Public Opinion And Regime Change

The New Politics Of Post-soviet Societies

Arthur H Miller, William M Reisinger, Vicki Hesli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000308648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This volume reports a research that represents some of the collaborative efforts aimed at investigating political attitudes and behaviors in the broader Soviet society, examining the public opinion constraints on efforts to transform the new organizations into a competitive political party system.

Part One
Conducting Public Opinion Research in the Soviet Union

1
Polling and Perestroika

Elena I. Bashkirova and Vicki L. Hesli

In this chapter we touch briefly upon the importance of public opinion research to the process of democratization, the role played by vital institutions and individuals in the growth of survey research within the Soviet Union, and the expansion of opportunities for collaborative study between Soviet and Western researchers. In progressing through these subjects we move from the general to the more specific. We begin with a theoretical discussion of the link between polling and perestroika by emphasizing the value of surveys as a tool for the expression of citizen interests. Confusion results, however, when the agenda being put forward by government officials—or the topic chosen for study by re searchers—does not coincide with the citizens' own priorities and concerns. We argue in support of public opinion research while offering some cautionary notes. We then examine the development of survey research within the Soviet Union. Significant progress has unquestionably been made in the past several years. Of particular importance has been the decline in the pervasive influence of the Communist Party. In the final section, we offer a smattering of results from recent studies. These have been chosen for the purpose of demonstrating that the study of public opinion in the former Soviet Union is of an entirely different type now in comparison to what was accepted, or required, in the past.

With the onset of perestroika and the introduction of the goal of democratizing all aspects of political, economic and social life, public opinion became a crucial instrument of political power and rule by the people. Public opinion translates into a means of public self-government when institutionalized through the use of referendums or when voter preferences are registered in elections involving competition among candidates, political parties or other organizations. Constitutional provisions allowing referendums are a practical mechanism for self-government by granting the people the right of the deciding vote. Parties and candidates appeal directly to public opinion in support of causes and goals, and actively try to influence public opinion while simultaneously responding to public demands in building consensus in support of policy agendas.

In addition, because the media regularly report the results of public opinion polls, such surveys provide feedback to the regime and to public organizations, while shaping the attitudes of the people, which in turn are transformed with the new information. Thus, because the final effect of surveys upon social and political processes depends on the accuracy of the information, the competence and reliability of public opinion researchers becomes critically important. The aim of survey research becomes a practical one: to employ the best methods available to evaluate as faithfully as possible the views and opinions of all categories of the population.

A democratic form of government and an awareness of public opinion are functionally inseparable. If democracy stimulates public opinion as a means of expressing the interests of the majority, public opinion in its turn becomes an indispensable instrument to make democracy function and spread. Government institutions can more truly represent the public through the scientific identification of public opinion. A baseline picture of public opinion is also necessary in order to monitor the process of democratization. Democracy by definition implies a more responsive government, yet scholars and politicians lack knowledge about the process of democratic reform and need to build an understanding of the likely pitfalls if such obstacles are to be overcome.

The Soviet people experienced gross ideological, political, social and economic mistakes that resulted inevitably from the indifference of administrative bodies to public opinion. During Stalin's tenure, a purposeful neglect of public opinion adversely affected the social climate and people's feelings, and restrained creative potential. In contrast, the Twentieth Communist Party Congress in 1956, with its open criticism of Stalin's cult of personality, rejuvenated the social atmosphere and encouraged and intensified critical evaluation and independent opinions among the Soviet people. Under such conditions, the social status of public opinion was strengthened. The enthusiastically cooperative attitude of the Soviet people toward participation in interviews, noted as early as the late 1950s by Soviet scholars, indicates that the people appreciate when the leadership expresses a genuine interest in the views of its citizens.

The self evaluation that is embodied in this link between public opinion and democracy found representation in the concept of "new political thinking." In his book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, Mikhail Gorbachev called for a new theoretical consciousness, with new ideas, doctrines and definitions being worked out and developed by politicians, social scientists and state figures. The very idea of new political thinking—of perestroika in Soviet society—was a completely new, if not to say alien, notion. The mass media, especially in the West, regarded new political thinking as "A Revolution from the Top."

The basic features of new political thinking were to serve as a methodological base for re-orienting sociological research in areas such as international affairs. One goal was to build a more realistic perception of the complex and contradictory phenomena associated with international events—including a re-evaluation of negative orientations, political stalemate, and apparently insurmountable problems. Another goal was to foster critical and creative thinking about the relationship between practical experience and various ideological and theoretical concepts. For example, a truly critical analysis of Soviet foreign and domestic policy provided an improved understanding of what concrete actions the Soviet state might undertake in order to achieve international peace and disarmament. Self-criticism promoted a discriminating comprehension of the country's experience, the ability to acknowledge errors, and the ability to change political course. Thus, flexibility in political decision-making was a major component of the new thinking, including the ability to review old views and images, to undertake new, unexpected decisions, and to take into account the interests of non-Soviet people—the whole of humanity.

Revising or possibly rejecting the old ideas that had been impeding social development necessitated the emergence of new concepts, novel proposals, and uncommon political decisions. The Soviet Union's relations with other nations and their approach to the international system were the first areas to manifest the tremendous transformations associated with this new theoretical orientation. The ideas represented by this great transformation included giving priority to human interests over class or group interests, de-ideologizing international relations and foreign policies, and acknowledging global interdependence.

In evaluating the impact of such concepts and ideas, we need to remember that the theoretical consciousness of the masses (or people's everyday consciousness) may be different from the consciousness developed within the political leadership or among intellectuals. The transmission of ideas "from the top" to the people is a complex and difficult process, which sometimes results in the unintentional transformation of not only the form but also the content of ideas. These transformations are especially problematic with regard to absolutely new ideas such as perestroika. Thus, the above-mentioned examples of theoretical consciousness are sometimes reflected in the mass consciousness in a different way, as shown in the accompanying illustration.

Theoretical Consciousness	Mass Consciousness
Priority of human interests over class interests	More goods in shops, raising the level of living
De-ideologization of international relations	More contacts with the United States and West European countries, more possibilities to travel abroad
Global interdependence	More care and concern about ecological problems

The complex way in which ideas from the level of theoretical consciousness are transformed into the everyday consciousness of the people creates clear difficulties for measuring the consciousness of the masses. Many of the concepts now being presented to the people in the form of questions raised in interviews represent unfamiliar ideas— ideas transmitted by Gorbachev, by reform-minded intellectuals, or borrowed from theoretical and conceptual currents in the West. These ideas may take on a very different form once they are adopted and internalized at the mass level. Respondents may need more time to think about these concepts before they are asked to respond; and they may need more information about the origin of the idea before they can intelligently tell the interviewer whether they agree or disagree. So as a picture is being built of the attitudes and behavioral orientations of the post-Soviet citizen, the citizen is also being exposed to new ideas and information. As learning occurs through the availability of new information, the responses of these same citizens are likely to change.

The traditional methods of sociological research—self-administered questionnaires, mail and telephone surveys, and face-to-face interviews—provide basic information about the trends in public opinion and social moods, but these methods do have some limitations when measuring attitudes toward newly emerging aspects of social reality. Group discussions plus less-structured and more in-depth interviews can be used to supplement the standard techniques and may help to fulfill at least three goals: to help the researchers better understand the subject of study, to allow the respondents to better express their inner perceptions on more sophisticated concepts, and, in the final analysis, to get valid, reliable and accurately measured data.

To measure public attitudes about such phenomena as perestroika, social and political reform, cooperatives, democratization and openness is not an easy task. It implies a proper understanding of the subject matter by the investigators themselves. It requires the development of a complex analytical image of the notion or concept under study, including all possible sides or aspects of the phenomenon which may hypothetically pertain to public consciousness. Developing such a sensitivity will ultimately lead to a better understanding of the dynamic tendencies underlying the social mood or the problem of the day, as well as allowing for a prognosis on the evolution of the issue.

The Development of Soviet Sociological and Public Opinion Research

Although sociological research had been carried out in the pre-revolutionary and civil war periods, Stalin equated such studies with bourgeois influences and declared them to be "hostile to Marxist ideology" (Shlapentokh 1987, 13-14). As in other spheres of Soviet life, this posture changed dramatically beginning with the 20th Party Congress in 1956 and Khrushchev's famous critique of Stalinism. Most scholars credit the birth of modern empirical sociology in the Soviet Union to the post-Stalin era.

The revival of sociological study within the Soviet Union involved heavy borrowing of techniques from the United States and other Western countries. Institutional advances came in the form of the establishment of the Soviet Sociological Association in 1958 and, in the early 1960s, the creation of departments for empirical sociological research at universities in Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk and Tartu (Shlapentokh 1987, 16-17). Several major studies were undertaken which involved interviews of ordinary people, and the data were analyzed using basic statistical techniques such as correlation analysis.

These were not times of unfettered freedom, however. As in any country, the political ideology of the regime and the orientation of the leadership have an impact on the choice of topics and the thoroughness of study, whether the research was funded by public or private monies. In the Soviet Union, of course, private research monies were completely unavailable, and thus the state more directly controlled topics for study. Although the Soviet leadership needed accurate and reliable information about the implementation and effectiveness of government programs—in order to make progress toward the stated goal of modernization—the authorities were reluctant to publicize too much information for fear that certain findings would highlight the failings and weaknesses of socialism (Shlapentokh 1987, 5-6). The most sensitive areas, from the perspective of the leadership, were those that had to do with their own ability to maintain power. Their maintenance of power depended to a certain extent upon coercion, but also upon the degree of popular support for the Communist Party and for the other major institutions of the state. As long as most people believed that the regime was accepted as legitimate by a majority of their fellow citizens, thoughts of rebellion or opposition were rarely expressed openly. But should the dissemination of the results of public opinion polls reveal a widespread distrust and/or dissatisfaction with the leadership, citizens who were previously passive in their acceptance of political authority might come to question their own levels of support. Thus, even after the death of Stalin, the study of public opinion was treated with the greatest possible caution in the Soviet Union.

Any questions relating even remotely to the performance of the political system had to be hidden under the guise of acceptable areas of economic research. For a project to overcome official sanction, scholars had to present "their research as related to economics and divorced from politics and ideology" (Shlapentokh 1987, 18). Only a few books reporting the results of these early studies were published in the immediate post-Stalin period, but by the mid-1960s the discipline had begun to expand into new areas of study. Seminars were held to discuss methodological issues of survey research, sociologists began to travel abroad to attend international conferences, and courses on sociology were introduced into the curriculum at major universities.

Two important events occurred in the 1960s: the acceptance of doctoral dissertations based upon empirical sociological research and the creation within the USSR Academy of Sciences of the Institute for Applied Sociological Research (Shlapentokh 1987, 34-38). All of these developments represented the acceptance and tacit approval by the authorities of the potentialities of survey research, as well as a response to pressure from scholars to keep pace with international developments in sociology and other sciences.

The intensive study of public opinion also began in the early 1960s. The first studies of public opinion in the Soviet Union were surveys of readers' attitudes toward articles published in newspapers. The questions asked were cautiously worded and tended not to touch on subjects which were deemed to be politically sensitive. One noteworthy project, supported directly by the Central Committee, attempted to go beyond attitudes toward the media by tapping a range of other issues. The Taganrog project, headed by Boris Grushin, included questions about the "participation of the people in various meetings and organizations, their communication with authorities, . . . the reaction of officials toward complaints of the masses and many other subjects" (Shlapentokh 1987, 170). In a 1967 publication describing the results of his research, Grushin noted that the opinions of the people were sometimes at odds with the official view. Because of deteriorating intellectual freedoms, however, the data from the project were not made available and Grushin published no more about it until 1980.

In 1968, a special department dealing with public opinion studies was established within the Institute for Applied Sociological Research (later renamed the Institute for Sociological Research, now the Institute of Sociology). Public opinion surveys were carried out regularly, while simultaneously the theory and method of public opinion studies were being developed. During the period surrounding the Prague Spring of 1968, however, the leadership developed a deep-seated suspicion of the motives and loyalties of many prominent intellectuals. This misgiving is shown by the targeting of Yuri Levada, who was a strong proponent of empirical research. He was accused by the authorities of "ideological sins" and was expelled from the Institute for Concrete Social Research. Party control was tightened and the proportion of party personnel working within the sociological research institutions was purposefully increased (Shlapentokh 1987, 119-120). Some work continued in such areas as labor turnover and rural sociology, and more Western books on methodology were translated into Russian, but sociology as a discipline was disjointed and made only limited progress toward tapping the opinions of the people.

During the 1970s, the results of sociological research were published mainly in specialized scientific journals with a narrow circulation, and very rarely in the public press. Some part of the data (mostly those showing "achievements of socialism in the USSR," positive attitudes toward various aspects of the Soviet way of life, and mass support of Soviet foreign and domestic policy) was used by political authorities in various state and communist party documents, including official reports and speeches by political figures. Data characterizing negative attitudes toward Soviet society, however, were not incorporated into official documents. Rather, these documents and speeches were aimed at reinforcing the climate of "social optimism."

The political leadership during this time remained hostile to sociological research—even if the information gathered might contribute to the more efficient management of the country. An American scholar (Lubrano 1981, 14) identified four factors that continued to limit the effectiveness of survey research as a policy tool in the USSR: 1) the limitation of most studies to regional samples not representative of other areas, 2) the potenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE CONDUCTING PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCH IN THE SOVIET UNION
• 1 Polling and Perestroika
• 2 Public Opinion Research in the Soviet Union: Problems and Possibilities
• PART TWO HOW CITIZENS RELATE TO POLITICS: INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, AND THE POLITICAL SYSTEM
• Foreword to Part Two: Social Change and Soviet Public Opinion
• 3 An Emerging Civic Culture? Ideology, Public Attitudes, and Political Culture in the Early 1990s
• 4 Emerging Democratic Values in Soviet Political Culture
• 5 In Search of Regime Legitimacy
• 6 The Center-Periphery Debate: Pressures for Devolution Within the Republics
• 7 New Forms of Political Participation
• 8 Public Opinion and the Emergence of a Multi-Party System
• Afterword to Part Two: Agendas—Researching the Emerging Political Cultures
• PART THREE PUBLIC OPINION AND THE ECONOMY
• 9 Perestroika and the Public: Citizens' Views of the "Fruits" of Economic Reform
• 10 Twelve Percent of Hope: Economic Consciousness and a Market Economy
• PART FOUR PUBLIC OPINION AND FOREIGN POLICY
• 11 Threat Perceptions
• 12 Intergenerational Differences in Attitudes Toward Foreign Policy
• Conclusions: Mass Public Opinion and the Study of Post-Soviet Societies
• Appendix
• References
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Index