is the post-communist states recording the lowest levels. Moreover, the variation
between the - more or less equally prosperous - western states is substantial: while
Sweden tops the list Germany has a participation level that is as low as most post-
communist states. All this indicates that solidarity and participation levels are not only
a reflection of socio-economic development. Historical trajectories unique to each
region are likely to have left their imprint as well, thus providing purchase to the
particularist perspective.
The low participation levels of post-communist countries clearly support this
observation. As many authors have pointed out, decades of totalitarian, communist
rule have wiped out civil society in these countries and have made people suspicious
of state institutions (Janmaat 2006; Schoepflin 2000; Smolar 1996). The legacy of this
period has been “hourglass” societies, composed of a mass of citizens minding their
own business at the bottom, economic and political elites vying for power and wealth
at the top, and a “missing middle” of minimal connections between these groups
(Rose, Mishler and Haerpfer 1997: 91). This raises the pertinent question of how
lasting this legacy will be. Can we expect post-communist societies to overcome this
heritage within the years to come and revert to levels of participation „in line’ with
their level of socio-economic development? Or has civil society always been a
phenomenon alien to this region and was there thus little for communism to destroy?
In that case participation levels may well stay low for the next decades or centuries.
Phrased more broadly, if we can identify regimes of social cohesion - for
instance a regime of post-communist countries comprising relatively high levels of
solidarity and low levels of participation - how durable are they? Do they extend over
generations or possibly centuries, or are they relatively short-lived phenomena,
perhaps so short-lived that it is more appropriate to talk of temporary clusters of
conditions rather than regimes? Unfortunately but not surprisingly, it is next to
impossible to empirically scrutinize the existence of longue duree regimes of social
cohesion because opinion surveys, which are essential for exploring the ideational
dimension of social cohesion, have been conducted only from the 1950s onwards.
Only by relying on archival data of behavior - as Putnam (1993) has famously done
for his study on civic culture in Italy - or on secondary sources - such as the
observations of early scholars like De Tocqueville on American society in the mid-
nineteenth century - can a (necessarily incomplete) case be made for social cohesion
regimes with deep historical roots. However, the different waves of the WVS do
allow us to explore continuities in attitudinal components over a 20 year period. Thus,
we can at least determine whether some „regime’ is nothing more than an accidental
coincidence of conditions at a single point in time or whether it represents a stable
collection of properties over two decades. If the latter is the case, we have some
provisional indication of the existence of long-term regimes of social cohesion.
I will use the first (1981-84), the second (1989-93) and the fourth (1999-04)
wave of the WVS to explore the regimes hypothesized by Green et al (2009) (i.e. the
regimes shown in Table 2). These regimes, it must be admitted, only relate to the
prosperous countries. I chose to confine myself to these countries since it is only for
this group that longitudinal data are available, making it possible to explore regime
stability. I added two more indicators based on WVS items to the existing set of
indicators in order to tap the hypothesized regimes as closely as possible. These are
active civic participation and respect for parents. The first is a compound index based
on 15 items about reported voluntary work for a range of organizations. It represents
the mean of the number of different organizations the respondent does voluntary work
for (see Appendix 1). The second represents mean values and taps the component of