Ada W. Finifter

Dimensions of Political Alienation

In recent years there has emerged in this country a radical questioning and rejection of established political institutions unparalleled since the Civil War in its intensity and scope. One objective indicator of this trend since World War II is the marked rise in voluntary renunciation of American citizenship, an act which represents the formal and final estrangement of the individual from his former political ties. Available evidence suggests that estrangement from the polity is also widespread in countries throughout the world as fundamental questions are being raised about the legitimacy of political institutions and political leadership.Attitudes toward the political system have long been a concern of political scientists. Major orienting theories of the political system suggest that citizen support plays a crucial role in determining the structure and processes of political systems. Almond and Verba, for example, use the concept “civic culture” to refer to a complex mix of attitudes and behaviors considered to be conducive to democratic government. Easton underscores the fundamental importance of attitudes for system stability, focusing especially on “diffuse support” as a prerequisite for the integration of political systems. He suggests that “(w)here the input of support falls below [a certain] minimum, the persistence of any kind of system will be endangered. A system will finally succumb unless it adopts measures to cope with the stress.”The conversion of these general theoretical ideas into systematic empirical theory requires further rigorous and comprehensive analyses of types of citizen support and the development of empirical indicators for this domain.

Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for Political Change

Using data from a national public opinion survey carried out in the Soviet Union during November and December 1989, we explore two attitudes relevant to the revolutionary changes there: (1) attitudes toward change and political democracy and (2) attitudes toward a core component of socialist ideology, the locus of responsibility for social well-being (the state or individuals?). These variables are unrelated, with the sample relatively evenly divided among the intersecting cells of a cross tabulation. While social conflict may be mitigated by the small sizes of absolutely opposing groups, consensus may also be hard to reach. Ethnicity, education, income, age, party membership, and life satisfaction have important effects on these attitudes. We discuss how attitude patterns in our data may be related to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and to problems faced by the independent successor states as they develop new institutions and foster new values.

Attitudes toward Individual Responsibility and Political Reform in the Former Soviet Union

Based upon a survey of the USSR in December 1989, Finifter and Mickiewicz (1992) found that respondents with higher education were less inclined than those with lower education to support individual, versus state, responsibility, and that supporters of individual responsibility were slightly less likely than those favoring state responsibility to support political change. A recent critique challenged this analysis, arguing that higher education is always associated with support for individual responsibility and that preference for individual responsibility is always positively associated with support for political reform, and reported findings to that effect. This analysis resolves these discrepant findings and clarifies why they occurred. A replication using data from 40 societies demonstrates that the relationship between education and locus of responsibility is not universal; indeed, it appears in only a few countries. Moreover, large differences in sampling and measurement procedures and extraordinary changes over time in the real world contributed to the differences between our findings and those of our critics.