Kent L. Tedin

Democratic Values and the Transformation of the Soviet Union

Our purpose in this article is to determine the degree to which the cultural requisites to democracy are present in the contemporary political culture of the USSR. We focus on support for core democratic rights, liberties, and institutions. Data for this project come from a survey of 504 citizens of the Moscow Oblast conducted between February 17, 1990, and March 4, 1990. In absolute terms, support for democratic values is fairly widespread in the Moscow Oblast. We found significant levels of endorsement of competitive elections and for many democratic rights and liberties such as liberty and the norms of democracy. Many of the scales measuring support for democratic rights were intercorrelated, leading us to hypothesize the existence of a general underlying dimension of democratic values. The best predictors of attitudes toward general democratic values were education, gender, and age. The better educated, males, and the young tended to be more supportive of democratic institutions and processes. We take these findings as evidence that further efforts to democratize the Soviet Union will not meet resistance from Soviet political culture.

The Influence of Parents on the Political Attitudes of Adolescents.

The purpose of this paper is to specify the conditions in which parents influence the party identification and certain issue attitudes of their adolescent children (recent high school graduates). The nature and extent of the parent-adolescent attitude correspondence is first established. Next, parental as opposed to environmental explanations for this correspondence are considered. Finally, the effects on parental influence of family interaction, political interest, issue salience to the parent, and accuracy of the adolescents perception of the parental attitude are analyzed. Issue salience and perceptual accuracy are found to have strong effects; the other variables have lesser or no effect. When issue salience and perceptual accuracy are held constant in a multivariate equation, the beta weights indicating the influence of the parent attitude on the attitude of the adolescent are very similar for all issues and party identification. It is concluded that idiosyncratic variations in successful parent-child attitude transmission can be explained by a general equation.

Assessing Peer and Parent Influence on Adolescent Political Attitudes

This paper treats both substantive and methodological issues in assessing agent influence on individual political attitudes. From a substantive perspective, the effect of perceptual accuracy, issue salience, and parent-peer orientation on attitude relationships among adolescents, parents, and peers is analyzed. These variables are found to affect relationships in a similar fashion, but their marginal distributions generally lead to higher correlations between adolescents and parents than between adolescents and peers. From a methodological perspective the link between statistical techniques for measuring paired comparisons and conceptions of influence is analyzed. It is argued that parents and peers can have divergent political attitudes, yet both influence the individual in the same direction.

The Consequences of Regime Type for Public-Policy Outputs:

Most research has shown little association between regime type and public-policy outputs. In this article we employ a multivariate model and year-by-year data from 1960-1980 in Latin America to analyze the relationship among regime type, regime age, and public policy. The analysis shows regime type to be significantly associated with policy in five areas, with regime age have an additional independent effect in several of these areas.

The 1928–1936 Partisan Realignment: The Case for the Conversion Hypothesis

An unresolved question concerning the New Deal realignment is the extent to which the Democratic surge in the vote resulted from either the conversion of former Republicans or the mobilization of newly active voters. Analyzing survey data from the Literary Digest straw polls and from early Gallup polls, we find evidence supporting the conversion hypothesis. New voters in 1928, 1932 and 1936 were only slightly more Democratic in their voting behavior than were established voters. Between 1924 and 1936, the vote among established voters was extremely volatile, largely accounting for the Democratic gains. After 1936, however, vote shifts became minimal and party identification had become highly consistent with presidential voting, suggesting a crystallization of the New Deal realignment by the late 1930s rather than a gradual evolution due to generational replacement.

Age, Race, Self-Interest, and Financing Public Schools through Referenda

Using a sample of 628 white, black, and Hispanic voters in a large urban school district, we test a series of hypotheses about voting in a school bond election. We find that there is a core of similar results across racial/ethnic groups. All three groups show strong, directly measured, self-interest effects. We also find some distinct group differences. Symbolic values played a limited role for white voters, but a stronger role for minorities. In addition, for white voters we find a substantial drop in support for the bond across age cohorts, but no such drop among black and Hispanic voters.

Racial/Ethnic Diversity and Academic Quality as Components of School Choice

A common critique of school choice is that it will have the practical effect of further increasing racial and ethnic segregation in American education. Although most survey evidence indicates that the highest priority of parents in choosing schools is academic quality, with the race and ethnic composition of the student body being much less important, many critics doubt that private preferences are being publicly revealed. In this paper, we use an experimental design embedded in a survey to obtain an alternative measure of educational quality and racial diversity as considerations for household school choice. While both academic quality and race/ethnic diversity had an effect on preferences, academic quality was a more important predictor. We then examined the relationship between preference and actual choice outcomes. Race-related opinions were nonpredictive of outcomes, but a stress on high test scores by parents predicted school choice among students who are not “at risk.”

Social Background and Political Differences Between Pro- and Anti-Era Activists

a stop-ERA campaign began to coalesce. The coalition opposed to the ERA, like that in favor, is composed essentially of women, and both proand anti-ERA groups have been very active in lobbying their case before state legislatures. While several scholars have studied political aspects of the women’s liberation movement (Freeman,1975; Jacquette, 1974; Amundsen, 1971), there has been considerably less attention paid to those women who actively oppose the ERA, and even fewer

Self-Interest, Symbolic Values, and the Financial Equalization of the Public Schools

Using a natural experiment in which some school districts stood to lose dollars due to court-ordered financial equalization and others stood to gain dollars, I test theories of self-interest and symbolic politics as predictors of dependent variables with racial overtones. The data show a substantial self-interest effect. However, even with the presence of a self-interest effect, symbolic values are still important, most notably those associated with race. The self-interest calculation is then investigated. Relevant variables include levels of information, beliefs, and individual predispositions. The effect of these variables on self-interest demonstrates that the assessment of self-interest is not a simple mechanistic process, but contingent upon a variety of affective variables. Finally, I note that self-interest affects the aggregate level of support for the dependent variable within district but has little effect on its relationship with symbolic values.

Sex Differences in Political Attitudes and Behavior: The Case for Situational Factors

S EX DIFFERENCES IN ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR are nowhere more evident than in politics. But they also exist at the level of the mass public. Survey data have shown that women, as compared to men, tend to be less politically efficacious, less politically interested, have less political information, and are less likely to participate in politics.1 The explanations usually advanced for this phenomenon are either preadult sex-role socialization, or situational and structural factors encountered in adulthood.2 Dominant in the literature has been the socialization model. As part of sex-role sociali-