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Comrades into Citizens? Russian Political Culture and Public Support for the Transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Donna Bahry
Donna Bahry*
Affiliation:
The Department of Government, Vanderbilt University
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Extract

Since 1989, the question of public values has been one of the most critical and the most controversial in the study of postcommunist politics. While there seems to be a consensus that people should accept democratic and market-based norms, there is little agreement on how much they actually do so—or on how much they need to, if markets and democracy are to survive.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Ten Years after 1989: What Have We Learned? , Winter 1999 , pp. 841 - 853
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

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References

1. Evans, Geoffrey and Whitefield, Stephen, “Political Culture versus Rational Choice: Explaining Responses to Transition in the Czech Republic and Slovakia,” British Journal of Political Science 29, no. I (January 1999): 129–55Google Scholar.

2. The literature is too extensive to cite here. For a careful overview of the findings to date, see Fleron, Frederic J., Jr., and Ahl, Richard, “Does the Public Matter for Democratization in Russia? What We Have Learned from the ‘Third Wave’ Transitions and Public Opinion Surveys,” in Eckstein, Harry et al., eds., Can Democracy Take Root in Russia? Explorations in State-Society Relations (Lanham, Md., 1998), 287–330 Google Scholar.

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7. 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 nonelite respondents—males of working age with less than higher education. (The selection criteria were chosen to allow comparisons with respondents in Lane's, Robert Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does [New York, 1962])Google Scholar.

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15. 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, Hurwitz, Jon and Peffley, Mark, “How Are Foreign Policy Attitudes Structured? A Hierarchical Model,” American Political Science Review 81, no. 4 (December 1987): 1099–1120 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Peffley, Mark and Hurwitz, Jon, “Models of Attitude Constraint in Foreign Affairs,” Political Behavior 15, no. 1 (March 1993): 61–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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21. Kaase and Newton, Beliefs in Government, 68–71. 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 Google Scholar.

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27. See, for example, Duch, “Tolerating Economic Reform.”

28. 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.

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32. 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): 157–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. See, for example, Bahry, Donna, Boaz, Cynthia, and Gordon, Stacy Burnett, “Tolerance, Transition and Support for Civil Liberties in Russia,” Comparative Political Studies 30, no. 3 (August 1997): 484–510 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gibson and Duch, “Support for Rights.”

34. See, for example, “Otnoshenie naseleniia k chastnoi sobstvennosti,” Voprosy ekonomiki, 1990, no. 2: 67–72 Google Scholar.

35. Dobson, “Is Russia Turning the Corner?” 52, 54.

36. Krosnick, Jon, “The Stability of Political Preferences: Comparisons of Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Attitudes,” American Journal of Political Science 35 (August 1991): 552 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. Reisinger, William M., Miller, Arthur H., Hesli, Vicki L., and Maher, Kristen Hill, “Political Values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: Sources and Implications for Democracy,” British Journal of Political Science 24, no. 2 (April 1994): 183–224 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bova, Russell, “Political Culture, Authority Patterns, and the Architecture of the New Russian Democracy,” in Eckstein, Harry et al., eds., Can Democracy Take Root in Post-Soviet Russia? (Lanham, Md., 1998), 177–200 Google Scholar; Vainshtein, Grigorii, “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): 272–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. 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, Sedov, Leonid, “Changes in the Country and in Attitudes towards the Changes,” Sociobgical Research 35 (1996): 33–42 Google Scholar.

39. 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.”

40. 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): 325–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. The question was included in my 1992–93 survey in Russia.

42. Evans and Whitefield make a similar case in “Political Culture versus Rational Choice.”

43. For a test of this argument, see Shiller, Robert, Boycko, Maxim, and Korobov, Vladimir, “Popular Attitudes toward Free Markets: The Soviet Union and the United States Compared,” American Economic Review 81 (June 1991): 385–400 Google Scholar; and Shiller, Boycko, , and Korobov, , “Hunting for Homo Sovieticus: Situational versus Attitudinal Factors in Economic Behavior,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 1 (1992): 127–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. 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.