Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Transformation and its aftermath
- 1 Time matters: the dynamics of regime support
- 2 The supply of regimes: democratic and autocratic
- 3 A changing supply of Russian regimes
- 4 Uncertainties of transformation: a view from the bottom
- 5 Changing levels of regime support
- 6 Social structure and the evaluation of regimes
- 7 The influence of political values and performance
- 8 Finding the economic influences that matter
- 9 The impact of the passage of time
- 10 What could challenge the new equilibrium?
- Appendix A New Russia Barometer samples
- Appendix B Coding of variables
- References
- Index
7 - The influence of political values and performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Transformation and its aftermath
- 1 Time matters: the dynamics of regime support
- 2 The supply of regimes: democratic and autocratic
- 3 A changing supply of Russian regimes
- 4 Uncertainties of transformation: a view from the bottom
- 5 Changing levels of regime support
- 6 Social structure and the evaluation of regimes
- 7 The influence of political values and performance
- 8 Finding the economic influences that matter
- 9 The impact of the passage of time
- 10 What could challenge the new equilibrium?
- Appendix A New Russia Barometer samples
- Appendix B Coding of variables
- References
- Index
Summary
Many forms of government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 1947The structure of the regime that governs a country is determined by bargaining and competition between elites; it is not determined by the values of the general public. Survey studies of national political cultures may produce sophisticated analyses of how individuals acquire political values (Almond and Verba, 1963; Inglehart, 1997; Feldman, 2003). However, such studies are of little relevance to regime transformation, because individuals change slowly compared to the abruptness with which a regime can be transformed.
Logically, an individual cannot evaluate the performance of a regime without having criteria for making a judgment. Decisions about support for a regime depend not only on what a regime does but also on the values that individuals use to assess it. Even if a Marxist and a libertarian agreed in their description of the performance of the Soviet regime, their conflicting values would lead to opposite conclusions. Values define general principles applicable to performance in many contexts. They are thus more general than the views that public opinion polls collect about what people would like government to do about a current problem.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Russia TransformedDeveloping Popular Support for a New Regime, pp. 124 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006