On the road from socialism to capitalism: Attitudes of young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina on economic role of the state

Abstract

The paper aims to examine the intensity and spread of value orientations of economic liberalism and redistributive statism among young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) at three points in time - before the collapse of the socialist social order (1989), in the phase of consolidation of the neoliberal form of economic regulation after the effects of the global financial and economic crisis (2012), and after the economic crisis that came as a consequence of the coronavirus pandemic (2022). The theoretical framework of the analysis relies on the theory of normative-value dissonance (Lazic, 2011). We used summative scales of value orientations, where the data allowed for such analyses, and in other cases, we carried out simpler forms of descriptive analyses of individual items. The analysis of empirical data was carried out separately for three datasets: In the first one the data had been obtained through the research conducted in 1989 in BiH, then again in 2012 in the Doboj region in BiH, and the third time in 2022 in the entity of Republic of Srpska. The significance of the research relies on examining the attitudes of young people related to the economic role of the state during the establishment of neoliberal capitalism, which has been insufficiently explored in domestic sociology.