Comrades into citizens? Russian political culture and public support for the transition

Slavic Review

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 841-853

  Bahry, Donna ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0001346265     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2697201     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Geoffrey Evans and Stephen Whitefield, "Political Culture versus Rational Choice: Explaining Responses to Transition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia," British Journal of Political Science 29, no. 1 (January 1999): 129-55.
2. The literature is too extensive to cite here. For a careful overview of the findings to date, see Frederic J. Fleron, Jr., and Richard Ahl, "Does the Public Matter for Democratization in Russia? What We Have Learned from the 'Third Wave' Transitions and Public Opinion Surveys," in Harry Eckstein et al., eds., Can Democracy Take Root in Russia? Explorations in State-Society Relations (Lanham, Md., 1998), 287-330.
3. James L. Gibson and Raymond M. Duch, "Political Intolerance in the USSR: The Distribution and Etiology of Mass Opinion," Comparative Political Studies 26, no. 3 (October 1993): 286-329.
4. Frederick Fleron, "Post-Soviet Political Culture in Russia: An Assessment of Recent Empirical Investigations," Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 2 (1996): 225-60;
5. Fleron and Ahl, "Does the Public Matter."
6. Fleron, "Post-Soviet Political Culture."
7. Harry Eckstein, "A Culturalist Theory of Political Change," American Political Science Review 82, no. 3 (September 1988): 789-804;
8. James Alexander, "Surveying Attitudes in Russia: A Representation of Formlessness," Communist and Postcommunist Studies 30, no. 2 (June 1997): 107-27.
9. The mass surveys include studies fielded in Russia in 1992-93 and 1997-98. The in-depth interviews include conversations with elite respondents from 1989 on. They also include several sets of interviews in 1995, 1998, and 1999 with selected groups of non-elite respondents - males of working age with less than higher education. (The selection criteria were chosen to allow comparisons with respondents in Robert Lane's Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does [New York, 1962]).
10. These issues are treated in more detail in William Reisinger, "The Renaissance of a Rubric: Political Culture as Concept and Theory," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 7, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 328-52.
11. Eckstein, "A Culturalist Theory";
12. David J. Elkins and Richard E. B. Simeon, "A Cause in Search of Its Effect, or What Does Political Culture Explain?" Comparative Politics 11, no. 2 (January 1979): 127-46.
13. Philip Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (London, 1964).
14. See, for example, David O. Sears and Jack Citrin, Tax Revolt: Something for Nothing in California (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
15. Lloyd A. Free and Hadley Cantril, The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion (New Brunswick, N.J., 1967);
16. Herbert McClosky and John Zaller, The American Ethos: Public Attitudes toward Capitalism and Democracy (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).
17. The classic study is by James W. Prothro and Charles M. Grigg, "Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement," Journal of Politics 22 (1960): 276-94.
18. John Mark Hansen, "Individuals, Institutions and Public Preferences over Public Finance," American Political Science Review 92, no. 3 (September 1998): 513-31.
19. See also, Susan Welch, "The 'More for Less' Paradox: Public Attitudes on Taxing and Spending," Public Opinion Quarterly 49 (Fall 1985): 310-16.
20. Max Kaase and Kenneth Newton reach the same conclusion for a broad sample of European countries. See Beliefs in Government (Oxford, 1995), 82.
21. The idea is that people make use of a general store of information to interpret specific events and information. Abstract beliefs may be viewed as heuristics that allow people to make sense of new stimuli. See, for example, Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley, "How Are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A Hierarchical Model," American Political Science Review 81, no. 4 (December 1987): 1099-1120;
22. and Mark Peffley and Jon Hurwitz, "Models of Attitude Constraint in Foreign Affairs," Political Behavior 15, no. 1 (March 1993): 61-90.
23. Stanley Feldman, "Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion: The Role of Core Beliefs and Values," American Journal of Political Science 32 (May 1988): 416-40.
24. Hurwitz and Peffley, "How Are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured?"
25. Paul Sniderman et al., The Clash of Rights: Liberty, Equality and Legitimacy in Pluralist Democracy (New Haven, 1996).
26. Stanley Feldman, "Economic Individualism and American Public Opinion," American Politics Quarterly 11 (1983): 3-29.
27. Sniderman et al., The Clash of Rights;
28. David Elkins, Manipulation and Consent: How Voters and Leaders Manage Complexity (Vancouver, 1993).
29. Note, though, that levels of sophistication vary, by education, by level of information, and by other factors. John Zaller assesses them in The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion (Cambridge, Eng., 1992).
30. Kaase and Newton, Beliefs in Government, 68-71.
31. The countries included West Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Austria, Ireland, Sweden, and Norway. David Mason also found mixed attitudes, using somewhat different questions and a sample including West Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States, in "Attitudes toward the Market and Political Participation in the Postcommunist States," Slavic Review 54, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 391.
32. Max Haller, Franz Hollinger, and Otto Raubal, "Leviathan or Welfare State? Attitudes toward the Role of Government in Six Advanced Western Nations," in Duane Allwin et al., eds., Altitudes to Inequality and the Role of Government (Rijswicjk, Netherlands, 1990), 33-62.
33. James L. Gibson and Raymond M. Duch, "Support for Rights in Western Europe and the Soviet Union: An Analysis of the Beliefs of Mass Publics," Research on Democracy and Society 1 (1993): 245.
34. Edward N. Muller, Pertti Pesonen, and Thomas O. Jukam, "Support for the Freedom of Assembly in Western Democracies," European Journal of Political Research 8 (1980): 265-88.
35. John L. Sullivan, Michal Shamir, Patrick Walsh, and Nigel S. Roberts, Political Tolerance in Context: Support for Unpopular Minorities in Israel, New Zealand, and the United States (Boulder, Colo., 1985);
36. James L. Gibson, "The Paradoxes of Political Tolerance in Processes of Democratisation," Politikon 23 (1996): 5-21.
37. Gennady Denisovsky, Polina Kozyreva, and Mikhail Matskovsky, "Twelve Percent of Hope: Economic Consciousness and a Market Economy," in Arthur Miller, William Reisinger, and Vicki Hesli, eds., Public Opinion and Repine Change: The New Politics of Post-Soviet Societies (Boulder, Colo., 1993);
38. Raymond Duch, "Tolerating Economic Reform: Popular Support for Transition to a Free Market in the Former Soviet Union," American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 590-608;
39. Richard Rose and Christian Haerpfer, "Mass Response to Transformation in Postcommunist Societies," Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 1 (1994): 3-28;
40. Richard Rose and Toni Makkai, "Consensus or Dissensus about Welfare in Postcommunist Societies?" European Journal of Political Research 28 (1995): 203-24.
41. See, for example, Duch, "Tolerating Economic Reform."
42. See, for example, Richard B. Dobson, "Is Russia Turning the Corner? Changing Russian Public Opinion, 1991-1996" (paper, Russia, Ukraine and Commonwealth Branch, Office of Research and Media Reaction, United States Information Agency, report R-7-96, September 1996), 58-59.
43. Natalia Tikhonova, "Mirovozzrencheskie tsennosti i politicheskii protsess v Rossii," Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost', 1996, no. 4: 15-27.
44. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, 1971);
45. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge, Eng., 1991).
46. See, for example, James L. Gibson, Raymond M. Duch, and Kent L. Tedin, "Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union," Journal of Politics 54 (1992): 329-71. Gibson argues that, "In some areas, there is strong and widespread support, as for instance in the willingness to assert a panoply of political, social, and economic rights against the major institutions of society. Moreover, there is fairly broad support for a pluralistic media. Competitive elections and a multiparty system seem to be coming under increasing scrutiny, however, with a concomitant rise in ambivalence. The weakest evidence of a . . . democratic political culture . . . may be found in measures of political tolerance" (964; the analysis in this case is based on data from Russia and Ukraine).
47. James L. Gibson, "The Resilience of Mass Support for Democratic Institutions and Processes in the Nascent Russian and Ukrainian Democracies," in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., Political Culture and Civil Society in the New States of Eurasia (Armonk, N.Y., 1995), 53-111.
48. Arthur Miller, Vicki Hesli, and William Reisinger confirm the primacy of personal freedom in public conceptions of democracy, in "Conceptions of Democracy among Mass and Elite in Post-Soviet Societies," British Journal of Political Science 27, no. 2 (April 1997): 157-90.
49. See, for example, Donna Bahry, Cynthia Boaz, and Stacy Burnett Gordon, "Tolerance, Transition and Support for Civil Liberties in Russia," Comparative Political Studies 30, no. 3 (August 1997): 484-510;
50. Gibson and Duch, "Support for Rights."
51. See, for example, "Otnoshenie naseleniia k chastnoi sobstvennosti," Voprosy ekonomiki, 1990, no. 2: 67-72.
52. Dobson, "Is Russia Turning the Corner?" 52, 54.
53. Jon Krosnick, "The Stability of Political Preferences: Comparisons of Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Attitudes," American Journal of Political Science 35 (August 1991): 552.
54. William M. Reisinger, Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli, and Kristen Hill Maher, "Political Values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: Sources and Implications for Democracy," British Journal of Political Science 24, no. 2 (April 1994): 183-224;
55. Russell Bova, "Political Culture, Authority Patterns, and the Architecture of the New Russian Democracy," in Harry Eckstein et al., eds., Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia? (Lanham, Md., 1998), 177-200;
56. Grigorii Vainshtein, "The Authoritarian Idea in the Public Consciousness and Political Life of Contemporary Russia," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 11, no. 3 (September 1995): 272-85.
57. The question of "which one Russia needs more of now" (order or democracy) is a standard one in the "Monitoring" surveys by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research. The vast majority of Russians opt for order. See, for example, Leonid Sedov, "Changes in the Country and in Attitudes towards the Changes," Sociological Research 35 (1996): 33-42.
58. Sedov, "Changes in the Country," reports that from one-fifth to one-third of respondents in repeat surveys from February 1992 to December 1994 responded with "hard to say."
59. Ellen Carnaghan provides an analysis of when and why people fail to respond in "Alienation, Apathy or Ambivalence? 'Don't Knows' and Democracy in Russia," Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 325-63.
60. The question was included in my 1992-93 survey in Russia.
61. Evans and Whitefield make a similar case in "Political Culture versus Rational Choice."
62. For a test of this argument, see Robert Shiller, Maxim Boycko, and Vladimir Korobov, "Popular Attitudes toward Free Markets: The Soviet Union and the United States Compared," American Economic Review 81 (June 1991): 385-400;
63. and Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov, "Hunting for Homo Sovieticus: Situational versus Attitudinal Factors in Economic Behavior," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 1 (1992): 127-81.
64. This could, of course, be read as a critique of standard questions. But my point is quite different. Standard questions are vital for understanding when and how individuals differ. The key issue is how the questions are interpreted.