Bulgarian Political Culture and Civic Participation 1

Modern Bulgarian political culture has emerged in result of intricately interlaced and inherited beliefs, views, values, and practices, coupled with new and continuously mastered and internalized modes of political commitment and conduct. The prevailing political cultural in Bulgaria today is rather strongly marked by community conservatism, national dreams, person-centered- ness, as well as distrust towards the political class as a whole. The activist culture in contemporary Bulgaria is limited, even marginal, divided into two opposing halves: civic activity and nationalist mobilization. The commitment of the trade unions remains superficial and pro- fessionalized. The trade unions themselves are in quite a weak position within the existing system of social dialog. The civic sector in today’s Bulgaria is strongly dependent on external funding; it is lacking sufficient internal support. Activities promoting civic participation are very restricted. Such a civic participation does exist, but only in limited and dispersed sectors of society, whereby its manifestations are more of a sporadic nature. March 2011 Bulgarian Political Culture and Civic Participation 1 CONTENTS 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................................................2 2. Unique Features of Bulgarian Political Culture ..........................................................................................3 3. Going into Politics and Political Commitment ...........................................................................................9 3.1. Typology of Party Membership ............................................................................................................15 3.2. Participation in Civic Organizations and Movements ............................................................................18 4. Modern Bulgarian Political Culture Facing the Test of Europe .................................................................22 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................................27 2 Bulgarian Political Culture and Civic Participation 1. Introduction reason-based approaches. The approach to political culture, which is viewed as a politi- Political participation has been subject to nu- cal explanatory theory, often contradicts the merous studies over the past several decades. reason-based approach of rational choices, The issue has been formulated in different which views politics as a market where the ways in the social sciences and initially it has participants make rational decisions based been treated in terms of “civic duty’, i.e. “the on their own judgments about the possible obligation to participate” as an element of costs and benefits from making one or anoth- the mandatory understanding of democracy, er choice. Political culture is looking for the be it ancient or modern democracy. In their sociological explanations of the political be- omnibus comparative study on civic culture, havior of individuals and social groups rather, Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba devote a and these are explanations based on shared whole chapter to “the obligation to partici- values and beliefs, including emotions and ir- pate” (Almond, Verba 1963). But in the pro- rational motivations. In the opinion of Todor cess of reasoning on this issue, they actually Tanev, this opposition can be explained with found out that in modern democracies the the “pre-adolescent age” of political science. commitment of citizens is, in fact, far too fee- This is the reason why he offers a synthetic ble, and their participation is too restricted. In approach to the notion in his large-scale re- his study on democracy, Robert Dahl ranked search work entitled “Political Culture”, in “effective participation” as the number one which political culture itself emerges as a re- criterion for the existence of this particular sult of a complicated cultural choice, whereby political regime (Dahl 1999: 44). This, howev- pure rationality is always complemented by er, did not prevent him from finding out that cultural rationality (Tanev 2001: 18-19). modern democracies are actually based on In essence, there are several political cul- precisely such a limited level of participation. tures coexisting in modern Bulgarian society in On the level of individuals, participation the way they have been defined by G. Almond in politics and public life as a whole is based and S. Verba, namely: traditional, restrained on beliefs and notions related to what poli- (i.e. inhibited, suppressed, or controlled), and tics is all about and what is the significance of civic (Almond, Verba 1998). But we are also individual participation therein. These beliefs capable of defining a dominant political cul- and notions are simultaneously an inherited ture, which is made up by the cultural mod- experience from previous generations (politi- els shared by the majority of the population. cal culture), acquired experience and amassed What has been inherited here merges with knowledge making it possible for people the new, as political culture is always in a pro- to get oriented in political life (civic compe- cess of renewal. And yet, the newly emerg- tence), and internalized political values, self- ing cultural models, which nowadays are consciousness about what is important in connected to a large extent with Bulgaria’s public life, and also what is correct and what EU membership, do not necessarily possess is incorrect (value hierarchies). upsides only. In the same way, Europe has al- Political culture has been subject to re- ways been associated with positive values in search for only a relatively short period of the Bulgarian mass consciousness, but Europe time, i.e. this is a new concept, which has is not the only source of positive changes. The now become well established in social sci- gradual sinking-in of the realization that Euro- ences. Political theory makes a distinction be- pean societies are also marked by certain con- tween two approaches to political phenom- tradictory features is part and parcel of the ena, namely: the culture-oriented and the ongoing process of the modernization, which Bulgarian Political Culture and Civic Participation 3 is currently taking place in Bulgarian political civic culture. To outline these features would culture. It is connected with overcoming the prove valuable only if they are subsequently belief that over there, “in the white coun- made subject to critical reasoning and consid- tries” (as one can often hear or read), things eration, including the clarification of the so- are certainly better than they seem to be in cial structures that support them. this country, “over there” everything is better in comparison with the situation “over here”. 2. Unique Features of Bulgarian If we assume that there is a dominant Political Culture political culture, which also coexists with more or less marginal and/or minority politi- Bulgarian political culture has been the sub- cal cultures, then the major question should ject matter of numerous analyses and research be: what is the nature of this political culture, works carried out in various academic fields, what are the political values and habits that namely: history, philosophy, historical anthro- are imposed, disseminated, and have survived pology, sociology, and political science. One the test of time in today’s Bulgarian society. segment of the texts devoted to this research As a consequence of the above, here come subject is qualified as “national or people’s some subsequent questions, such as those psychology”. What has always been at stake concerning the specific mechanisms, which in this case is the danger of going into a field maintain the dominant political culture, and of apparent triviality, which claims to recon- the possibility for developing an enduring and struct Bulgarian political culture. prevailing civic political culture in Bulgaria. One of the recognized and respected au- Modern Bulgarian political culture is a mix- thors who have researched “the Bulgarian ture of inherited and newly acquired political national character” is Ivan Hadjiysky, who has values, habits, and practices. We cannot possi- produced reference texts on the “way of life bly explain everything with tradition, although and spiritual nature of the Bulgarian nation”. in our daily discourse we often resort to justi- His approach is sociological and it makes it fications such as “the 500-year long Turkish possible for us to reconstruct to a large ex- domination” or “the 45-year long communist tent an acceptable picture of the major value- dictatorship”. Nowadays, the young people oriented traits of modern society in Bulgaria in Bulgaria who have no personal experience after the Liberation from Turkish domination whatsoever of communism (let alone the in 1878. Having in mind that in all of the “Turkish domination”) make up almost one preceding years national liberation struggles third of the voters in the country. The new ele- had been waged, it is in these first years of ments in Bulgarian political culture have come independent political development precisely in result of the acquisition of a personal, mod- that the principal elements of what we have ern-times experience, which is becoming in- to analyze as Bulgarian national political cul- creasingly more often a European experience, ture today were formed and disseminated. ensuing from

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