Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass. Go to InCompass-Hevon Europe.com

But free access to all our podcasts to date. This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation with Jacob

Poshta. Jacob Poster is Associate Associate Director Global Attitudes at the Pew Research

Center based in Washington, D.C. Jacob, you've been involved in a pretty major research

public opinion survey recently under the broad theme of European public opinion three decades after

the fall of communism. Can you tell me a bit about the reason behind this survey and your methodology?

Just kick off the discussion.

Sure. Thanks for having me. We did a foundational survey in 1991 asking people's attitudes after the fall of communism what they thought about their lives. And in 2009 and 2019, we decided to repeat aspects of that survey.

And so we went back to countries in the former Eastern Bloc, Russia, Ukraine,

in addition to Western European countries to see how attitudes have changed since 1991

and how they now regard the changeover from communism to democracy.

And how big was your sample and which countries were surveyed?

There was 16 countries across Europe, located across Western Europe, so the UK, Germany,

EU member states.

EU member states.

But additionally, we also surveyed in Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine,

Poland, you know, states that were on both side of the Iron Curtain to sort of figure out

how attitudes had shifted in both states since that time.

And I'm not an expert in public opinion surveys, but in order to make the findings comparable,

were you keen and constrained to make sure that the questions posed this time around were almost

identical to the previous times? For the questions that we repeated since 1991, yes, they are

identical. They're identically translated. They were administered in the same way. Most of the Eastern

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