RELIGIOSITY AND NATIONALISM IN POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES: A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH
RELIGIOSITY AND NATIONALISM IN POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES: A LONGITUDINAL APPROACH

Summary/Abstract: The paper focuses on how the effect of nationalism on religiosity varies over time in post-communist countries from Central and Eastern Europe. A religious revival in the area is already documented for the first decade of the post-communist transition, by previous researches. The paper testes two hypotheses: the increasing in impact of nationalism on religiosity during the first period of post-communist transformation and the diminishing of impact of nationalism on religiosity during the second decade. The hypotheses were tested on data provided by three different waves of European Values Study / Word Values Survey (1990, 1999 and 2008), using Changing Parameters Model proposed by Firebaugh (1997). The analyses were carried out on 11 countries from Central and Eastern Europe. The results suggest that in the impact of nationalism on religiosity boost in the very beginning of transition period and it was already higher during the first survey. The later evolution was rather a descendent one, even during the first decade of transformation. The data support the second hypothesis for eight out of eleven countries, showing that in the second decade the effect of religiosity on nationalism vanished or significantly decreased.

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