Membership in Civic Association in Central and Eastern Europe: a Longitudinal Analysis

This paper focuses on the trends in civic participation in ten post-communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe, trying to see which mechanism led to changes in the pattern of civic participation during the post-communist period - intra-cohort change or cohort replacement. The analyses are based on the three successive waves of European Values Survey, collected in 1990, 1999 and 2008. Using the cohort decomposition analysis, the social change is partitioned in changes due to the replacement of the older cohort socialized in an environment less favourable to civic participation and to the changes produced by the transformation in the social context and by individual aging. During the last two decades, the rate of civic participation has decreased in all the countries included in the analysis, with the exception of Slovenia. This negative evolution is due to the intra-cohorts changes and it is quite likely the outcome of the economic crises occurred during the transition to the market economy and of the inappropriate functioning of the democratic institutions. The cohort replacement exerts a significant positive effect on most countries, but its contribution to the total social change is weaker than the effect of the intra-cohort change. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]