Communist socialization and post-communist economic and political attitudes

• A cross-national approach to APC analysis with historically defined cohorts.
• Analysis of effect of communist exposure on attitudes towards democracy and market.
• More exposure to communism has an indoctrinating, not resistance, effect.
• Early childhood exposure is more influential that adult exposure but both matter.
• Catholics & Protestants more likely to resist communist imprinting than Orthodox.

We investigate the effect of individual exposure to communism on support for democracy and capitalism. We examine whether this effect varies across different types of communism, at different periods of people's lives, in different countries, and across different types of individuals. To do so, we propose a modified approach to solving the APC problem that relies on (a) survey data from multiple countries (b) historically defined cohorts and (c) variation in the time-periods related to these cohorts across countries. We provide a series of robustness tests for the method, and show that results are not very sensitive to panel structure. We conclude that generally communism had an indoctrinating effect, with more exposure to communism resulting in more opposition to democracy and capitalism.