When promises reach boundaries: political participation in post-communist countries

Voting in elections has been for many decades the most used mode of political participation throughout the world. In the last half a century people have gradually developed critical attitudes towards political institutions and those who were supposed to represent them (Norris 2011; Dalton 2017). Their limited trust in political parties, parliaments, government, or politicians have led to a decrease in voter turnout and a general alienation from other conventional and institutionalized modes of engagement in politics. In recent times, other modes of political participation have gained momentum and many people joined protests, demonstrations, public boycotts, or engaged in different forms of digital activism across a large number of countries (van Deth et al.2007; Theocharis and van Deth 2017; Giugni and Grasso 2022). Many of these were reactions to government failures, political scandals, internal or external crises, or fatigue with the approaches used by political actors associated with the establishment.

These developments have happened in parallel with an increased appetite of the public for alternative models to representative democracy. Among these, the most popular models are direct democracy, which includes mainly referendums and citizens’ initiatives, deliberative democracy with various forms of mini-publics, and the preference for technocratic governance in which the role of experts is prominent (Caramani 2017; Gherghina and Geissel 2017, 2019, 2020; Bedock and Pilet 2020; Bertsou and Caramani 2020). The general idea behind these alternative models is that the power of representatives is lower, while ordinary citizens and experts get a direct say in the life of the polity.

Most of these conclusions and general trajectories are based on evidence from Western (European) countries. Nevertheless, these trends are also visible in contemporary Eastern Europe. The differences that existed in the 1990s and 2000s between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of frequency of participation, the number of people mobilized, or diversity of modes employed have vanished to a large extent recently. This convergence – or equalization – of political behaviors and modes of participation is the result of developments in both the West and in the East of the continent. On the one hand, the West European citizens increasingly behave in a similar way to those from post-communist countries with respect to voting: fewer people vote and many of those who go to the polls are more electorally volatile compared to the past (Grasso 2016; Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2017). There is much research indicating that the openness and availability of voters, electoral volatility, or limited voter turnout are traditional characteristics in the post-communist region (Mair 1997; Sikk 2005; Kostadinova and Power 2007; Gherghina 2014; Neff Powell and Tucker 2014; Marian 2018). Consequently, it is not surprising that there is a convergence of voting behavior between the two regions (Emanuele et al.2018).

On the other hand, the East Europeans started using modes of political participation that were marginal for a while: protests or demonstrations and engagement in democratic innovations. Considering protests or demonstrations first, extensive research shows how the first two post-communist decades have been characterized by isolated protests and relatively weak civil society (Howard 2003; Kopecký and Mudde 2003; Bernhagen and Marsh 2007; Kostelka 2014). In the recent years this has changed dramatically and many citizens engaged in contentious politics across countries (Jacobsson 2015; Pleyers and Sava 2015; Ekman et al.2016; Bernhard 2020). This is reflected both in the high number of protests and in the various reasons pushing protesters to the streets. Causes vary from the general contesting of the competence of government to handle the political situation or the long-lasting problem of corruption to concerns related to everyday life or specific government failures. The diversity of protests attracted many citizens and produced important consequences for the political system and society. These consist of changing governments, early elections or policy change in the areas desired by the protesters.

For example, in Romania there were several waves of protests at a national level in 2012, 2015 and 2017–2018 that mobilized large masses. In 2015, following the tragedy in a nightclub in the capital city, people went to the streets to protest against the corruption that caused the tragedy (Creţan and O’Brien 2020). The protests resulted in the resignation of the prime minister and the emergence of a technocratic government roughly one year before the regular elections. In 2017–2018, many people in the country and in the diaspora – the country has one of the largest diasporas in the world – protested against the government's attempts to change the legislation to decriminalize corruption and to help many politicians to escape criminal investigation or prison sentences. The street protests halted the adoption of the legislation, and this proposed change in the law has not been revisited by subsequent governments.

Protests have become a new political reality in Albania as well. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rapidly increasing oil prices, protests emerged in Tirana (in March 2022), and tens of thousands of people took to the streets, marching in protest against raising prices and oligarchs. This was considered as a genuine civil society-based protest, somewhat like the 2013 protests against the government plans to import and dispose of chemical weapons from Syria in Albania (a decision that was never realized because of the protests), and the 2018 student protests against [what]. Another event was related to police brutality: the killing of a 25-year-old man, which the police tried to cover up. When the news broke, in December 2020, outraged (predominantly young) people protested, forcing the police to officially change their story, and eventually forcing the minister of internal affairs to resign. These events have led to comments about a ‘culture of reaction’ in Albanian society rather than a vivid civil society (Rama 2019; Peçuli and Andriotis 2022).

To use yet another example, in 2020–2021 there were large protests in Bulgaria against corruption, state capture and subsequent de-democratization process promoted by the ruling party ‘Movement for a Democratic Bulgaria’ and its leader who dominated the national political arena since 2009 (Dimitrova 2022). The protests included both people in the country and in the diaspora and contributed to the resignation of the prime minister in March 2021.

In addition to these traditional types of protests, some countries in the region witnessed pro-government rallies that are more common in hybrid or authoritarian regimes. The governments of Hungary and Poland, which embarked on a road to de-democratization roughly one decade ago (Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2020), were the first ones to mobilize rallies through which they could show broad support in the society. In Hungary, between 2012 and 2016, hundreds of thousands went to the streets to show support for the newly elected Fidesz government and to protect it against domestic and foreign opponents (Susánszky et al.2016). In 2015, the pro-government rallies in Poland had a similar role to protect the ruling party against domestic opponents. They took place as a reaction to the anti-government protests, which were ignited by the government's decision to appoint one third of the Constitutional Court judges (Szary and Florkiewicz 2015).

Second, the use of democratic innovations and people's engagement with them is increasing considerably in contemporary Eastern Europe compared to the previous decades. Democratic innovations, usually defined as direct democracy, deliberative democracy and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) practices, are not new to post-communist countries. Some of them used referendums during the previous regime, the ad-hoc deliberation was familiar to many people from meetings at local level to take decisions, while one country from the region was the first in the world to use Internet voting for the entire population. Estonia moved beyond Internet voting trials, addressed the legal and technical issues, and used online voting through a functional platform (Alvarez et al.2009). East European countries had in place earlier and more numerous provisions for direct democracy compared to West European countries (Gherghina 2017).

Recently, people started using more direct democracy, namely referendums and citizens’ initiatives. Many post-communist countries organized binding and consultative referendums in the last decade, on an increasing number of topics (Gherghina 2019; Gherghina et al.2019; Silagadze and Gherghina 2020). One of the topics that became quite popular in the region was the idea of banning same-sex marriage: four referendums were organized between 2013 and 2018 in Croatia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Some of the referendums – not only on this topic – have been initiated by citizens, which reflects an important appetite for involvement in the decision-making process. In some instances, there were also recall votes to oust from office elected representatives (Mișcoiu 2019), a procedure that is not very common in Europe.

In Eastern Europe the number of deliberative practices and the participation of citizens overall increased significantly over time. Some of the most common practices can be found especially at the local level and consist of participatory budgeting or consultative assemblies (Brabec 2019; Schiffbeck 2019; Volodin 2019; Gherghina and Tap 2021; Oross and Kiss 2021). Participatory budgeting is widespread around the world where several thousand cities use it, including some of the capitals in Europe, and allows people to decide how part of their community budget is allocated. Three of its main characteristics are the involvement of the local authority in the process, the existence of public deliberation, and output accountability (Sintomer et al.2008). These make participatory budgeting quite attractive and relatively easy to implement on a yearly basis. In Czechiathe first participatory budgeting was introduced in 2014 and until 2018 there were 81 such processes in 40 municipalities. Their number increased from one in 2014–33 in 2018; out of those 33, two municipalities organized the participatory budgeting for the fourth year in a row, while seven organized it for three consecutive years (Brabec 2019: 94–95). Citizen assemblies also gained momentum in the region, especially on the topic of climate change, in parallel with several similar mini-publics in Western Europe (Devaney et al.2020; Oross et al.2021). At national level there is limited use of deliberative practices and yet one out of the four cases of constitutional deliberation in Europe comes from the post-communist region (Reuchamps and Suiter 2016).

Third, there are important technological developments that allow citizens to expand their participatory repertoires by activating in the online environment or with the help ICT (Alvarez et al.2009; Vaccari and Valeriani 2018). Namely, beyond voting, ICT was used to improve communication between the government and the citizens (Damnjanović 2019) but also as tools to allow mobilization for protests or to combine some of the deliberative practices mentioned above.

These developments illustrate a diversification of the modes of political participation in the post-communist world, which may create great expectations in terms of societal impact. More people engage with politics through these modes, which narrows the previous gap with West European countries that have more experience with democracy. One specific element of post-communist political participation is the involvement of their citizens abroad. Many countries in Eastern Europe have large diasporas formed either by labor migrants or historical ethnic communities and those people participate actively in the politics of their home country. In spite of this promising landscape, there are still several boundaries of political participation. These include, among others, widespread apathy, limited trust in political institutions, challenges for new modes of participation, poorly informed participation, or the absence of visible outcomes (Závecz 2017; Bernhard 2020).

It has often been assumed that the situation in post-communist Europe, with reference to political participation, protests, public mobilization and civil society, would improve significantly because of EU accession or a general ‘normalization of protests’. In reality, civil society organizations in Central and Eastern Europe have remained for a long time weak players compared to their counterparts in Western Europe because of limited sustainable income, formalized interactions with the state, and lack of grassroot support (Kutter and Trappmann 2010).

This Special Section seeks to understand the complexity of this picture by analyzing instances in which the promises of political participation meet the boundaries in post-communist countries. It aims to achieve two theoretical and empirical objectives. At theoretical level, the collection of articles attempts to outline several theoretical frameworks that can be used to understand who participates, why and with what consequences (Ekman and Amnå 2012; van Deth 2014; Theocharis and van Deth 2017). This topic is often surrounded by discussions referring to empirical matters much more than around general arguments and theoretical explanatory models. One of the special issue's aims is to enrich the theoretical debate about political participation in new democracies and transition countries (Tuzov and Masood 2022).

At the empirical level, the Special Section strives to identify and explain various ways in which individuals engage in politics, why they do this (or refuse to engage) and with what expectations (Giugni and Grasso 2022). The articles cover a range of post-communist countries in the form of comparative perspectives across countries with contextualized case studies (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia and Hungary) and use both qualitative and quantitative analyses.

The first contribution by Savić-Bojanić (2023) deals with political participation among ethnic minorities. A common assumption is that in ethnically divided societies the individuals with different ethnic background usually participate in politics to increase the importance of their group (Tavčar Krajnc et al.2012; Stein 2020). However, it remains unclear why individuals belonging to small ethnic minorities, which have limited opportunities to produce a change in society, engage in politics. The article aims to explore and explain the levels of political participation of Jews and Poles in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It seeks to understand why some members of these communities choose to participate actively while other engage only in voting practices or refrain from getting involved (Savić-Bojanić 2023). This is outlined using four different criteria: whether the act communicates a message about an individual's political preference, the potential degree of conflict, the effort put into the activity and the degree of cooperation with other people involved in the action. The qualitative analysis of this study relies on a series of semi-structured interviews and focus-groups conducted in the two ethnic communities.

The goal of the small-scale exploratory study presented in the second article by Bakardjieva (2023) is to examine the digital mediation of grassroots processes unfolding within Bulgarian civil society that contribute to the strengthening of the social base and cultural influence of illiberal ideologies and citizen organizations (Bakardjieva 2023). While ample attention has been paid to the utility of digital media in progressive movements and mobilizations, much less is known about their use by illiberal activists. The methodology comprises three case studies each focused on a different collective actor that espouses ‘illiberal,’ nationalist and intolerant views. Using the concept of ‘uncivil society’ (Kopecký and Mudde 2003), the article approaches the analysis of the positions and activities of these organizations from two angles: the way in which these actors appropriate discourses of ‘patriotism’ and ‘civil society’ and the way they employ digital media to construct collective identities and build up support. The analysis casts light on the role digital media play – at the hands of such actors – in the rise of illiberal and ‘uncivil’ advocacy that could lead to the ‘conquest of civil society’ by illiberalism and a continuing political backslide of liberal democracy.

The third contribution by Sultanishvili (2023) deals with what one might label democratic innovations, commonly understood as consisting of direct democracy (referendums in particular), deliberative democracy practices and various types of e-participation (Gherghina et al.2019). One such democratic innovation is the practice of organizing mini-publics for public deliberation. The study analyses the reasons for citizens’ refusal to participate in public deliberation through the Georgian mechanism of the General Assembly of a Settlement in the remote communities of Georgia. The article draws on the existing academic literature on effective deliberation processes and reasons behind the public's disengagement from them to explain the Georgian public's withdrawal from the deliberation processes (Sultanishvili 2023). By applying the analytical framework on effective deliberation and the logic of non-participation, this article uses the case study approach and qualitative research methods to show how façade deliberation processes cause public disenchantment with engagement in local decision-making processes and reinforce the public image of civic participation mechanisms as pointless efforts.

Finally, Oross and Tap (2023) turn to a country that has been characterized by democratic backsliding since around 2010 during the Orban government (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019; Applebaum 2020; Krastev and Holmes 2020). The article explains how Hungarian parties expand their members’ participatory repertoires in intra-party democracy with the help of information and communication technology. By answering the question how Hungarian parties use digital tools for their internal procedures, the article adds to the literature on parties’ use of technology. To make visible the promises and boundaries of online political participation in a post-communist country, the article relies on 26 semi-structured interviews with Hungarian politicians from ten parties conducted in 2020. The findings indicate that top-down communication dominates Hungarian parties’ practices, the social media is highly popular and is used for both external and internal reasons.

Taken together, these articles neatly illustrate the diversity of the modes of political participation in contemporary post-communist Europe. This is a sobering reality check for scholars doing research on the engagement of citizens in the region. The old narratives of weak civil societies in the East and low levels of participation (aside from occasional protests) are a relatively outdated part of the story today. At the same time, even with a wide array of new possibilities to participate, and governments offering a number of democratic innovations (mechanisms for consulting citizens or voters, not least with the use of digital solutions), the boundaries or limitations of political participation are still there, including lack of trust in political institutions and the absence of permanent high levels of engagement.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Olena Podolian is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University. Her research interests cover state politics and political participation in Eastern Europe.

Joakim Ekman is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University. His research interests cover public opinion, democratisation, and political participation.

Sergiu Gherghina is an Associate Professor in Comparative Politics at the Department of Politics, University of Glasgow. His research interests lie in party politics, legislative and voting behaviour, democratisation, and the use of direct democracy.