The Attitudinal Legacy of Communist Labor Relations

This study of workers' attitudes compares data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) surveys for former communist countries in Europe with ISSP data for Western countries over the period 1987–93, which covers the beginning of the transition to a market economy for the former communist countries. Consistent with their hypothesis that communist-run economies left an attitudinal “legacy,” the authors find that the citizens of former communist countries evinced a greater desire for egalitarianism, less satisfaction with their Jobs, and more support for strong trade unions and state intervention in the Job market and economy than did Westerners. Over the course of the period studied, however, residents of the former communist European countries perceived sizable increases in occupational earnings differentials, and they adjusted their views of the differentials that “ought to#x201D; exist in their economies in the direction of greater inequality.

Labor relations in communist economies has diverged historically from that in free market economies. Under communism nearly all workersjoined official "transmission belt" unions that operated as an arm of the state rather than as independent representatives of workers. The state set wages, prices, and enterprise budgets in ways that created huge job vacancies with no open unemployment, and produced low real wages and narrow skill and sectoral pay differentials. These practices resulted in inefficient allocations of labor (Freeman 1992). At the same time, there was a social ethos favoring egalitarianism (Burawoy 1985;Kornai 1980). While most analysts believe that communist labor practices produced demoralized and disgruntled workers, there have been no comparisons of worker attitudes in historically communist economies and market economies using comparable survey instruments that document or test this expectation.' To what extent do workers in traditionally communist societies differ from workers in the West in their attitudes toward working conditions, wage inequality, job satisfaction, and the role of unions and the state in determining labor market outcomes? To what extent can any observed differences be attributed to the "legacy" of the communist past? How have attitudes changed during the transition to a market economy?
In this study we use data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) to try to answer those questions.2 Each year the ISSP focuses on a particular topic. The topics most relevant to our area of inquiry are "social inequality" (the 1992 and 1987 modules), "work orientation" (the 1989 module, supplemented by preliminary evidence from the 1993 module),3 and "the role of government" (1990) 1 We have information on seven ex-communist countries: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Russia. Most of these countries reported in the 1992 module. For Hungary and Poland, we Germany. Shiller et al. (1991) compared random samples of the Moscow and New York populations in their attitudes toward free markets. In another paper, Shiller et al. (1992) studied individual attitudes in three ex-communist countries-Russia, Ukraine, and East Germany-and compared them with individual attitudes in three advanced capitalist economies-the United States, Japan, and West Germany. In addition, Rose and Haerpfer (1994) contrasted attitudes toward the transformation of ex-communist societies, and Frentzel- Zagorska and Zagorski (1993) examined Polish opinion concerning privatization and state interventionism.
2The ISSP is a continuing program of cross-national collaboration carried out by a group of national research institutes, each of which conducts an annual survey of social attitudes and values. It brings together pre-existing national social science surveys and coordinates their research to produce a common set of questions asked in identical form in the participating nations. 'We refer to this evidence as preliminary because it is taken from means for the survey published by the ISSP. The computer files were not available for analysis at the time of our study. 4For earlier work using these data, see Blanchflower and Freeman (1992) and Blanchflower andOswald (1989, 1994). have information in several ISSP modules, which allows us to analyze changes in labor outcomes and attitudes over time. Appendix Table Al reports the number of responses by country and year.

Measuring The Communist Legacy in the Labor Market
Like any other lengthy historical experience, decades of communist rule in eastern Europe and Russia have arguably left a "legacy" of effects on workers and the job market that successor market economies must deal with. There is a potential labor market outcome legacy: narrow wage distributions; distinct work practices (Haraszti 1978;Burawoy and Lukacs 1992); relations with management that diverge from those in historically capitalist economies (Burawoy 1985;Kornai 1980); high rates of union membership in unions dominated by communist regimes; dependence of firms on the state; and enterprise provision of many social benefits. In addition, there is a potential "attitudinal legacy" in terms of workers' views about institutions and markets due to experience under communism and decades of communist propaganda.
To be sure, institutions, labor market outcomes, and attitudes are likely to differ among ex-communist countries,just as they do among Western countries. Poland and Hungary differ in the nature of their former communist systems and in the characteristics of their movement to a market economy, just as Sweden and Norway differ from the United States and the United Kingdom. National differences notwithstanding, however, the operative hypothesis of this study is that the communist experience was sufficiently similar to leave an identifiable common legacy affecting outcomes and views of the labor market in the ex-communist states. This is a hypothesis about cross-national differences due to comparable experiences, and as such is subject to the problems of assessment common to such analyses (Kohn 1989).
A priori, what form might this legacy take? By imposing narrow wage distributions through governmental fiat, and pressing an egalitarian ethos, communism should have influenced attitudes toward earnings inequality and government intervention-s in labor market outcomes. We anticipate three differences in attitudes between workers in ex-communist and Western countries: (1) employees in ex-commlunist countries will be more favorable toward narrow wage distributions and government interventions to attain them; (2) given the persistence of poor working conditions in former comimunist countries (in which workers were deprived of normal market modes of responding to such conditions, having neither the "exit" option of findcling employment outside the state-run sector nor the "voice" option of forming free trade unions), employees in those countries will evince less job satisfaction than workers in Western countries; and (3) workers in excommnunist countries will have more positive attitudes toward free trade unions than do workers in the West. In addition, assuming that attitudes toward inequality responcd to actual levels of inequality, we expect that the views in ex-commutnist countries toward wage differences will change over time, as competitive markets produce greater inequality.
We examinie the ISSP for evidence of such "legacies" in two ways. First, we conitrast responses to ISSP questions (both outcome and attitude items) in ex-communist countries with those in Western couIntries, controlling for respondents' individual characteristics. This is effectively an exercise in estimating country dummy variables: the test of the legacy hypothesis is whether there is a common pattern aimiong the dumnmy variables for ex-commun-ist countries. Second, we probe the correlates and investigate possible objective causes for any observed differences. This is an effort to explain differences between excomrmunist countries and Western countries in terms of actual or perceived labor market factors.
In attitude surveys, the valicdity and reliability of measures are invariably of some concern. Because none of our data are longitudinal, we cannot determine whether the same person would respond similarly to the same quiestion in a second interview, which would give us test-retest measurement errors. This does not mean, hi Lwever, that we have no way to assess the qutality of responses. We perform three checks on individual respon-ses: (1) we examine whether individual responses fit a patternfor instance, whether workers who are completely satisfied with theirjobs also express inore willingness thanothers to work without pay; (2) we relate individual responses to objective characteristics: are workers who want a more nlarrow wage distribution high or low in that distribution?; and (3) we investigate whether people with the same char-acteristics give cornparable respon-ses in different surveys. The resuilts of all of these checks stuggest that responses on the ISSP are consistent. 5

Characteristics of ex-Communist and Western Data Samples
For our cross-section analyses of workers in ex-commuinist economies anid market economies, we rely heavily onthe 1992 ISSP, which provides data on seven ex-commuinist countries (Builgaria, the Czeclh Re-puLblic, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Slovenlia) sLupplemllenited by the 1993 ISSP. For our analysis of changes over time, we use the 1987 anid 1992 ISSP surveys, which contain comparable information for Hungary and Poland.
None of these data files are ideal. Relatively few 5As examples of otir checks, we fotund that 24% of those completely satisfied with their job agreed strongly that they wotuld work without pay, compared to less thani 10% of those who were dissatisfied, 13% who were nieither satisfied nior dissatisfied, anid so on. Also, we confirmed that greater inequality was favoreid by the more eduicated (see Table 2) anid those with high earninigs (table available fi-om auithois oIn requiest); we fotni,d from a comnparison of respoinses oIn simllilar qtuestioIns in 1987 ancl 1992, that years of schooling had a comparable effect in both years (see coefficients reported in Table 2); antc we confir-med that age, sex, an-id marital stattus also hadl comparable effects in both years. In addition, we explored inrlividuial clifferences in responses to the Table 7 questions andcl found that people with similar demographic characteristics respoinded in the same (lirection-. workers in the ISSP for the ex-communist countries report being in the private sector, which prevents us from making inferences about differences between those employees, who will constitute the bulk of future employment, and employees of stateowned firms. For our comparison group we have data from eleven OECD countries in 1987 or 1992 (Australia, Austria, Canada, Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, West Germany, and the United States) plus information on other variables of interest on six other countries (Israel, Japan, the Philippines, Southern Ireland, Spain, and Sweden) in other years of the ISSP. 6 We compare the former communist states with a set of Western countries rather than with a single one because differences between the eastern European countries and any particular Western country, such as the United States, could be due to the distinct characteristics of that Western country rather than to the legacy of communist labor practices vis-A-vis market economies in general. The danger of this approach, however, is that we may miss important contrasts between more narrowly defined groups, say between East Germany and West Germany. To deal with this danger, we present all calculations with individual country dummies before giving broader excommunist versus traditional market economy contrasts.

Attitudes Toward Inequality
As a starting point for analyzing differences in views toward inequality between persons in ex-communist economies and those in traditionial capitalist economies, we examined responses to the 1992 ISSP 6In a number of cases the data were collected in a different year from that reported. For example, Great Britain did not conduct a survey in 1988; the reported data were collected in 1989. Half the 1989 respondents were asked the questions from the 1988 ISSP and the other half weire asked the questions from the 1989 compoInen1t. In a few cases, such as Italy in 1988, 1989, 1990and Austria in 1987and 1988, the same group of riespondents wer-e asked the two years of questions. question: "Are differences in income in this country too large?" The difference between the ex-communist countries and the West is stark.7 Save for Italy, there is only the barest overlap in the survey responses. On average, 52% of respondents in the ex-communist countries expressed a strong belief that income differences were too large, compared to 30% of respondents in Western countries. Most striking, perhaps, are the differences between citizens in the ex-communist countries and those in Scandinavia, where incomes are more equally distributed than in most capitalist economies and where the social democratic egalitarian ethos is strong. In Sweden and Norway, just 23-24% of respondents believed income differences were too large.
We pursue the anialysis of differences in views toward inequality across countries using two questions on the 1987 and 1992 ISSPs on pay by occupation. In those years the ISSP asked individuals in different countries "what people earn each year" and what they "ought to earn" in 11 occupations. In each of the two years, seven of these occupational groups were identical, while four were different.8 We used the reported figures on what people earn to estimate a measure of "perceived differentials" and used the reported figures on what they ought to earn to estimate "appropriate differentials."' We calculated from these re-7The percentages agreeing strongly that differeinces in income were too large were as follows: Bulgaria, 85%; East Geirmainy 61 %; Russia, 59%; Slovenia, 48%; Poland, 42%; Czech Republic, 36%, Hungary 35%; Italy, 53%; Great Britain, 37%, Austria, 35%, West Germany, 31%, New Zealand, 30%, United States, 28%, Canada, 26%; Sweden1, 24%; Norway, 23%; and Australia, 18%.
'TThe occupational categories available in both years were doctor, small shopkeeper, chairman of large national company, skilled factory worker, farm worker, unskilled factory worker, and cabinet minister. In 1987 the remaining foui categories were bricklayer, bank clerk, secretary, anid bus driver, whei-eas in 1992 they were replaced by solicitor, shop assistaInt in a depai-tmeint store, owner/manager of a factory, and appeal court judge.
'}Summaries of the nmean earnings by country in the two categories are reported in a data appendix that is available on request from the authors.
spouses the standard deviation of the natural log of the averages reported in these appendix tables for each country. The resultant statistic does not measure what survey respondents believe occupational differentials should be. They were not asked about occupational differentials per se, but rather about occupational pay. But implicit in statements about pay for different occupations are statements about differentials in pay. For instance, someone who reports that the chairman of a large national company earns or should earn X while a bricklayer earns or should earn Y is telling us about the differentials he perceives to exist or believes should exist. The legacy hypothesis suggests that persons in ex-communist countries should differ from those in capitalist countries both in the occupational differentials they perceive to exist and in the differentials they believe to be fair (that is, the differentials they believe "ought to" exist). Table 1 gives the standard deviations of the natural log of earnings from the 1987 and 1992 ISSP modules.'0 In 1987, workers in the two ex-communist countries for which we have data, Hungary and Poland, perceived smaller occupational differentials than did workers in most Western countries. The unweighted country mean for Hungary and Poland in the standard deviation of perceived differentials is, for example, 0.57, which falls considerably short of the 0.81 for workers in the West and the 10We also calculated the standard deviation of the log of wages or (where wages were unavailable) earnings in reporting countries from the 1987 and 1992 ISSP surveys. The only ex-communist couLntry for which earnings data exist for 1987 is Hungary: its measure of inequality is below that of all the capitalist countries except West Germany. For the year 1992, we have data on all of the ex-communist countries in our sample. In the ex-communist sample, Hungary turns out to be among the low inequality countries, while Russia, Slovenia, and Poland have higher standard deviations of log earnings. Among the capitalist countries, Norway and Italy join Germany as low inequality countries. Overall, inequality was still higher in 1992 in the ex-communist countries. 0.85 for those in the four large ex-communist countries for which we have data in both 1987 and 1992 (the United States, West Germany, Great Britain, and Italy). The second column in the table shows a similar ex-communist/Western difference in the pattern of occupational pay differentials that people believe ought to exist: persons in the ex-communist states favor smaller differentials than persons in the West. In the 1987 data, the average standard deviation of the natural log of earnings perceived to be fair is 0.40 for Hungary and Poland, compared to an average of 0.60 in the capitalist countries.
By contrast, in 1992, when the transitionto a market economy was under way, persons in Hungary and Poland and in the other ex-communist countries for which we have data reported very different perceptions of pay differentials. The differentials they perceived were wider than those perceived by respondents in the Western countries in the ISSP (which includes Norway, with an extremely narrow wage distribution) and similar to those perceived by workers in the big ex-communist countries. Similarly, what Hungarians ancd Poles believed "ought to" be paid to workers in different occupations was much greater in 1992 than in 1987. Because the "ought to" differentials are also high for workers in the other ex-communist countries, the unweighted mean of the standard deviation of the natural log of earnings perceived to be fair is in the same range for employees in the ex-communist countries as for those in the West: it is slightly higher than the unweighted mean for all Western countries (inclusive of Norway) and slightly lower than the mean for the larger excommunist countries.
In both years, and in all countries, excommunist and capitalist, there seems to be a relation between the distribution of perceived pay and the distribution of pay perceived to be fair. The "ought to" differentials are invariably smaller than the perceived differentials, suggesting that workers may form their views of the appropriate pay by occupation on the basis of perceived pay, scaling the latter down by somne amount. Perceived differentials increase between 1987 and 1992, and so too do "ought to" differentials. Countries with high perceived differentials have high "ought to" differentials.
To explore the relation between "ought to" and perceived occupational pay, we calculated individual-specific measures of perceived and "ought to" occupational earnings differentials. Specifically, for each person in the samples, we calculated the standard deviation of that respondent's perception of actual earnings across occupations and the standard deviation of the earnings he or she believes "ought to" be paid across those occupations. These statistics differ from the statistics in Table 1. In Table 1 we calculated standard deviations for the natural log of mean earnings across occupations within a country (one value per country).
Our new statistic is based on the standard deviation of the natural log of earnings across occupations reported by each individual (one value for each individual).
We then estimated ordinary least squares regressions of these individual measures of perceived and desired inequality on personal characteristics, such as schooling, age, gender, and country dummy variables, with the United States as the reference group. By including variables for individual characteristics, we perform ceteris paribus comparisons of people in the ex-communist countries and in the West and examine the relation between personal characteristics and perceived/ "ought to" pay differentials. Since the group of countries covered in 1987 differs from that covered in 1992, we provide separate calculations for the two years. To summarize the ex-communist countries/Western countries differentials of concern, we also estimated a restricted model in which we replaced the individual country dummies with the single summary dummy variable that takes the value 1 for an ex-communist country and 0 for the Western countries. Finally, to test inferences about changes over time, we further estimated ouir model on a pooled sample limited to countries that appear in both years. Table 2 presents the basic cross-section regression results. There are three findings. First, consistent with Table 1, column 1 of Table 2 shows that, controlling for personal characteristics, in 1987 persons in ex-communist countries perceived lower occupational pay differentials than did respondents in the West, save for those in Australia. Column 2 shows that the Hungarians and Poles also believed that the differentials "ouight to" be less than did respondents in the West, including the Australians. The coefficients on schooling further show that persons with more potential earnings power also perceived greater differentials and were more likely to believe that such differentials were fair.
Column 3 adds the standard deviation of the natural log of perceived differenitials to the "ought to" equation. What does this tell us? It shows what people in different countries believe the spread in occupational pay should be, conditional on the spread they perceive. For instance, the coefficient on the dummy for Hungary of -.0574 shows that, taking account of the lower perceived spread in earnings, Hun-garians still desired a smaller spread than did persons in the excluded United States.
The coefficients onthe stan-dard deviation of perceived earn-ings are overwhelmingly statistically significan-t. This implies that people's attitudes toward the spread of earnings that "ought to" be paid are formed not in a vacuum but in fact depen-d upon what they see in the marketplace. The 0.62 coefficient implies, roughly, that iindividuals believe the distribution of occupation-al diffeirentials in their couintry "oought to" be scaled down from what they perceive it to be by a factor of 0.62.
For example, if the standard deviation of the. natural log of perceived occuipational earnings was 0.64 (the mean value in our sample in 1992), the estimated coefficient implies, ceteris paribus, individuals would like earnings differentials that would yield a standard deviation of 0.57 (the standard deviation of perceived pay of 0.92 multiplied by 0.62). Conditional on perceived differentials, persons in Hun-gary and Poland favored a modestly moire egalitarian distribution than those in Western countries: the ex-communist dummy variable in the restricted regressioin isjust-.02, though highly significant.
Columns 3-6 of the table confirm the more complicated pattern for 1992. Perceived differentials vary con-siderably, with dummies for the ex-communist countries showing that woirkers in most countries perceived less in-eqtuality than did persons in the United States (the big exception being Russia), but more than in Norway. The summary measure shows that the excommunist dummy is a positive . 10, due in large part to the low perceived inequality in Norway among the western couintries. The regression-for the spread in earniiings that ";ought to" be paid in columlnIi 5 shows a similar pattern, but in this case workers in all the ex-communist countries, including Russia, have lower "ought to" differentials than in the United States. The coefficient on the dummy variable for ex-commtiumst coun-tries in the stummary regression is 0.0277.
This finding might lead somie to believe that people in the ex-communist countries have less desire for narrowing pay differentials than-do people in the West. But our hypotlhesis is that egalitarian desires are tempered by perceived market differentials. Thuils the appropriate equation to assess the desires is equatioin (6). Here the dummy variables for the ex-communiist countries are smaller than those in all Western countries except Norway, anld the dummy variable in the summary regression is -0.029, with a t-statistic of 8.19. The similarity to the 1987 coefficien-t is impres- Jb; z ;:~~~~~~~~~1 C\4 ) oo C) "t 0 0 't, C) C) C, 0 5} n s ? .
_~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ sive, suggesting that the column (3) and (6) results represent a more stable pattern than the column (2) and (5) results. How do the findings square with those reported earlier based on the broader question of the percentages who agree strongly that differences in income are too large? If the responses to the occupational earnings questions and the responses to the "Are differences in income too large?" question are capturing the same attitudes, we would expect that including the responses to the latter in the equations for the spread of "ought to" pay should greatly weaken the dummy variables for the ex-communist countries. Column 7 shows that this is indeed the case. The coefficients on virtually all of the country dummy variables decline, and the summary measure for excommunist states drops to a bare -0.0055, which is not significantly different from zero. The underlying reason for the negative coefficient in column (6) is thus the broad desires for lower income differences.
Overall, the implication of Table 2 is that individuals in the ex-communist countries more strongly desired a narrowing of pay differentials than did those in the West, but that they substantially tempered that desire in the light of rising differentials during the transition to a market economy. The data on which the regressions reported in Table 2 are based, however, differ across the two years both in the mix of countries included and in the set of occupations for which earnings were reported. To make a firmer assessment of changes over time, and guarantee that any measured changes over time are not due to changes in the composition of our samples, we formed a pooled sample of observations for individuals in the ex-communist countries and for those in the Western countries that reported in both years. This sample, which contains just two ex-communist countries, Hungary and Poland, and just four Western countries, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and West Germany, provides a relatively clean picture of changes over time.
To capture the changes, we include dummy variables for interactions between country and year. The dummy variable for 1992 is included to capture actual changes across the years as well as differences in the samples of occupations between the two years. Table 3 gives our pooled regression results. The dummy variables for Hungary and Poland in column 1 show that in 1987 perceived differentials were lower in those two countries than in the West. The 1992 country interaction terms show that the differentials rose by about 0.20 natural log points over the five-year period. The regression coefficients for the 1992 interactions also show rises in perceived differentials in Wester-n countries, but by smaller magnitudes. To obtain the perceived differentials in 1992, we must sum the coefficients on country and country-year interactions. The results of that analysis show that perceived differentials in Hungary and Poland differed little from those in Great Britain and Germany, were smaller than in the United States, and were larger than in Australia.
The spread of "ought to" differentials in column 2 reveals a general upward trend in the differentials respondents believe "ought to" be paid: the 1992 interaction terms are positive. The upward trend is weaker in Hungary but not in Poland than in the Western countries: the coefficients on the country-year dummy variable of .0473 for Hungary suggest a smaller perceived increase than in the United States (the 1992 dummy of .0869 reflects the United States) or in the other Western countries, whereas for Poland, the .0997 coefficient is comparable to that for the United States and larger than those for other Western countries. Table  3, where we estimate the coefficients on country dummy variables, conditional on the spread in perceived differentials. In 1987 people in both Poland and Hungary had a lower spread in "ought to" differentials than those in the United States or Australia. But their spread is similar to that among people in Great Britain and Germany. The sum of the coefficients on the country terms and the country-year interaction terms for 1992 shows that the spread in pay across occupations that was believed to Notes: Equation-s also inlclude five age clummies aindl a geincler dulmImly. The exclutdlec1 category is the Utnitecl States. Because the schooling variable was Imlissing foi Polanri, in all cases for that collnltIry we imn1puted the imleanl for the other couintries.
be "fair" was smaller for Hungarians and Poles than for Americans or other Westerners, conditional on the perceived spread. We conclude that respondents in the excommunist countries had a greater preference for narrowing occupational earnings, conditional on perceived earnings, thani did Westerners, but that the difference in preferences diminished greatly as perceived differentials widened in those countries more rapidly than they did in most Western countries.

Job Satisfaction, Happiness and the Role of Trade Unions
Because Hungary has been in the ISSP since 1986, we have available more information on outcomes and attittudes for that country than for the other ex-commiinist countries. The 1989 ISSP asked questions about job satisfaction and working conditions. The 1990 ISSP asked questions about unionism. Although we are leery about generalizing from a single country to all excommunist countries, the differences in attitudes between Hungarian employees and those in Western countries do provide insight into the potential legacy of communism. They allow us to examine the widely held view that communist labor relations practices produced less desirable workplace conditions and less satisfied workers than free market practices. (See Haraszti 1978; for a contrasting view, however, see Burawoy and Lukacs 1992.) Respondents to the 1989 ISSP were asked the generic (and widely used) job satisfaction question, "How satisfied are you in yourjob?" Questions aboutjob satisfaction are difficult to interpret due to the subjective nature of the variable and problems in making interpersonal comparisons (Freeman 1978).
Still, econometric analyses based on satisfaction data have yielded interesting and consistent results across data sets that show links between satisfaction and economic and demographic variables, and also show thatjob satisfaction is a good predictor of future quit behavior-indeed, in many longitudinal surveys, the best such predictor (see, for example , Hamermesh 1977;Borjas 1979;Freeman 1978;Blanchflower and Oswald 1992;and Clark and Oswald 1997).
What is more troubling for our analysis is that people in one country may "scale" responses differently from those in another (see Hofstede 1985 for studies of different country responses to satisfaction-type questions in a single multinational).
For instance, Americans may be relatively optimistic, with an "everything will work out" mentality that leads them to respond more positively than a comparable British group to the quiestion "Are you satisfied with your job?" eventhough their true satisfaction, on some objective scale," is the same as that 'Oine objective scaling would be to determine how satisfactioin responses milap inlto labo-turnover. of the (possibly more reserved) British. We deal with this problem by examining answers to more objective questions regarding workplace conditions-such as health and safety conditions-and estimating an ordered probit model in which we include as controls responses to other unrelated questions that might index national patterns of response.
In any case, relatively few Hungarians reported being very satisfied or completely satisfied (1 3 %) with theirjobs compared to Westerners, among whom the proportion ranged from 33% in Eire to 50% in the United States. 12 At face value, this confirmns the notion that workers under communism are less satisfied than workers under capitalism. Table 4 presents evidence on worker perceptions of objective workplace conditions that might explain the low job satisfaction reported by Hungarian workers. It shows that Hungarian workers are far less likely to regard their jobs as interesting than are Western workers (question 1) and far more likely to see their workplace as involving dangerous conditions (question 2) and unhealthy conditions (question 3). All of these perceptions are likely to feed into lowjob satisfaction. To the extent that they reflect objective conditions, they suggest that the reported lowerjob satisfaction has some grounding in reality.
As our final check on the effect of coinmunist labor relations on job satisfaction, we use the entire distribution of responses on the 1989 job satisfaction question to estimate the difference in job satisfaction between Hungarian workers and Western Satisfactioni correlates well with qtit behavioi, so if the same respon-se led to similar qtittinig across couiitries, we could view responises as valid indclicators of onie form of objective behavior. However, we (lo niot have data conltrastinig satisfaction and quits acioss cotiiutries. '2The proportionis of woirker-s who i-eported beinLg "very" or "completely" satisfied with theirjobs were as follows: Hunigary, 13%; I-elanld, 33%; Italy, 34%; Israel, 37%; Great Britain, 39%; Netherlanids, 39%; Norway, 43%; West Germaniy, 44%; Austria, 48%; and the Uniited States, 50%. workers in an ordered probit model. Ordered probits are the appropriate statistical procedure where, as in this case, respondents express their preferences in the form of an ordinal ranking. Our model includes various demographic variables that are known to influence job satisfaction, including gender, age, and marital status. We also include a unionism variable, which previous studies have found is negatively correlated with satisfaction (Freeman 1978;Borjas 1979), and self-employment, which has been found to be positively related to satisfaction (Blanchflower and Oswald 1993).
In this analysis, the coefficient on this dummy variable tells us how the entire distribution of job satisfaction differs between Hungarians and Westerners, conditional on the diverse control variables. Table 5 presents our results. Column 1 gives a basic job satisfaction equation. It shows that the "control variables" have their expected effects on job satisfaction. Thus, the ISSP question on job satisfaction gives results comparable to those in other surveys: unionism, in particular, is negatively related to job satisfaction, while self-employment is positively related. The coefficient on the Hungary dummy is large, negative, and statistically significant (-.53).
Column 2 controls, as best we can, for income, on the hypothesis that Hungarians may be less satisfied with their job not because of any legacy of communist labor relations but simply because they are lower paid than Western workers. For this purpose, we use an ISSP question that asked people whether they viewed their income as high: "For each of the following statements about your job, please tick one box to show how much you agree or disagree that it applies to your job: My income is high." Consistent with lower income in former communist countries, Hungarians were far more likely than Western workers to disagree with this statement. Some 70% of Hungarians disagreed or disagreed strongly that their income was high, compared to 48% of the British, 27% of Germans, 33% of Italians, 43% of Americans, and comparable fractions of other Westerners. Workers who report that their income is low are less likely to be satisfied (that is, the coefficients on the various categorical responses are increasingly negative compared to the omitted group of persons who strongly agree that their income is high). The coefficient on the Hungary dummy falls to -.41 upon addition of the "income is high" responses,  (1989). 'The excltuded category is "stronigly agree." "The excluded category is "always." but it remains substantial and significant. At similar perceptions of income (if not similar incomnes), HuLngarians are less satisfied with their jobs than Wester-ners. Finally, column 3 includes a series of dummy variables to distinguish whether respondents considered theirjobs to be "interesting" or their working conditions to be "unhealthy" or "dangerous" (as in Table 4). The inclusion of these variables reduces the size of the coefficient on the Hungary dummy by approximately a quiarter, although the coefficient remains statistically significant. These factors contribute to the low levels of satisfaction in Hungary, but they are not the whole story. All told, we interpret the ordered probits as confirming the reported lower job satisfaction of Hungarians with eviden-ce about objective features of workplaces.
In addition to evidence onjob satisfaction, we have reports of overall happiness by respondents, whether employed, unemployed, or out of the labor force. Since work is such animportant part of life, we expect that this measure of attitudes ought also to be related to labor market experiences. Our "happiness" measure also has one important advantage over job satisfaction: it covers all citizens, including the jobless. The 1991 ISSP provides data on perceived "happiness" for Slovenia, Poland, and East Germany, as well as for Hungary and Western countries. Respondents were asked: "If you were to consider your life in general these days, how happy or unhappy would you say you are, on the whole?" Four options were given for their replies-"not at all," "not very," "fairly," and "very."'13 Thirty-eight percent of Hungarians, 23% of East Germans, and 45% of Slovenes said "Overall, the responses were as follows (%):

Not Not
No. at All Very Fairly Very Obs. they were not at all happy or not very happy, compared to 11% of West Germans, 8% of the British, 8% of Americans, 7% of the Irish, 10% of New Zealanders, and 11% of Norwegians. Only the Italians and Israelis had "not at all" or "not very" happy percentages close to those of the eastern Europeans-22% for Italians and Israelis. Table 6 reports a series of ordered probit equations to estimate country effects on happiness, controlling for age, gender, marital status, and years of schooling. Once again we report results including a full set of country dummies (the excluded country is the United States) as well as the results from an equation that replaces the country dummies with a single ex-communist dummy. Individuals in the ex-communist countries reported being less happy than those in the Western countries in our sample. As can be seen from column 1, the lowest levels of happiness among the Western countries were to be found in Israel and Italy. The young, married individuals, women, and those with higher levels of schooling reported the highest levels of happiness.
In order to obtain results comparable to the job satisfaction evidence presented above, which was for workers only, in columns 2 and 3 we restrict the samples to the employed and those unemployed or out of the labor force, respectively. The pattern of results, including the country dummy structure, is remarkably similar to the job satisfaction pattern. In column 4, where two dummies are added to control for labor market status, we confirm the earlier finding of Oswald (1994) that the unemployed are less happy than the employed (the excluded category). This negative unemployment result is further confirmed in columns 5 and 6 of Table 6, where we report separate estimates for the 11 capitalist countries and the 4 ex-communist countries.'4 The main differences between these two equations are the lack of significance of the "'The excluded couLntries ar-e the United States and Hungary, respectively.  gendervariable in equation-6 an-d the higher levels of happiness of those age 65-74 in equation 5 compared with the middle-aged. Individuals livin-g in ex-cominutnist couItries report lower levels of happiness and, if employed, lower levels of job satisfaction than are found in our con-trol group of Western countries. This is further confirmation of the legacy hypothesis.

Attitudes Toward Unions
One interpretation of the resuilts on job satisfaction is that it is a legacy of transmission belt unions and the absence of a free labor market. If the lack of independent voice is, in fact, an important factor, wve would expect to see Hungarians and persons in other ex-communist couintries differ from people in Western coun-tries in their attitudes toward trade union-s.
The 1990 and 1993 ISSP contains several questions about attitudes toward tinionisin that enable us to test that interpretationi. Table 7 records the responses of Htungarians, Bulgarians, and Czechs as well as ISSP respondents from Western counitries to questions regarding unionism in those sur-veys. The responses to the question "How good are trade/labor unions for the country as a whole?" show that persons in the excommutinist countries had less favorable views of unlions in their cotuntry than did Westerners. Forty-two percent of Hungarians, 45% of Bulgarians, and 37% of Czechs reported that unlions were "inot very good" or "not good at all," compared to 16% of West Germans, 27% of the British respondents, 25% of American respondents, and so 0o1.
A large nuLmber of Italiains (44%) also reported that unions were "not very good" or "not good at all." But the reason for the dissatisfaction with unions in ex-com-muLnlist couniitries differs markedly from the reason for Italian dissatisfaction. Asked "Do you think that trade unions have too much power or too little power?", the eastern Europeans overwhelmingly thought that unions had too little power, whereas Italians disapproved of unions as havin7g too mtch power-(respon-ses to question 2). Moreover, the proportion of Hungarians who expressed the belief that strong trade union-s are needed to protect workers (quiestion-3) exceeded  1990 1993 1993 1990+1993 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 1990 Far-Too Mtclu  ISSP (1990ISSP ( , 1993. that in all Western countries except Germany. 15 '5We initially expected one additional ISSP question-In geineral, b-ow would you describe relation-s at your workplace between management and employees?"-to be informative on possible attitudes toward the need for un-ions. But the response of Hungarians relative to Westerner-s here was ambigtuous. A much smaller proportion (11.5%) stated that labor-managemenit relations were very good than in any Westerim country (the Netherlands was tbe next lowest at Why do persons from ex-communist eastern European countries and Westerners respond so differently to the union questions in the ISSP? How can we rationalize the view of workers in ex-commtmnist coun-18.5%), but at the same time, the proportion of Huniigariais descr-ibiig labor-relations as quite orvery bad (3.1 %) was mnuc smaller thani the proportioin of workers in Westerin cotuntries (the inext lowest was Israel, with 4% Source: ISSP (1987,1990,1992,1993).
tries that unions are not good for the country, are too weak, and are needed to protect workers? Our explanation is that these responses reflect two aspects of the experience with unions under communism: the past role of unions as transmission belts of the state, and the weakness of newly emerging or changing traditional unions-one of several legacies of the country's communist labor system.

Attitudes Toward the State in Economic Life
Under communism, the state dominated economic life, with adverse consequences for economic progress and for worker and citizen satisfaction. By overturning communism, these countries have committed themselves to developing a market economy with a much smaller governmental role in economic affairs than in their past. Still, the decades of government-dominated economic life and communist egalitarian ideology may have left a legacy of "statism" in these countries that would produce attitudes toward state interventions in wage and employment different from those found among people brought up in market economies. Table 8 presents responses to ISSP questions from the 1987, 1990, 1992, and 1993 modules that cast light on this issue. It shows a wide difference in attitudes toward state interventions between eastern European and Western countries, and some differences among the ex-communist countries as well. The figures under the heading "Reduce Income Differences" show that a larger proportion of workers in the former communist countries than in the capitalist countries believe that the government is responsible for reducing differences in income. In 1987, 34% of persons in the two ex-communist countries for which we have data, Hungary and Poland, strongly agreed with this statement, proportions that far exceed those in Western countries save for Austria. In 1992, for which we have information-for seven ex-communist countries, the results are similar. On average, 33% of people in the ex-communist countries agreed strongly that governments should reduce income differences, compared to just 20% in the capitalist countries (though many in the capitalist countries agreed somewhat). The sole countries whose responses overlap those in the other set of countries in this contrast are Italy and Austria among the Western countries and Czechoslovakia among the ex-communist countries. The figures for 1993 show an even greater divergence between the excommunist and the capitalist countries, with no overlap at all! There is less consistency among the former communist countries in whether respondents support controlling wages by law. The East Germans strongly favor such controls, but the Hungarians do not. The contrast between the East and West Germans on this issue is striking.
On the employment side, the ISSP asked in 1987 and in 1992 whether the government should provide jobs for all. The respondents in the two eastern European countries covered in 1987, Hungary and Poland, were far more likely to agree with this proposition than were respondents in the Western countries. In 1992, when the ISSP asked this same question in six excommunist countries, the unweighted average proportion of persons in those countries who agreed strongly was 51%, compared to 26% in the capitalist countries.
The greater support for government playing a role in income and employment determination in former communist countries shows up, finally, in responses to the following question: "Should government provide basic income for all?" Only Huigary provided data on this question in 1987. There, the proportion strongly agreeing was 40%, far above the corresponding proportion in capitalist countries. The difference in 1992, for which we have data for seven ex-communist countries, is even greater.
In sum, while there are some country differences, the overwhelming pattern in these data is a greater proclivity for relying on the state'6 among persons fi-om ex-comnmunist countries than among Westernersconsistent with the legacy hypothesis.

Conclusions
We have uncovered substantial differences between su-rvey respondents in former communist countries and those in Western countries in responses to diverse questions about attitudes toward earnings inequlality, job satisfaction, working conditions, unions, and the role of the state in regulating labor market outcomes.
In ISSP surveys conducted over the years 1987-93, the citizens of former communist countries evinced a greater desire for egalitarianism, less satisfaction with their jobs, more support for strong unions, and more support for state intervention than did most Westerners. At the same time, as perceived occupational earnings differentials widened in these countries over the course of the breakdown of communism and the transition to more capitalistic systems between 1987 and 1992, tolerance for those differentials increased substantially. Without gainsaying the important differences in outcomes and attitudes among ex-communist countries and among Western countries, we believe that it is reasonable to interpret the broad pattern of differences between the two groups as reflecting a legacy of communist economics.