Jeffrey W. Hahn

Generational Differences in Russian Attitudes towards Democracy and the Economy

Abstract The purpose of this article is to explore whether there is evidence of generational differences in Russian attitudes towards democracy. Are the attitudes, values and beliefs of those who came of age politically after the fall of the Soviet Union significantly different from those who did so in the Soviet period? The main finding is that the post-Soviet generation of Russians is generally more supportive of democratic values and institutions and a free market economy than the generations which came of age politically during the Soviet years. Such a result is not surprising. However, while support was found to be the case generally, the differences appear much more strongly for economic reforms than for political ones. In trying to explain why this should be, the authors argue that instrumentalist rather than culturalist considerations are paramount. Put another way, the current generation appears to be less interested in politics than in getting ahead in the world. If these differences are generational and not simply a function of aging, in the future this generation may be less interested in the public good than in their own.

College Activism Reassessed: The Development of Activists and Nonactivists from Successive Cohorts

Abstract Large samples (300–500 students each year) of the four undergraduate classes were presented with a structured interview during the academic years 1973–1974, 1974–1975, and 1975–1976. The interview contained a series of items selected to determine level of behavioral activism and a variety of attitudinal, personality, and familial variables shown to be relevant in previous research. Students were classified as activists or nonactivists on the basis of their scores on the activism instrument. Analyses examined the effects of cohort, year in college, and activism on the other variables. The most notable finding was the greater likelihood of nonactivists to participate in national and campus politics, with participation declining over years of measurement. These and other findings were quite different from those reported in the earlier literature. It was concluded that developmental designs which permit separation of cohort and year-of-measurement effects are critical in research on such changing soc...

The effects of college on students' partisanship: A research note.

The well-documented generational shift from partisanship towards independence with its important systemic implications (Nye et al., 1976) raises an important issue for students of political learning. Such a shift questions the principal assumption of socialization theory that important attitudes are transmitted from parent to child as affective orientations early in the childs development process and then gain cognitive support as physiological capacities develop; these orientations then persist unchanged into adulthood (Weissberg, 1974). Although their cross-sectional methods confounded maturationaI, generational, and environmental effects, the earlier socialization studies (Greenstein, 1965; Easton and Dennis, 1969; Hess and Torney, 1967) generally supported this theory. More recently, panel studies based on data from primary schools (Vaillancourt, 1973; Vaillancourt and Niemi, 1974) and a national high school sample (Jennings and Niemi, 1974, 1975)have also upheld this transmission-of partisanship model. The later studies document some slippage in party identification between parent and child, but a recent reanalysis of the Jennings and Niemi data stressing more appropriate statistical techniques (Weissberg and Joslyn, 1977) suggests