Since the mid 1970s, all four of our countries have had some experience of regime change. The Czech Republic emerged at the start of 1993 from the more diverse Czechoslovakia. In South Korea the increasingly democratic Sixth Republic replaced the authoritarian Fifth Republic in 1987. That change had regional implications because the authoritarian regime in Korea had reputedly favoured the ‘home regions’ of the authoritarian rulers (Min 2004) and the leaders of the new democratic regime came from other regions. But we focus on Vietnam and Ukraine, where the imprint of regime change might be particularly evident in regional differences in public attitudes towards marketisation and opening up – differences between public opinion in North and South Vietnam, and between public opinion in East and West Ukraine.

In Vietnam the free-market South was forcibly reunited with the communist North only in July 1976 and experienced scarcely more than a decade of classic communism between reunification and Doi Moi, in marked contrast to the much longer experience of communism in the North. If there were any legacy from the period before reunification, we might expect the public in the South to feel more competent and more comfortable with markets and an open economy and perhaps less comfortable with government from Hanoi. The historical legacy would provide a plausible explanation for polarised opinion between North and South – if that was a significant pattern.