanding of the development of Eastern European public opinion during the period 1990 to 1992. To achieve that end, survey data of European Union's Central- and Eastern Eurobarometers (CEEB) are employed. Other studies which utilize this data base are Juchler (1994) and Pickel/Pickel (forthcoming). The former gives a rather general account of the developments in Eastern European public opinion, while the latter concentrate on the question of political stability in the tradition of Lipset (1988). Additional questions from the CEEB but related to economic transformation are analyzed in Hayo (1995). In the following analysis, the focus lies on the question how people evaluate the creation of a market economy, and whether the speed of the economic transition and privatization is considered to be acceptable. This study is more an exercise in explorative than in confirmative analysis. All results are discussed and interpreted, though, and where possible a connection to other strands of the literature is given. It needs to be stressed that it is not "objective" data (assuming something like this exists) on economic transformation that are compared, but people's perceptions of the process. However, this should not be seen as a drawback of the analysis, since what motivates human action are not objective considerations but subjective impressions. In many cases there is a close connection between "objective" data and subjective perceptions, but sometimes there exists a large gap between both. As is well known, a major factor creating this gap are unfulfilled expectations. In a way, what is measured here is how the economic achievements perceived by people measure up with their expectations. This is clearly a different approach than one based on comparing the percentages of privatized firms or administered prices in the transformation countries. It is maintained here that both approaches, the comparison of "objective" data and of subjective perceptions, are important scientific achievements in themselves. Moreover, there cannot be a doubt that a synthesis between them would also be desirable, but this aspect cannot be discussed here in more detail. The organization of the paper is as follows: After this introduction, a short overview of the employed data and some methodological remarks are given. Then the question how support of public opinion for the creation of a market economy changes over time is tackled. Furthermore, using a regression approach, it is asked who is in favor or against a market economy. In the fourth section, the speed of the transformation process and its assessment over time by people is studied. Public opinion towards the speed of privatization and what types of respondents would like to see a faster or slower privatization speed are then considered. Finally, in the conclusion some important general points are emphasized. II Data and Methodology In this study, data from several CEEB opinion polls over time and countries are utilized. These surveys were designed to be representative, but for some countries one may suspect some violations of sampling principles. Still, although there seems to be some "noise" in the data, the overall impression is not too bad. A summary of the surveys is given in Table 1A in the Appendix. Large-scale comparative studies can suffer due to several problems - see for instance Przeworski/Teune (1970) and Almond/Powell (1978). Three of the more important ones are cultural biases, non-attitudes and aggregation problems. …