Political Involvement in Transition: Who Participated, and Electoral Dynamics, In Central and Eastern Europe?

Using surveys conducted in 1991, this paper examines the sociodemographic, experiential and ideological determinants of nonelectoral and electoral political participation in eight postcommunist states of eastern Europe, with comparisons to Germany and the United States. Comparing the postcommunist states to the capitalist ones, we find the determinants of participation in the former largely conform to the patterns in the west, with education playing an especially large role. In the postcommunist states, we found that youth, political anger and antisocialist ideology were important determinants of political protest and party sympathy, but not of the decision to vote in the initial elections. This may have contributed to the elite-mass divisions in these countries, where the elite promoted market-oriented reforms, and the populations responded with II left turns II in subsequent rounds of elections

Beliefs About Inequality

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THE EVOLUTION OF AN ISSUE: The Rise and Decline of Affairmative action

This article examines the development of the affirmative action issue since its inception, and compares its dynamics and evolution with the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It identifies and discusses three periods or phases of the affirmative action regime. This vein of research helps provide at least a partial explanation for why policies in related areas of civil rights may produce different outcomes, and explicates the broad resistance to key elements of the anti-discrimination effort of the last three decades. A tentative model based on the congruence of the policy stance of political institutions to public opinion is suggested. We conclude that while issues such as affirmative action may be susceptible to long-run institutional counter pressures, voluntary programs to increase diversity will certainly continue. Copyright 2000 by The Policy Studies Organization.

Attribution Style and Public Policy Attitudes Toward Gay Rights

This study examines the influence of beliefs about the cause of homo-sexuality on public policy attitudes concerning gay rights. Copyright (c) 2004 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.