Conference Paper

For some time, scholars have argued that Western and Eastern Europe differ in terms of the political culture of their unified political communities. Since all the available evidence indicates that political culture is crucial to the economic performance and political stability of individual states, it is important to detect the drivers behind the basic beliefs of citizens, two and a half decades after the fall of communism. The Relevant World Values Survey and the European Values Survey reports repeatedly confirmed that whilst the support for democracy is strong among the citizens of the former communist Eastern Europe, their belief in the vital components of a democratic political culture is weak. It could be argued that some post-communist countries have been less successful in building the “moral infrastructure of democracy” due to the resilient democratic values deficit, based partially upon the political and economic attitudes from the past. In a separate section of this chapter, the results of a survey conducted on a group of students from the Republic of Macedonia are presented and their replies on the dichotomy between autocratic and democratic values are analyzed. By assessing the opinions of the students who had not been born when communism was still alive, it has been concluded that a substantial cultural shift will have to take place if the current system of formal democracy is to be replaced by a more effective one.