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Popular participation under socialism
COMMENTS
AND COMMUNICATIONS
R.V. BURKS
Popular Participation Under Socialism*
In focusing his attention on the question of popular participation in decisionmaking in the European socialist states, Professor Jan Triska's principal conclusion is that there exists "introductory and still fragmentary evidence that there is citizen participation in community decisions *This is a revised version of comments presented by Professor Burks at the Stanford Conference on Political Development in Eastern Europe (see above). In addition, Professors Skilling and Finley made available their revised comments, from which we have here extracted their major points. H. Gordon Skilling, in his paper, "Change: Development or Retrogression?" pays particular attention to the contributions to the book of Andrzej Korbonski and of Paul Johnson. He criticizes Korbonski's review of the literature for its underestimation of the contribution made by West European specialists and in certain fields by East European scholars. In accounting for the inadequacies and gaps that remain in the literature as a whole, Skilling notes the problem of linguistic difficulties, "the absense of adequate documentation," as well as the "disproportionately large" contributions made to the field "by journalists and ex-offieials." He also, however, blames Western scholars for "premature attempts to apply theories which are still the subject of controversy in so-called mainstream comparative politics" and for "efforts at quantitative measurement where it is often neither possible nor meaningful." Skilling criticizes Korbonski for his over-optimism about developments in Eastern Europe and Johnson for his selections as the central criterion of development "the system's capacity to control its environment," noting, in the latter case, that Johnson "gives no adequate reason for regarding system capacity as more important than, say, individual freedom" and that, indeed, in his concern to measure performance and change within Communist systems, he makes "a determined effort to quantify the unquantifiable." David D. Finley, in his paper, "The International Dimension of Political Development in Eastern Europe," draws attention to "the great variety of definitions of development, which obstructs cumulative and comparative study and theory-building" and criticizes the view to be found in the final section of Political Development hi Eastern Europe "that there is very limited non-Soviet foreign impact in Eastern European political development." In the conclusion to his paper, Finley summarizes his major points as follows: (I) The definition of development that we employ is a determinant of the sort of international interface we posit. There are pitfalls into which the general literature has fallen in this
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in Eastern Europe. ''1 While it might be true that there is "citizen participation in community decisions in Eastern Europe," I contend that much of the evidence adduced by Triska in support of this conclusion could as well be used to buttress the contrary inference, namely that citizen participation in community decisions was, with the partial exception of Yugoslavia, in fact organized from above and involuntary in nature. In the published version of his paper Triska has expanded his evidence by the addition of new material from Hungary and Yugoslavia. I therefore propose to review his evidence a second time. This evidence is properly characterized as survey data and is of two kinds--that relating to elected deputies serving in county legislatures and that concerned with the activity of the mass of the citizenry at the county level. In four counties in Romania the American researcher Daniel Nelson found that deputies to the People's Council were selected, screened and nominated by the Socialist Unity Front, a mass organ of the Communist Party. Most deputies were Party members. The Party was overrepresented in the four Councils chosen for study by a factor of seven or eight to one. Deputies had also to fit a key, such that the composition of a given Council reflected with some precision the ethnic and social composition of the given constituency. Within that key Nelson found that deputies fell into three categories: the local elite, the needed, and the fillers. Do not Nelson's data suggest involuntary participation, the control of People's Council decisionmaking from above, as much as they do the voluntary participation of the citizenry? And is not the involuntary inference strengthened by Table 6.8 on p. 164, concerning the nature regard which need not and should not be allowed to distort our inquiry into the East European case. For several reasons it seems desirable to start with whatever self-described definition is operative in !he particular society under examination. (2) In identification of the specific elements of international interface, we are apt to arrive at distorted conclusions about non-Soviet foreign influences if we do not seriously endeavor to take account of successively mediated foreign inputs as well as the more readily observable direct ones. (3) The flows of external influence should be presumed to be two-directional. In different dimensions on influence, the "source" and "target" roles with respect to impact on political development may be reversed, even among the same pair of countries. Reciprocal dependencies exist. (4) The problems of data accessibility and data ambiguity restrict severely the prospect of confident social science explanation of foreign impacts in East European development on the basis of quantitative analysis of aggregatuble data. The situation calls for the coope~tive employment of social scientific methods and historical case studies. [Ed.] I. Triska's paper, the subject of the present essay, is entitled "Citizen Participation in Community Decisions in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and Poland" in Triska and Cocks, pp. 147-177 (p. 175).
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of the problems raised by citizens in their contacts with these deputies? In all four counties citizens made proposals of a public or personal character in 87-92 percent of the cases, and complaints of public or private nature in only 8-13 percent. Does not the overwhelming proportion of proposals, as opposed to complaints, suggest that citizens fear to say what they really think? The Polish scholars Sylwester Zawadski and Stefanie Dziecolowska interviewed voters on their relationship to the deputies elected to the People's Councils in the People's Republic. Altogether five tables (6.11; 6.12; 6.13; 6.14 and 6.16) are needed to summarize the results of these interviews. On the basis of this material Triska concludes that citizen opinion of deputies had improved over time and that these representatives tend to be viewed as "better educated, more responsive, more active and more influential" (p. 175). This would suggest that citizens felt that deputies were in some significant degree responsive to their interests. In Table 6.16 the Polish respondents of Zawadski and Dziecolowska declared that the three most desirable characteristics .of local deputies were honesty, familiarity with the problems of their constituencies and, thirdly, initiative. Could it not equally well be argued that these responses indicate that respondents in fact thought of their deputies as corrupt, ill-informed and lazy? Such an interpretation would draw strength from Table 6.11 in which between 70 and 87 percent of Polish respondents either had no opinion on the amount of activity displayed by their deputies, or felt that there had been no improvement in that respect, or thought that the amount of activity had declined. Indeed, according to Table 6.13, 45 to 53 percent of Polish respondents believed that for the legislative period 1969-1973 their deputies had been rather or entirely passive, or refused to offer an opinion. Table 6.12 tells us that between 66 and 76 percent of Polish respondents thought the influence exercised by their deputies was small, very small or hard to define while Table 6.14 indicates that between 46 and 71 percent of citizens had not contacted their deputies in the preceding year. Tables 6.13 and 6.14 also give us reason to believe that rural voters are much more critical of deputies than their urban counterparts and contact them much more frequently. Triska draws from this the conclusion that strong social ties exist between the deputies and their rural constituents. I would think this evidence could equally well be taken to mean that possession of private property enables citizens to stand up to local government even if it be autocratic and arbitrary. For Hungary there are also interviews with deputies to the People's
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Councils, conducted by Andrea Szego. In response to her questions, 85 percent of the deputies denied either that local interests existed or that it was necessary to integrate them at the Council; 97 percent had never openly disagreed with another deputy while 91 percent had never publicly differed with county officials; 46 percent of deputies had never taken the Council floor while 64 percent had never put a question; 31 percent consulted other deputies before speaking to the Council while 28 percent had called on influential personalities before speaking. Szego finds these results "absurd" and, on the basis of the fact that 90 percent of county officials (as distinguished from deputies to the county council) agreed with her that different localities possessed independent and conflicting interests, concluded that it was the county bureaucracy which assumed responsibility for interest aggregation at the local level. Is her conclusion the only reasonable inference? Would it not be equally sound to deduce from Szego's data that a) in any Socialist state there is relatively little aggregation because the underlying interests are not reconcilable with the existence of a Soviet-oriented one-Party government and b) such integration as does occur necessarily takes place at a very high level? So much for deputies. Let us now turn to citizens, always at the level of the county. We begin by noting that all the data concerning citizen participation, as distinguished, e.g., from citizen attitudes toward or solicitation of deputies, comes from Yugoslavia. Triska characterizes the Yugoslav state as aiming at socialist transformation by means of the widespread sociopolitical activity of its citizens and asserts that Yugoslavia has led other countries in the development of participatory institutions (p. 152). Perhaps what Triska meant to say was that Yugoslavia had been more inventive in the matter of popular participation than any other socialist state, a proposition with which, I think, we would all agree. Surely he cannot mean that the other socialist states have in part modeled their own practices on the Yugoslav. As I am sure he is aware, the workers' council, the most influential of the Yugoslav innovations in the field of popular participation, spread to other East European states only in revolutionary circumstances, to Hungary and Poland in 1956 and to Czechoslovakia in 1968. In each case the borrowed institutions were suppressed once the revolutionary upheaval had subsided. In this connection Triska cites a study by Sidney Verba and Goldie Shabad concerning workers' councils. The two researchers wished to learn whether these bodies constituted real participatory channels open to all the worker population, or whether instead they were dominated
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by the CPY or a technocratic elite. Verba and Shabad found that the councils are indeed genuine participatory channels, and this on the ground that, according to their samples, 40 percent of all workers in the socialist sector are members of such councils. The workers are thus provided with greater participatory opportunities than would be possible if self-governing bodies were limited to the political sphere. Secondly, workers' councils add a new and important dimension to political participation in Yugoslavia because council members do not need to belong to the CPY. Both these propositions seem to me to be non-sequiturs. Neither the fact that many workers have been council members nor the fact that Party membership i s not a prerequisite to such membership tells us anything about the extent of Party control of these bodies. If the purpose of the CPY in setting up workers' councils had been to "mobilize" their participation, would it not have helped to include large numbers of workers in them and to open membership to non-Party people? Verba and Shabad also looked at the patterns of citizen participation in workers' councils in the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia. They found them remarkably similar. They concluded that the superimposition of uniform political institutions on Yugoslav diversity had been successful. Could they not also have inferred fromsuch uniformity that the councils were dominated from a single center? Triska and Ana Barbic culled a list of official civic virtues from the Yugoslav constitution, the program of the League of Communists and the statutes of the Socialist Alliance, and checked out their list by means of interviews with Party members, Alliance members, and ordinary citizens, comparing citizen participation and civic attitudes. They reported that Party members "were found to lead the rest of the citizens in every civic attitudinal and behavior category examined." Party people "participated more in community politics in every single category than the rest of the legitimate voters." Triska and Barbic conclude that, "as far as citizen performance on the community level is concerned, Party affiliation is an important key to quality citizenship" (pp. 159, 162). Indeed it is! Regression on the variable elective factor, in which the holding of electoral office at the local level was correlated with such other variables as membership in a political organization, level of education, age, sex, income and the like (Table 6.5) produces a beta of 58 for membership in a political organization, after which comes education with a beta of 12, a distant second-best. F, or the ratio of explained to unexplained variation, is a highly significant 261.90262. I would go so far as to assert that Party membership is the key to
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"quality citizenship." Tables 6.6 and 6.7 show that Party members are highest in political interest, in political influence, and in participation in political life. Members of the Socialist Alliance are a poor second in all these respects while the category "others" is a dismal third. All this suggests that at the local level, it is the Party members and the well-educated who exercise influence. It does not seem t o me to be convincing evidence of significant mass participation at the local level. On the contrary. There remains the argument from distribution. Triska points to the regional differentiation among his Yugoslav returns at the local level. Table 6.3, Citizen Participation in Four Yugoslav Republics, differentiates between elective modes of participation (e.g., election to a workers' council) and communal modes (e.g., attendance at a preelection voters meeting). "The first group, the elective sector, displays participatory similarities across the four republics, while the second group, the communal sector, displays differences from republic to republic. This is probably because the common Yugoslav sociopolitical order reaches the elective sector.but not the communal sector" (p. 155). Application of the X 2 test to Table 6.3 for independence between republics and popular participation confirms these judgments. In the elective sector x 2 = 7.30, as against a theoretical x 2 at the .05 level of significance of 16.92, whereas in the communal sector x 2 is 42.88. We must raise the question whether in fact the results in the elective sector do not suggest the exercise of central control. Table 6.2, "Participation of Men and Women in Four Yugoslav Republics" (in percent) confirms the result of the communal sector provided by Table 6.3. X 2 is 281.46, as compared with a theoretical X 2 of 67 at the .05 level of significance. 2 It is a generally accepted fact that there has been participation at the local level in Yugoslavia, a participation encouraged by a regime which needed to establish a modus vivendi with its population, since expulsion from the Communist comity in 1948 had deprived that regime of the implicit guarantee which until then had underlain every European Communist state, i.e., that of Soviet military intervention should the situation ever get out of control. Thus in 1952 a Yugoslav law required 2. The application of ihe X 2 test was carded out by Professor John M. Mattila of the Department of Economics, Wayne State University. Mattila has served as my statistical adviser throughout. The elective sector data is included in Table 6.2 but is overwhelmed by the quantities of data from the communal sector. The enormous size of X 2 in the case of Table 6.2 is in part a function of the theoretical assumption that the participation of men and women should be equal. The conclusion is the same, however, if we calculate X 2 for men and women separately. In the cases of males it is 36.74 as against a theoretical X 2 at the .05 level of 32.7, whereas in the case of females it is 48.42 as against 32.7.
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that in elections to the popular assembly of the communal (township) assembly there had to be twice as many candidates as there were seats; if not the election had to be held again. At the Stanford conference I tried to argue that the most significant body of data concern,ing mas s participation in community decisionmaking in socialist Eastern Europe would not be provided by survey data but would be found in the returns of elections to the Yugoslav communal assemblies. This would give us some idea of what might happen in other socialist countries should their governments ever find themselves in a position to permit mass participation in decisionmaking at the local level. We do know that in general the Yugoslav voter did not vote for candidates to the township legislature, but against them. All candidates were either Party members or campaigned with the approval of the Party. As a rule, the voters simply crossed off the names of the Party die-hards, although on occasion they chose a local nationalist to represent them. Detailed analysis of the returns of the elections to the Yugoslav communal assemblies, if these could be obtained, would surely provide us with greater understanding of the extent and the importance of mass participation than the ambiguous survey data which Triska has so far been able to assemble. My argument is strengthened by Tables 7.5, 7.6 and 7.7 in Professor Lenard Cohen's captivating essay "Electoral Behavior in Yugoslavia" (pp. 178-216) which was written subsequently to the Stanford conference, perhaps as a consequence of my comments there. These three tables classify four republics and one province for the election of 1969 at the federal and republic levels according to a) the level of voter turnout b) the percentage of invalid votes and c) the number of districts in which there was more than one candidate for a given seat. On all three variables, Voivodina ranked at the top of the list, with greater voter turn-out, the highest percentage of invalid votes, and the largest number of competitive elections. On all these variables either Bosnia-Herzogovina or Macedonia fell to the bottom of the pile (see Table 1). TABLE 1. RANKORDEROF REPUBLICSYUGOSLAVGENERALELECTION, 1969
Voter Turn Out Voivodina Slovenia Croatia Bosnia Macedonia
Invalid Votes Voivodina Slovenia Macedonia Croatia Bosnia
Competitive Elections Voivodina Croatia Slovenia Macedonia Bosnia
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Now we know from a variety of evidence, including direct observations that voters in Yugoslav elections are not placed under direct compulsion to go to the polls, that they mark their ballots in secret, and that there is little of the synthetic holiday atmosphere which characterizes elections elsewhere in socialist Europe. We have so far assumed that Triska has continued to hold the same position as that which he developed at the Stanford conference, namely that there is in Eastern Europe popular participation in decisionmaking at the community level and that this participation is voluntary. In the interval between the conference and the submission of the manuscript of Political Development in Eastern Europe to Praeger Publishers, however, Triska appears to have modified his position. He now seems to argue that distinguishing between voluntary and governmentsponsored participation is a rather difficult business, that virtually all political systems involve a mix of voluntary and involuntary participation, and that the impact of participation (even when voluntary) on decisionmaking cannot be determined. Consequently, he does not, he says, raise the question in the present study of whether participation in Eastern Europe is "mobilized" or "autonomous." In this case, it would seem to me, it is incumbent upon Triska to make the argument that in Eastern Europe mobilized participation constitutes an important advance along the road of political development. Such a brief he does not offer. Yet there is also some indication that Triska has not in fact changed his mind about the voluntary nature of the political participation identified by his survey data. Witness the final paragraph of his essay. We plan to continue to pursue the study of political participation in Eastern Europe because we believe that developed Socialist systems have been adapting to the basic requirements of political development and adopting institutions of interest articulation. Without citizen participation in community decisions, we are persuaded, these polities would not be able to advance on their respective developmental paths and would in fact risk economic, social and political decay (p. 176). Is not this paragraph more a declaration of faith than a conclusion based on the evidence presented? Clearly Triska approaches the data with suppositions and assumptions different from my own. It may be of help to those who have had the patience to follow the argument this far if I present briefly the very different perspective from which I approach the extensive survey data which Triska has collected and evaluated. In my view the degree to which the Socialist governments of Eastern Europe can accept citizen participation in decisionmaking at the com-
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munity level is very limited. There exists between regimes and populations a deep gulf of hatred, fear and suspicion. The populations do not accept their governments as rightful, continuing to think of them as arbitrary, dictatorial and, above all, Soviet imposed. Public opinion polls have been taken in Western Europe among travelers front Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, most recently in 1976-1977. The travelers were asked how they would vote in the (unlikely) event of free elections in their respective homelands. They were told to suppose that, in addition to the Communist Party, democratic socialist, Christian democratic, peasant, and nationalist parties would be running. (See Table 2.) TABLE 2.
Country
Poland Czechoslovakia Hungary Romania
HYPOTIIETICALCOMMUNISTVOTE IN EASTERNEUROPE, 1976-1977
N
Percentage Voting Communist
1,798 1,485 1,368 1,254
4 5 5 II
Percentage Abstaining 9 15 3 2
Source: Radio Free Europe, Audience and Public Opinion Research Department, "Political Orientation and Listening to Western Radio in East Europe" (Munich, July 1977), 19 pp. No refugees were included in the sample and compensation had to be made for the fact that city dwellers, the intelligentsia, and'Party members were heavily over-represented.
The overwhelming majority of respondents voted either democratic socialist or Christian democratic, indicating a strong preference for a nonsocialist society. Thus I would argue that the regimes, rather than promoting mass participation in decisionmaking at any level, local or otherwise, as a rule fear such participation. For they believe it can assume significant proportions only on terms which risk creating a political landslide, such as took place in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For me the clincher is provided by the Yugoslav case. I have already referred to the double-length electOral lists employed in elections to the popular house of the communal assembly. At higher levels, as Cohen's chapter makes clear, the CPY experimented with giving the voters a choice between candidates in some districts. Western observers could hope that, with the passage of time, these percentages would be gradually increased until Yugoslavia had a system of semi-free elections. 3 3. R.V. Burks and S.A. Stankovic, "Jugoslawien auf dem Weg zu halbfrcien Wahlen?"
Osteuropa (Stuttgart), Vol. 17, No. 2/3 (February/March 1967), pp. 131-146.
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But this early optimism proved unrealistic. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 reintroduced a Soviet-style system of indirect elections. The republican legislature is now composed of delegations chosen by the communal assemblies from among their own number, and parliament itself by delegations selected by the republican legislatures from among themselves. At the lower levels there is now a third house, and at the parliament a delegation, chosen by the Party and its transmission belts (such as the Socialist Alliance). Furthermore, the delegations are not truly made up of delegates; they are rather composed of mandatories, who must refer back to those who chose them for instructions on important issues. Thus the Constitution of 1974 brought with it a revival of Party control over the electoral process at all levels. How do we account for the difference between the specifications of the Constitution of 1974 and the parliamentary system as it operated in 1969? I am inclined to believe that this difference reflects the Croatia crisis of 1971, involving, as it did, a political landslide comparable to that which took place in Czechoslovakia three years earlier. The events of 1971 brought the CPY face to face with the true attitude of the Croatian population toward the Communist regime and this knowledge caused Belgrade to set about revising the electoral system. And I would contend that if deviant Yugoslavia could not afford extensive mass-participation in decisionmaking the other Socialist states would be even less able to cope with it.
AND COMMUNICATIONS
R.V. BURKS
Popular Participation Under Socialism*
In focusing his attention on the question of popular participation in decisionmaking in the European socialist states, Professor Jan Triska's principal conclusion is that there exists "introductory and still fragmentary evidence that there is citizen participation in community decisions *This is a revised version of comments presented by Professor Burks at the Stanford Conference on Political Development in Eastern Europe (see above). In addition, Professors Skilling and Finley made available their revised comments, from which we have here extracted their major points. H. Gordon Skilling, in his paper, "Change: Development or Retrogression?" pays particular attention to the contributions to the book of Andrzej Korbonski and of Paul Johnson. He criticizes Korbonski's review of the literature for its underestimation of the contribution made by West European specialists and in certain fields by East European scholars. In accounting for the inadequacies and gaps that remain in the literature as a whole, Skilling notes the problem of linguistic difficulties, "the absense of adequate documentation," as well as the "disproportionately large" contributions made to the field "by journalists and ex-offieials." He also, however, blames Western scholars for "premature attempts to apply theories which are still the subject of controversy in so-called mainstream comparative politics" and for "efforts at quantitative measurement where it is often neither possible nor meaningful." Skilling criticizes Korbonski for his over-optimism about developments in Eastern Europe and Johnson for his selections as the central criterion of development "the system's capacity to control its environment," noting, in the latter case, that Johnson "gives no adequate reason for regarding system capacity as more important than, say, individual freedom" and that, indeed, in his concern to measure performance and change within Communist systems, he makes "a determined effort to quantify the unquantifiable." David D. Finley, in his paper, "The International Dimension of Political Development in Eastern Europe," draws attention to "the great variety of definitions of development, which obstructs cumulative and comparative study and theory-building" and criticizes the view to be found in the final section of Political Development hi Eastern Europe "that there is very limited non-Soviet foreign impact in Eastern European political development." In the conclusion to his paper, Finley summarizes his major points as follows: (I) The definition of development that we employ is a determinant of the sort of international interface we posit. There are pitfalls into which the general literature has fallen in this
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in Eastern Europe. ''1 While it might be true that there is "citizen participation in community decisions in Eastern Europe," I contend that much of the evidence adduced by Triska in support of this conclusion could as well be used to buttress the contrary inference, namely that citizen participation in community decisions was, with the partial exception of Yugoslavia, in fact organized from above and involuntary in nature. In the published version of his paper Triska has expanded his evidence by the addition of new material from Hungary and Yugoslavia. I therefore propose to review his evidence a second time. This evidence is properly characterized as survey data and is of two kinds--that relating to elected deputies serving in county legislatures and that concerned with the activity of the mass of the citizenry at the county level. In four counties in Romania the American researcher Daniel Nelson found that deputies to the People's Council were selected, screened and nominated by the Socialist Unity Front, a mass organ of the Communist Party. Most deputies were Party members. The Party was overrepresented in the four Councils chosen for study by a factor of seven or eight to one. Deputies had also to fit a key, such that the composition of a given Council reflected with some precision the ethnic and social composition of the given constituency. Within that key Nelson found that deputies fell into three categories: the local elite, the needed, and the fillers. Do not Nelson's data suggest involuntary participation, the control of People's Council decisionmaking from above, as much as they do the voluntary participation of the citizenry? And is not the involuntary inference strengthened by Table 6.8 on p. 164, concerning the nature regard which need not and should not be allowed to distort our inquiry into the East European case. For several reasons it seems desirable to start with whatever self-described definition is operative in !he particular society under examination. (2) In identification of the specific elements of international interface, we are apt to arrive at distorted conclusions about non-Soviet foreign influences if we do not seriously endeavor to take account of successively mediated foreign inputs as well as the more readily observable direct ones. (3) The flows of external influence should be presumed to be two-directional. In different dimensions on influence, the "source" and "target" roles with respect to impact on political development may be reversed, even among the same pair of countries. Reciprocal dependencies exist. (4) The problems of data accessibility and data ambiguity restrict severely the prospect of confident social science explanation of foreign impacts in East European development on the basis of quantitative analysis of aggregatuble data. The situation calls for the coope~tive employment of social scientific methods and historical case studies. [Ed.] I. Triska's paper, the subject of the present essay, is entitled "Citizen Participation in Community Decisions in Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and Poland" in Triska and Cocks, pp. 147-177 (p. 175).
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of the problems raised by citizens in their contacts with these deputies? In all four counties citizens made proposals of a public or personal character in 87-92 percent of the cases, and complaints of public or private nature in only 8-13 percent. Does not the overwhelming proportion of proposals, as opposed to complaints, suggest that citizens fear to say what they really think? The Polish scholars Sylwester Zawadski and Stefanie Dziecolowska interviewed voters on their relationship to the deputies elected to the People's Councils in the People's Republic. Altogether five tables (6.11; 6.12; 6.13; 6.14 and 6.16) are needed to summarize the results of these interviews. On the basis of this material Triska concludes that citizen opinion of deputies had improved over time and that these representatives tend to be viewed as "better educated, more responsive, more active and more influential" (p. 175). This would suggest that citizens felt that deputies were in some significant degree responsive to their interests. In Table 6.16 the Polish respondents of Zawadski and Dziecolowska declared that the three most desirable characteristics .of local deputies were honesty, familiarity with the problems of their constituencies and, thirdly, initiative. Could it not equally well be argued that these responses indicate that respondents in fact thought of their deputies as corrupt, ill-informed and lazy? Such an interpretation would draw strength from Table 6.11 in which between 70 and 87 percent of Polish respondents either had no opinion on the amount of activity displayed by their deputies, or felt that there had been no improvement in that respect, or thought that the amount of activity had declined. Indeed, according to Table 6.13, 45 to 53 percent of Polish respondents believed that for the legislative period 1969-1973 their deputies had been rather or entirely passive, or refused to offer an opinion. Table 6.12 tells us that between 66 and 76 percent of Polish respondents thought the influence exercised by their deputies was small, very small or hard to define while Table 6.14 indicates that between 46 and 71 percent of citizens had not contacted their deputies in the preceding year. Tables 6.13 and 6.14 also give us reason to believe that rural voters are much more critical of deputies than their urban counterparts and contact them much more frequently. Triska draws from this the conclusion that strong social ties exist between the deputies and their rural constituents. I would think this evidence could equally well be taken to mean that possession of private property enables citizens to stand up to local government even if it be autocratic and arbitrary. For Hungary there are also interviews with deputies to the People's
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Councils, conducted by Andrea Szego. In response to her questions, 85 percent of the deputies denied either that local interests existed or that it was necessary to integrate them at the Council; 97 percent had never openly disagreed with another deputy while 91 percent had never publicly differed with county officials; 46 percent of deputies had never taken the Council floor while 64 percent had never put a question; 31 percent consulted other deputies before speaking to the Council while 28 percent had called on influential personalities before speaking. Szego finds these results "absurd" and, on the basis of the fact that 90 percent of county officials (as distinguished from deputies to the county council) agreed with her that different localities possessed independent and conflicting interests, concluded that it was the county bureaucracy which assumed responsibility for interest aggregation at the local level. Is her conclusion the only reasonable inference? Would it not be equally sound to deduce from Szego's data that a) in any Socialist state there is relatively little aggregation because the underlying interests are not reconcilable with the existence of a Soviet-oriented one-Party government and b) such integration as does occur necessarily takes place at a very high level? So much for deputies. Let us now turn to citizens, always at the level of the county. We begin by noting that all the data concerning citizen participation, as distinguished, e.g., from citizen attitudes toward or solicitation of deputies, comes from Yugoslavia. Triska characterizes the Yugoslav state as aiming at socialist transformation by means of the widespread sociopolitical activity of its citizens and asserts that Yugoslavia has led other countries in the development of participatory institutions (p. 152). Perhaps what Triska meant to say was that Yugoslavia had been more inventive in the matter of popular participation than any other socialist state, a proposition with which, I think, we would all agree. Surely he cannot mean that the other socialist states have in part modeled their own practices on the Yugoslav. As I am sure he is aware, the workers' council, the most influential of the Yugoslav innovations in the field of popular participation, spread to other East European states only in revolutionary circumstances, to Hungary and Poland in 1956 and to Czechoslovakia in 1968. In each case the borrowed institutions were suppressed once the revolutionary upheaval had subsided. In this connection Triska cites a study by Sidney Verba and Goldie Shabad concerning workers' councils. The two researchers wished to learn whether these bodies constituted real participatory channels open to all the worker population, or whether instead they were dominated
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by the CPY or a technocratic elite. Verba and Shabad found that the councils are indeed genuine participatory channels, and this on the ground that, according to their samples, 40 percent of all workers in the socialist sector are members of such councils. The workers are thus provided with greater participatory opportunities than would be possible if self-governing bodies were limited to the political sphere. Secondly, workers' councils add a new and important dimension to political participation in Yugoslavia because council members do not need to belong to the CPY. Both these propositions seem to me to be non-sequiturs. Neither the fact that many workers have been council members nor the fact that Party membership i s not a prerequisite to such membership tells us anything about the extent of Party control of these bodies. If the purpose of the CPY in setting up workers' councils had been to "mobilize" their participation, would it not have helped to include large numbers of workers in them and to open membership to non-Party people? Verba and Shabad also looked at the patterns of citizen participation in workers' councils in the Republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Macedonia. They found them remarkably similar. They concluded that the superimposition of uniform political institutions on Yugoslav diversity had been successful. Could they not also have inferred fromsuch uniformity that the councils were dominated from a single center? Triska and Ana Barbic culled a list of official civic virtues from the Yugoslav constitution, the program of the League of Communists and the statutes of the Socialist Alliance, and checked out their list by means of interviews with Party members, Alliance members, and ordinary citizens, comparing citizen participation and civic attitudes. They reported that Party members "were found to lead the rest of the citizens in every civic attitudinal and behavior category examined." Party people "participated more in community politics in every single category than the rest of the legitimate voters." Triska and Barbic conclude that, "as far as citizen performance on the community level is concerned, Party affiliation is an important key to quality citizenship" (pp. 159, 162). Indeed it is! Regression on the variable elective factor, in which the holding of electoral office at the local level was correlated with such other variables as membership in a political organization, level of education, age, sex, income and the like (Table 6.5) produces a beta of 58 for membership in a political organization, after which comes education with a beta of 12, a distant second-best. F, or the ratio of explained to unexplained variation, is a highly significant 261.90262. I would go so far as to assert that Party membership is the key to
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"quality citizenship." Tables 6.6 and 6.7 show that Party members are highest in political interest, in political influence, and in participation in political life. Members of the Socialist Alliance are a poor second in all these respects while the category "others" is a dismal third. All this suggests that at the local level, it is the Party members and the well-educated who exercise influence. It does not seem t o me to be convincing evidence of significant mass participation at the local level. On the contrary. There remains the argument from distribution. Triska points to the regional differentiation among his Yugoslav returns at the local level. Table 6.3, Citizen Participation in Four Yugoslav Republics, differentiates between elective modes of participation (e.g., election to a workers' council) and communal modes (e.g., attendance at a preelection voters meeting). "The first group, the elective sector, displays participatory similarities across the four republics, while the second group, the communal sector, displays differences from republic to republic. This is probably because the common Yugoslav sociopolitical order reaches the elective sector.but not the communal sector" (p. 155). Application of the X 2 test to Table 6.3 for independence between republics and popular participation confirms these judgments. In the elective sector x 2 = 7.30, as against a theoretical x 2 at the .05 level of significance of 16.92, whereas in the communal sector x 2 is 42.88. We must raise the question whether in fact the results in the elective sector do not suggest the exercise of central control. Table 6.2, "Participation of Men and Women in Four Yugoslav Republics" (in percent) confirms the result of the communal sector provided by Table 6.3. X 2 is 281.46, as compared with a theoretical X 2 of 67 at the .05 level of significance. 2 It is a generally accepted fact that there has been participation at the local level in Yugoslavia, a participation encouraged by a regime which needed to establish a modus vivendi with its population, since expulsion from the Communist comity in 1948 had deprived that regime of the implicit guarantee which until then had underlain every European Communist state, i.e., that of Soviet military intervention should the situation ever get out of control. Thus in 1952 a Yugoslav law required 2. The application of ihe X 2 test was carded out by Professor John M. Mattila of the Department of Economics, Wayne State University. Mattila has served as my statistical adviser throughout. The elective sector data is included in Table 6.2 but is overwhelmed by the quantities of data from the communal sector. The enormous size of X 2 in the case of Table 6.2 is in part a function of the theoretical assumption that the participation of men and women should be equal. The conclusion is the same, however, if we calculate X 2 for men and women separately. In the cases of males it is 36.74 as against a theoretical X 2 at the .05 level of 32.7, whereas in the case of females it is 48.42 as against 32.7.
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that in elections to the popular assembly of the communal (township) assembly there had to be twice as many candidates as there were seats; if not the election had to be held again. At the Stanford conference I tried to argue that the most significant body of data concern,ing mas s participation in community decisionmaking in socialist Eastern Europe would not be provided by survey data but would be found in the returns of elections to the Yugoslav communal assemblies. This would give us some idea of what might happen in other socialist countries should their governments ever find themselves in a position to permit mass participation in decisionmaking at the local level. We do know that in general the Yugoslav voter did not vote for candidates to the township legislature, but against them. All candidates were either Party members or campaigned with the approval of the Party. As a rule, the voters simply crossed off the names of the Party die-hards, although on occasion they chose a local nationalist to represent them. Detailed analysis of the returns of the elections to the Yugoslav communal assemblies, if these could be obtained, would surely provide us with greater understanding of the extent and the importance of mass participation than the ambiguous survey data which Triska has so far been able to assemble. My argument is strengthened by Tables 7.5, 7.6 and 7.7 in Professor Lenard Cohen's captivating essay "Electoral Behavior in Yugoslavia" (pp. 178-216) which was written subsequently to the Stanford conference, perhaps as a consequence of my comments there. These three tables classify four republics and one province for the election of 1969 at the federal and republic levels according to a) the level of voter turnout b) the percentage of invalid votes and c) the number of districts in which there was more than one candidate for a given seat. On all three variables, Voivodina ranked at the top of the list, with greater voter turn-out, the highest percentage of invalid votes, and the largest number of competitive elections. On all these variables either Bosnia-Herzogovina or Macedonia fell to the bottom of the pile (see Table 1). TABLE 1. RANKORDEROF REPUBLICSYUGOSLAVGENERALELECTION, 1969
Voter Turn Out Voivodina Slovenia Croatia Bosnia Macedonia
Invalid Votes Voivodina Slovenia Macedonia Croatia Bosnia
Competitive Elections Voivodina Croatia Slovenia Macedonia Bosnia
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Now we know from a variety of evidence, including direct observations that voters in Yugoslav elections are not placed under direct compulsion to go to the polls, that they mark their ballots in secret, and that there is little of the synthetic holiday atmosphere which characterizes elections elsewhere in socialist Europe. We have so far assumed that Triska has continued to hold the same position as that which he developed at the Stanford conference, namely that there is in Eastern Europe popular participation in decisionmaking at the community level and that this participation is voluntary. In the interval between the conference and the submission of the manuscript of Political Development in Eastern Europe to Praeger Publishers, however, Triska appears to have modified his position. He now seems to argue that distinguishing between voluntary and governmentsponsored participation is a rather difficult business, that virtually all political systems involve a mix of voluntary and involuntary participation, and that the impact of participation (even when voluntary) on decisionmaking cannot be determined. Consequently, he does not, he says, raise the question in the present study of whether participation in Eastern Europe is "mobilized" or "autonomous." In this case, it would seem to me, it is incumbent upon Triska to make the argument that in Eastern Europe mobilized participation constitutes an important advance along the road of political development. Such a brief he does not offer. Yet there is also some indication that Triska has not in fact changed his mind about the voluntary nature of the political participation identified by his survey data. Witness the final paragraph of his essay. We plan to continue to pursue the study of political participation in Eastern Europe because we believe that developed Socialist systems have been adapting to the basic requirements of political development and adopting institutions of interest articulation. Without citizen participation in community decisions, we are persuaded, these polities would not be able to advance on their respective developmental paths and would in fact risk economic, social and political decay (p. 176). Is not this paragraph more a declaration of faith than a conclusion based on the evidence presented? Clearly Triska approaches the data with suppositions and assumptions different from my own. It may be of help to those who have had the patience to follow the argument this far if I present briefly the very different perspective from which I approach the extensive survey data which Triska has collected and evaluated. In my view the degree to which the Socialist governments of Eastern Europe can accept citizen participation in decisionmaking at the com-
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munity level is very limited. There exists between regimes and populations a deep gulf of hatred, fear and suspicion. The populations do not accept their governments as rightful, continuing to think of them as arbitrary, dictatorial and, above all, Soviet imposed. Public opinion polls have been taken in Western Europe among travelers front Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, most recently in 1976-1977. The travelers were asked how they would vote in the (unlikely) event of free elections in their respective homelands. They were told to suppose that, in addition to the Communist Party, democratic socialist, Christian democratic, peasant, and nationalist parties would be running. (See Table 2.) TABLE 2.
Country
Poland Czechoslovakia Hungary Romania
HYPOTIIETICALCOMMUNISTVOTE IN EASTERNEUROPE, 1976-1977
N
Percentage Voting Communist
1,798 1,485 1,368 1,254
4 5 5 II
Percentage Abstaining 9 15 3 2
Source: Radio Free Europe, Audience and Public Opinion Research Department, "Political Orientation and Listening to Western Radio in East Europe" (Munich, July 1977), 19 pp. No refugees were included in the sample and compensation had to be made for the fact that city dwellers, the intelligentsia, and'Party members were heavily over-represented.
The overwhelming majority of respondents voted either democratic socialist or Christian democratic, indicating a strong preference for a nonsocialist society. Thus I would argue that the regimes, rather than promoting mass participation in decisionmaking at any level, local or otherwise, as a rule fear such participation. For they believe it can assume significant proportions only on terms which risk creating a political landslide, such as took place in Czechoslovakia in 1968. For me the clincher is provided by the Yugoslav case. I have already referred to the double-length electOral lists employed in elections to the popular house of the communal assembly. At higher levels, as Cohen's chapter makes clear, the CPY experimented with giving the voters a choice between candidates in some districts. Western observers could hope that, with the passage of time, these percentages would be gradually increased until Yugoslavia had a system of semi-free elections. 3 3. R.V. Burks and S.A. Stankovic, "Jugoslawien auf dem Weg zu halbfrcien Wahlen?"
Osteuropa (Stuttgart), Vol. 17, No. 2/3 (February/March 1967), pp. 131-146.
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But this early optimism proved unrealistic. The Yugoslav constitution of 1974 reintroduced a Soviet-style system of indirect elections. The republican legislature is now composed of delegations chosen by the communal assemblies from among their own number, and parliament itself by delegations selected by the republican legislatures from among themselves. At the lower levels there is now a third house, and at the parliament a delegation, chosen by the Party and its transmission belts (such as the Socialist Alliance). Furthermore, the delegations are not truly made up of delegates; they are rather composed of mandatories, who must refer back to those who chose them for instructions on important issues. Thus the Constitution of 1974 brought with it a revival of Party control over the electoral process at all levels. How do we account for the difference between the specifications of the Constitution of 1974 and the parliamentary system as it operated in 1969? I am inclined to believe that this difference reflects the Croatia crisis of 1971, involving, as it did, a political landslide comparable to that which took place in Czechoslovakia three years earlier. The events of 1971 brought the CPY face to face with the true attitude of the Croatian population toward the Communist regime and this knowledge caused Belgrade to set about revising the electoral system. And I would contend that if deviant Yugoslavia could not afford extensive mass-participation in decisionmaking the other Socialist states would be even less able to cope with it.