Class and Values in Postsocialist Transformation in Serbia

Abstract

Circumstances such as the blocked transition in Serbia during the 1990s—with the prolonged political and economic domination of former nomenklatura members, the economic collapse of the country and massive pauperization of the population, external isolation, and so on—may result in the perseverance of old values among many social groups whose position has thus been extremely worsened. In this case, a gap between new norms and old values may be created, which we call value/normative dissonance. This gap is likely to cause a strong inter- and intraclass value inconsistency. In this article, we analyze the spread of dominant value orientations among social classes in the present postsocialist system in Serbia. The analysis is based on the data obtained in the South-East European Social Survey Project (SEESSP) in which 2,997 respondents participated in December 2003/January 2004. We analyze the spread of two pairs of conflicting value orientations: (1) political liberalism vs. authoritarian collectivism, and (2) market liberalism vs. redistributive statism. We also check intraclass value consistency. The influence of possible normative/value dissonance upon the democratization and market transformation of Serbia is evaluated. We compare the results of our analysis with the findings of an analysis of data obtained in an earlier survey, Change in Class Structure and Mobility in Serbia, in which 3,660 respondents participated in 1989. Our decision to deal with the two value orientations mentioned above was based on a factor analysis of a number of statements hypothetically related to different value systems and was confirmed by principal components analysis (PCA). Based on these results, we form scales to represent political and market liberalism, on one side, and authoritarian, redistributive statism, on the other. In the third step, we use analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the scale scores to describe value consistency among and within the social classes.