The Post-Communist Middle Classes, the State, and Democratization

Abstract

This chapter constructs individual-level measures of class, career trajectories, and democracy support, using a large cross-national survey dataset. It provides detailed evidence on individual employment histories from twenty-seven post-communist countries selected for their common history of state employment and communism. It also shows that state-sector careers weaken support for democratic institutions under autocracy, especially among the middle-class. The chapter covers multiple regime types, which reveal that the state under authoritarianism has a distinctive impact on the middle-classes' political orientations. It demonstrates that state employment has meaningful, independent effects on regime preferences by exploiting natural variation across state-sector professions and individuals that move into and out of the public-sector.