Support for Market Economy Principles in European Post-Communist Countries during 1999–2008

Tomáš Sirovátka, Martin Guzi () and Steve Saxonberg

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Since the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989, a neoliberal discourse has dominated the thinking of the political elite in the post-communist countries, paving the way for unprecedented mass privatisation, economic deregulation, and other market reforms. In this article, we study the development of public support for market economy principles in post-communist countries compared to other European countries during the 1999-2008 period, which is the period that directly followed the initial stage of market transformation. We use data from the European Value Survey covering 22 European countries for the years 1999/2000 and 2008/2009. In addition to analysing the trends, we apply multilevel regression models to study the determinants and levels of support for the market economy in post-communist and other European countries. We find that, when controlling for individual and country-level variables, a significant increase in support for market economy principles has taken place in the post-communist cluster, which is not the case in the other countries. There is some inconsistency in support for the individual principles of market economics: support exists in post-communist countries for the notion that the state should be responsible for the social and economic well-being of its inhabitants and for state regulation of the economy, while support is high for some market economy principles, such as free competition and private ownership. In other words, support for some kind of social market seems to prevail among those living in post-communist countries, based on the notion that the state should combine a market economy with relatively generous social policies.

Keywords: market economy; post-communist countries; free competition; private ownership; state regulation of economy; welfare attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 B20 D02 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Czech Sociological Review 55.3(2019): pp. 319-345

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/97585/1/MPRA_paper_97585.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:97585

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().