Appendix D Sample and Variable Construction for Analysis in Chapter 2

Summary

Ideally, this study would include all of the postcommunist cases. However, I excluded Serbia and Montenegro since the constitution was not adopted until 2003 near the end of this study. I also excluded Bosnia and Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan because it was not possible to collect the necessary data for those cases. Twenty-two cases are included in the study: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine.

The Dependent Variable

The dependent variable is measured as a country's Freedom Score (the average of the political rights and civil liberties components of the scale) in 2003. Alternative specifications of the model using a 0 (unconsolidated), 1 (consolidated), or 1 (unconsolidated), 2 (partially consolidated), or 3 (authoritarian) using logistic regression yield the same results but raise technical problems when calculating the robustness of the parameters.

Cultural Variables

WVS (measure of popular support for the old regime). To measure popular affect toward the old regime, I used the WVS question number 163 drawn from the 1999–2001 wave. The question was worded as follows:

People have different views about the system for governing this country. Here is a scale for rating how well things are going: 1 means very bad; 10 means very good.