Conferences

This paper is an extension of my paper “Decomposition of Long-Term Changes in Political Opinions According to Group-Specific Markov Processes” (Tomescu-Dubrow, ASK 2008). In it I used two sources of longitudinal data for Poland, POLPAN and POLTEST, to test the assumption that political opinion change through time is not entirely due to some universal and time-constant processes; rather, it depends on the initial conditions in a person’s state. Information on Poles’ evaluations of the past socialist regime available for repeated intervals, and over a sufficiently long time period—ten years—allowed me to decompose long-term changes in assessment of socialism into short-term change, and the reliability of responses according to group-specific Markov processes. Results demonstrated that Markov-type processes do not have significant explanatory power for long-term change in opinions about socialism. Substantively, this meant that the ‘subjective’ legacy of the past, namely peoples’ views of the former regime, matters. The current project extends the analyses by adding information from the 2008 wave of the POLPAN survey, and by dealing with the causal interpretation of this type of results. Focus will be on different processes within different groups.