Abstract
As we saw in the last chapter, members of postcommunist parliaments had remarkably pro-market values for people with such a communist past. But the communist regime had not only supported socialist values, it had also rejected the values of nationalism and liberal democracy. Did those elected to postcommunist parliaments now reject all the principles of the old regime by accepting nationalist, liberal and democratic values as well as rejecting socialist ones?
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Notes
William L. Miller, Annis May Timpson and Michael Lessnoff, Political Culture in Contemporary Britain: People and Politicians, Principles and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) pp. 158–62.
British politicians were also much more tolerant of deviants and extremists than were their public - in political affairs, though not in everyday personal life. See Miller, Timpson and Lessnoff (1996) p. 125. The tolerance questions used in our FSU/ECE and more especially in our British surveys owe some inspiration to John L. Sullivan, James Pierson and George E. Marcus, Political Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1982), though they are not quite the same, and we would interpret them differently
See also their more recent George E. Marcus, John L. Sullivan, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse and Sandra L. Wood, With Malice Towards Some: How People make Civil Liberties Judgements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
For American findings that contrast the tolerance of elites and masses see the classic, Herbert McClosky and Alida Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe about Civil Liberties (New York, NY: Russell Sage, 1983). McClosky and Brill contrast the mass public with various elite groups, but not elected politicians as such.
Reisinger et al. also found MPs and executive officials in the FSU were about 31 per cent more favourable than their publics to a multi-party system both in 1992 and 1995 (30 per cent in Russia, 33 per cent in Ukraine). See Arthur H. Miller, William M. Reisinger and Vicki L. Hesli, ‘Change in support for democracy and marketization among post-Soviet mass and elite, 1992–995’, Paper to AAASS (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies) 27th National Convention, Washington, DC, October 1995, Tables 1 and 2.
Miller, Hesli and Reisinger also found that ‘both the Russian and Ukrainian elite as of mid-1992 were definitely more favourable towards… democratic principles… than was the general population… but there was less distinction between the two [i.e. elites and publics] when nationality and ethnic interests are considered.’ 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. 1–40 at p. 14. We have found that the post-Soviet MPs differed more on liberal values 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 when the Soviet Union was still in existence. And we have also found that members of the new Russian parliament elected in 1993 were less nationalist than their public, if only by a small amount. On their small sample, Miller, Hesli and Reisinger found that their quasi-Soviet Russian elites were slightly more nationalist than their public, not less.
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© 1998 William L. Miller, Stephen White and Paul Heywood
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Miller, W.L., White, S., Heywood, P. (1998). The Nationalist, Liberal and Democratic Values of MPs. In: Values and Political Change in Postcommunist Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377448_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377448_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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