Entrepreneurial MPs
Chapter
Abstract
Public opinion exists on many levels. Indeed it forms a complex web of influence and representation. We were interested not just in the opinions of the mass public but in the opinions of their democratically elected representatives. So at the end of 1994, a year after our surveys of the opinions and values of the general public, we went back to interview a sample of members of parliament in Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and the Czech Republic.1 The questionnaire consisted of most, though not quite all, of the questions that we had already put to the general public in these countries. So we can compare the attitudes of people and their elected politicians in these four countries.2
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Czech Republic Market Economy Prime Minister Communist Party Political Change
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Notes
- 2.For an earlier comparison of mass and elite attitudes in the FSU see Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reisinger, ‘Comparing citizen and elite belief systems in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 59 no. 1 (1995) pp. 1–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reisinger, ‘Understanding democracy: a comparison of mass and elite in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine’, Studies in Public Policy, no.247 (Glasgow: Strathclyde University Centre for the Study of Public Policy, 1995). It was based upon June-July 1992 interviews with the public, and April 1992 interviews with a total of 138 respondents drawn from the old Russian and Ukrainian parliaments - technically the Supreme Soviets - that had been elected under Gorbachev. These differ from our own surveys of parliamentary opinion in that they include only half as many Russian and Ukrainian deputies; they exclude ECE; they are drawn from Soviet era Supreme Soviets; and the opinions of these elected deputies are merged with those of 39 appointed administrators.Google Scholar
- 3.Miller, Hesli and Reisinger also found that ‘both the Russian and Ukrainian elite as of mid-1992 were definitely more favourable towards… the market than was the general population.’ Arthur H. Miller, Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reisinger, ‘Comparing citizen and elite belief systems in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol.59 no.1 (1995) pp. l-40 at p. 14. We have found that the post-Soviet MPs differed more from their publics than the deputies who Miller, Hesli and Reisinger interviewed after the fall of the Soviet Union, but who had all been elected as Soviet deputies when the Soviet Union was still in existence.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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© William L. Miller, Stephen White and Paul Heywood 1998