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² It has been argued that the persistence of values over time constitutes a validation of political culture theory. See, for example, Brown, Archie, ‘Introduction’, in Brown, Archie and Gray, Jack, eds, Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977)Google Scholar; Almond, Gabriel A., ‘Communism and Political Culture Theory’, Comparative Politics, 15 (1983), 127–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent summary of the literature see Almond, Gabriel A., ‘The Study of Political Culture’, in Almond, Gabriel A., ed., A Discipline Divided (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), pp. 138–56.Google Scholar

³ It is the author's intention to conduct another survey which will replicate the questions used here. Only analysis of similar data over time allows the researcher to begin to separate out period, generational and other effects which may not be revealed by cross-sectional analysis. See Cutler, Neal, ‘Generation, Maturation and Party Affiliation: A Cohort Analysis’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 33 (1969–1970), 583–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glenn, Norval D. and Hefner, Ted, ‘Further Evidence on Aging and Party Identification’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 35 (1972), 31–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bahry, Donna, ‘Politics, Generation and Change in the USSR’, in Millar, James R., ed., Politics, Work and Social Life in the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 74–6.Google Scholar

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¹¹ The question has been raised about whether the Soviet Union can be properly considered as ‘uneconomically developed’. In some ways, economic conditions more nearly approximate those found in the Third World, ‘an Upper Volta with rockets’, as one reviewer put it. The position taken in this article is that the Soviet Union must be counted among the developed countries because of its level of industrialization and because of the portion of its labour force engaged in industry and in professional occupations, including the field of science. That the consumer market works badly and that the standard of living compares poorly with what is found in other industrialized societies is evidence that economic development in the Soviet Union was distorted, not that it does not exist.

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⁴¹ It has been argued that survey research may not be the best way to study political culture in communist countries because ‘the survey method puts political culture on the same conceptual level as public opinion’ (Welch, , ‘Issues in the Study of Political Culture’, p. 484Google Scholar). A certain amount of caution is in order to avoid equating public opinion with political culture. The latter term refers to the more enduring values and beliefs about politics which members of society hold and which presumably condition their perception of government. As such they are assumed to change much more gradually than opinions about political issues and government personnel. See Brown, , Political Culture and Communist Studies, pp. 155–64.Google Scholar

⁴² Finifter, Ada W. and Mickiewicz, Ellen, ‘Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change in the USSR’, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 1990Google Scholar; Gibson, James L., Duch, Raymond M. and Tedin, Kent L., ‘Cultural Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union’, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco, 1990Google Scholar. Other major joint projects are being conducted by a team of political scientists from the University of Iowa (principal investigator, Arthur H. Miller), and by the National Opinion Research Center (field research director, Cynthia Kaplan). Results from many of these efforts are being brought together in book form: Miller, Arthur H., Reisinger, William M. and Templin, Vicki L., eds, The New Soviet Citizen: Public Opinion and Politics in the Gorbachev Era (forthcoming).Google Scholar

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⁴⁴ The question may be raised as to why a single city study should be regarded as more representative than a national sample such as those conducted by the Soviet All-Union Centre for the Study of Public Opinion. Obviously, a truly representative national sample would be preferable. However, aside from the problem that the Centre simply has not published a comparable study of Russian political culture, there are grounds for wondering how representative their survey results are for the population as a whole. The disadvantage of the case study approach is clear: we have no way of saying scientifically whether conclusions based on a single city study are generalizable elsewhere. This is offset, however, because the serious technical problems encountered in doing a national survey may be minimized, if not eliminated, in a single-area study thereby yielding greater confidence in the representativeness of the results. A detailed discussion of this may be found in Hahn, Jeffrey W., ‘Public Opinion Research in the USSR: Problems and Possibilities’Google Scholar, in Miller, et al. , eds, The New Soviet Citizen.Google Scholar

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⁴⁹ There is a vigorous debate among specialists studying political culture, especially in communist countries, on this issue. Leading proponents of the view that political behaviour is as important a dimension of political culture as attitudes include: White, , ‘Soviet Political Culture Reassessed’, pp. 62–6Google Scholar; Tucker, Robert L., Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), pp. 5–6Google Scholar; and Fagen, Richard T., The Transformation of Political Culture in Cuba (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969), pp. 6–10Google Scholar. Among those insisting on the need to separate the psychological dimension from the behavioural one are Brown, , ‘Ideology and Political Culture’, p. 2Google Scholar, and Almond, , ‘The Study of Political Culture’, p. 145Google Scholar. This view, which would exclude behaviour from what is embraced by political culture, has been called a ‘subjectivist’ definition and inclusion of behaviour is sometimes designated an ‘anthropological’ definition, although Brown has questioned the appropriateness of that. (See the chapters by Brown, Archie and McAuley, Mary in Brown, , ed., Political Culture and Communist StudiesGoogle Scholar.) My own point of view on this debate can be found more extensively in Hahn, , Soviet Grassroots, pp. 10–11 and pp. 41–3Google Scholar. While my treatment in this article relies on attitudinal rather than behavioural indicators of political culture, evidence of political participation, including the activism which Soviet citizens exhibited during recent election campaigns and in street demonstrations, would seem to offer prima facie support for the existence of something like a ‘civic culture’, however desirable it may be to exclude behaviour as a component part of political culture conceptually.

⁵⁰ Many, if not most, of the questions used were replications of those in the pioneering study of the American electorate by Campbell, Angus, Gurin, Gerald and Miller, Warren E., The Voler Decides (Evanston, Ill.: Row, Peterson, 1954)Google Scholar. There were two reasons for choosing these items. First, they are probably the most widely used measures of American political culture and, secondly, they have been repeated in the various follow-up American National Election Studies conducted by the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. The relative consistency of responses to these measures suggests they are measuring political culture rather than opinion. The results were made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The questions used are found in the codebooks for the 1976, 1980, 1984 and 1988 elections. See American National Election Study, 1976 (1980, 1984, 1988): Pre- and Post-Election Survey File, conducted by the Center for Political Studies of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan and the National Election Studies under the general direction of Warren E. Miller, ICPSR, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1978 (1982, 1986, 1990). Hereafter, references will be American NES and the year.

⁵¹ Finifter, Ada W., ‘Dimensions of Political Alienation’, American Political Science Review, 64 (1970), 389–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More recent treatments of a concept originally used in Campbell, et al. , The Voter DecidesGoogle Scholar, would include: Clarke, Harold D. and Acock, Alan C., ‘National Elections and Political Attitudes: The Case of Political Efficacy’, British Journal of Political Science, 19 (1989), 551–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Finkel, Steven E., ‘Reciprocal Effects of Participation and Political Efficacy’, American Journal of Political Science, 29 (1985), 891–913.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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⁶² Berelsen, Bernard R., ‘Democratic Theory and Public Opinion’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 16 (1952), 313–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campbell, Angus, Converse, Philip E., Miller, Warren E. and Stokes, Donald E., The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).Google Scholar

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⁷¹ This correlation simply confirms for the sample what one would expect from aggregate data showing the growth of Soviet education levels over time. See, for example, SSSR v tsifrakh v 1984 godu (Moscow: 1984), pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

⁷² There is considerable disagreement among political scientists as to what is learned and when, and even whether it matters very much. The assumption used here, however, is that political socialization begins in childhood and that the acquisition of affective political orientations precedes cognitive ones. It appears reasonable to assume that children have an awareness of politics and government and feelings about them by age ten. For discussions of the literature, see Monroe, Alan D., Public Opinion in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 61–78Google Scholar; and Jennings, M. Kent and Niemi, Richard G., The Political Character of Adolescence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 4–25.Google Scholar

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