Most member states of the United Nations are not democratic. Developments over the past decade have shown, however, that undemocratic regimes are increasingly unstable. The collapse of Communism offers an extraordinary opportunity to study the process of change from authoritarian to democratic regime. Democratic transitions are occurring simultaneously in more than a dozen Central and Eastern European countries. And, unlike transitions elsewhere, democratization is occurring simultaneously with the transition from non-market to market economy. Every one of the democratizing regimes faces major problems that threaten the establishment and maintenance of their representative institutions. This project investigates the evolution of political support for new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. A pooled, time series data set will be created from a series of 46 New Democracies Barometer surveys conducted over the past five years in the nations of Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Belarus and Ukraine. This data set will allow the testing of political-cultural, economic, and social theories of mass support for (or rejection of) democratic regimes.
