Abstract
Western study of Russian politics has made a remarkable transformation. From a formerly information-constrained research environment, often more informed by educated speculation than by hard empirical data, the field is now brimming with opportunity for in-country research. One trend among Western scholars has been the examination of political culture through the use of quantitative survey methods. Many contemporary researchers have sought to test cultural continuity theories with Western concepts of political culture development. Unfortunately, the findings of this research have been mixed, often contradictory, and inconsistent. As new research should begin after examining what has gone before, this chapter presents a review of Western survey research results in Russia.1
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Notes and References
J. Millar, ed., Politics, Work, and Daily Life in the USSR: A Survey of Former Soviet Citizens (New York: Cambridge, 1987).
S. White, Political Culture and Soviet Politics (New York: St. Martins Press, 1979);
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See L. Pye, ‘Introduction: Political Culture and Political Development’, in L. Pye and S. Verba, eds, Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton, 1965), pp. 3–26.
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See P. Roeder, ‘Modernization and Participation in the Leninist Developmental Strategy’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 83, no. 3 (September 1989), 859–84;
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These general findings were largely confirmed in 1990 and 1992 surveys. J. Gibson, ‘The Resilience of Mass Support for Democratic Institutions and Processes in the Nascent Russian and Ukrainian Economies’, in V. Tismaneanu, ed., Political Culture and Civil Society in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 53–111.
See also J. Sullivan, J. Piereson and G. Marcus, ‘An Alternative Conceptualization of Political Tolerance: Illusory Increases 1950s–1970s’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, no. 3 (September 1979), 781–94.
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See also W. Reisinger, A. Miller, V. Hesli and K.H. Maher, ‘Political Values in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania: Sources and Implications for Democracy’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 24, no. 2 (April 1994), 183–223.
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For similar views among elites see J. Hahn, ‘Attitudes Toward Reform Among Provincial Russian Politicians’, Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 9, no. 1 (January–March 1993), pp. 66–85.
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See P. Converse, ‘Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue’, in E. Tufte, ed., The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 168–89
and J. Zaller and S. Feldman, ‘A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 36, no. 3 (August 1992), 579–616.
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Along with ‘phantom’ opinions, varying rates of ‘I don’t know’ responses generally go unreported and raise further questions about the strength of survey findings. See E. Carnaghan, ‘Alienation, Apathy, or Ambivalence? “Don’t Knows” and Democracy in Russia,’ Slavic Review, Vol. 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996), 325–63.
Hough, ‘The Russian Election of 1993’, op. cit., 8, 11. See also F. Fleron, ‘Post-Soviet Political Culture in Russia: An Assessment of Recent Empirical Investigations’, Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, no. 2 (1996), 225–60.
See M. Urban, ‘The Politics of Identity in Russia’s Post Communist Transition: The Nation against Itself’, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, no. 3 (Fall 1994), 733–65.
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E. Walker, ‘Post-Sovietology, Area Studies, and the Social Sciences’, The Harriman Institute Forum, Vol. 6, nos. 6–7 (February–March 1993), 24–8.
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© 2000 James Alexander
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Alexander, J. (2000). Surveying Attitudes in Russia: a Representation of Formlessness. In: Political Culture in Post-Communist Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507913_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507913_3
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