K. Krumov

Individualism, Collectivism, and Authoritarianism in Seven Societies

Building on Hofstedes finding that individualism and social hierarchy are incompatible at the societal level, the authors examined the relationship between individualism-collectivism and orientations toward authority at the individual level. In Study 1, authoritarianism was related to three measures of collectivism but unrelated to three measures of individualism in a U.S. sample (N = 382). Study 2 used Triandiss horizontal-vertical individualism-collectivism framework in samples from Bulgaria, Japan, New Zealand, Germany, Poland, Canada, and the United States (total N = 1,018). Both at the individual level and the societal level of analysis, authoritarianism was correlated with vertical individualism and vertical collectivism but unrelated to horizontal collectivism. Horizontal individualism was unrelated to authoritarianism except in post-Communist societies whose recent history presumably made salient the incompatibility between state authority and self-determination.

Structure of attitudes toward illegal immigration: development of cross-national cumulative scales.

This research examined the possibility of developing Mokken cumulative scales measuring attitudes toward illegal immigrants in a 9-nation sample. A total of 1,407 respondents primarily from national and regional universities participated in the surveys including the 20-item Illegal Immigration Scale. The scales displayed acceptable reliability with coefficients alpha ranging from .79 to .93. A Procrustes analysis yielded coefficients of congruence with the previously established three-factor solution. The amount of variance accounted for varied between 33.1 and 54.7%, supporting the presence of other factors in attitudes toward illegal immigrants. Mokken scale analysis yielded robust and economical scales in two clusters of national samples.

Developing attitude statements toward illegal immigration: transcultural reliability and utility.

This is a report on the utility of a scale measuring attitudes toward illegal immigrants in two samples from nations that have more people moving out of the country than moving into the country. The Attitude toward Illegal Immigrants Scale was administered to 219 undergraduates from Sofia University in Bulgaria, and 179 undergraduates from Hanoi State University in Vietnam. Results yielded a scale with no sex differences, and acceptable alpha coefficients. Item analysis identified the most contributory and least contributory items, with considerable overlap in the two samples. A principal component analysis with varimax rotation was carried out to examine the structure.

Conflict Resolution Strategies in the Transition to Market Economy

One of the most typical characteristics of post-totalitarian societies is the expansion of conflict. In the transition from totalitarianism to democracy, conflict accompanies the changes in all social spheres: politics, economics, culture, personality, and so on. The most dramatic and difficult conflicts to overcome are the economic ones. The conflicts in the economic sphere always emerge, develop, and die away within a given organization. It is precisely the structure and characteristics of the organization that determine the dynamics and the development of the conflict, and it is again the organization that determines the resolution and disappearance of the conflict. The goal of our empirical study was to trace the dynamics of the conflicts within changing Bulgarian organizations, as well as to reveal their peculiarities depending on the gender, age, and position of the subjects in the organizational hierarchy. In addition, our task was to find out the ways in which the five basic strategies for conflict resolution are applied in developing organizations. The general conclusions of our study outline the ways for successfully coping with conflicts and effectively managing organizations in the transition from a centralized to a market economy.

Ideology and Identity: A National Outlook

Hopes for an international order and global peace seem shattered as we face the 21st century. The nation-state supported by the national outlook is not withering away. On the contrary, in the identity vacuum which followed the system collapse of Stalinism, new virulent forms of mini nationalisms and ethnic chauvinisms are observed. Clearly, peace research must devote more attention to the understanding of the ideological and identity components of the national outlook. The current studies contribute a step toward outlining the components of the national outlook. Phase 1 focused on components and structure of the US national outlook. 1867 US, international students, and domestic group respondents participated in the 60-item check-off survey. Few differences were found between groups, supporting the presence of a common national outlook with shared content and structure. In phase 2, 755 social science students from the USA, Bulgaria, Hungary and Norway responded to each of the 60 items on a five-point response category varying from completely meaningful (5) to completely meaningless (1). Differences in ratings by the samples were determined, and varimax rotated factor analyses were completed. The greatest overall differences were found, as predicted, between US and Bulgarian respondents, and the greatest similarities between US and Norwegian participants. Finally, the relationship of the national outlook to peace is discussed.

Attitudinal predictors of potential illegal cross-border migration

This paper reports on the relationship between attitudes toward illegal immigrants and illegal immigration, and peoples private behavioural intention to immigrate illegally into a foreign country. The research was carried out in 2005, in Bulgaria, a country with a net emigration rate, using a sample of 505 undergraduate Bulgarian students (22.5% male; M age = 23.3; SD = 4.8). A pool of 78 items assessed attitudes toward undocumented immigrants and evaluation of illegal migration. These two measures were used to predict potential undocumented immigration. Based on a factor analysis six subscales were identified and labelled: improvement of life, moral evaluation, courage to live, failure experienced in own country, expectations of benefits from illegal migration, and right to immigrate. Results of a multiple regression analysis explained 62 percent of the variance of the behavioural intention to migrate illegally into a foreign country. The analysis yielded the following factors: attitudes to improve life (β = 0.35), the moral evaluation of illegal immigrants (β = -0.26), expectancies of benefits (β = -0.19), the courage of migrants (β = 0.10), and seeing illegal immigration as a right (β = 0.09), These findings support the hypothesis that attitudes may predict potential behaviour, the strongest predictor for undocumented migration being the urge to improve life, and moral evaluation of migrants.

Authoritarian Attitudes and Aesthetic Preferences: A Bulgarian Replication

This report describes a Bulgarian replication with 173 students of a German study concerning the effect of stimulus properties of complexity and order and authoritarian attitudes on the perceived pleasantness of polygons. Analyses of variance yielded neither significant main effects nor significant interactions for the different measures of authoritarianism, but there were significant main effects for order and complexity.