Self-Esteem in Adolescents: A Two-Wave Time-Lag Study across the Iron Curtain

Abstract

Background: The aim was to conduct a time-lag study on how democracy and dictatorship may influence self-esteem in adolescents. Methods: Adolescents (aged 15-16) from Sweden and Bulgaria were compared using the 'I Think I Am' questionnaire measuring self-esteem 1989-1991 (T1) when Bulgaria was a communistic dictatorship and Sweden a parliamentary democracy and 2015-16 (T2) when both countries were democracies. Results: The lower global self-esteem in Bulgaria compared to Sweden at T1 equalised at T2, which mainly was related to the sub-scales ' Relations with others' and ' Psychological well-being '. Both global self-esteem and ' Relations with others ' had a significant interaction between time and country, indicating that the country differences in self-esteem were modified by time, i.e. our proxy for governance. The differences that existed between the sexes in Sweden at T1 equalised at T2. The girls in both countries had lower results in the sub-scale ' Psychological well-being ' than the boys at both time-points. Conclusion: The prior differences in selfesteem between a democracy and a communistic dictatorship equalised over a generation of democracy. We suggest that the amelioration self-esteem in the former dictatorship is due to decrease of social stressors. This lower self-esteem related to others could be seen as 'Dictatorship damage'. Background Different forms of governance, i.e. dictatorship or democracy, form different compatriots [1-4] and how dictatorships impact the well-being among its citizens has been discussed since the time of the ancient Greeks [5]. Despite this, few studies have been conducted on the psychological impact of governance. This scarcity of studies is at least partially related to the difficulties of getting permission to examine an autocratic state as dictators tend to fear criticism and opposition [4]. A wave of democratic changes swept over Europe in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. These changes cleared a path for the formation or restoration, in some cases, of liberal democratic institutions in Europe, as well as elsewhere in the world [6].Our previous study [7] compared levels of self-esteem in adolescents in Bulgaria and Sweden, two countries on either side of the Berlin Wall before it fell in 1989; the study was cross-sectional in design. In our previous study, we found that the adolescents in Bulgaria had a lower global selfesteem related to relations to others than their Swedish counterparts, which was suggested as being related to the higher presence of dictatorship-related macro-environmental stressors in the communistic dictatorship Bulgaria and to a more equal distribution between the sexes in the Bulgarians [7].Self-esteem is often defined as a personality characteristic that mirrors the level of global regard that one has for oneself as a person [8,9]. It is widely recognised that self-esteem is strongly and closely related to psychopathology in adolescents where low levels of self-estee...