Politicians in times of transformation: "Transformational correctness" or genuine differences in perception?

The paper presents selected results of the 1996 study of top Polish politicians-members of the 1993-97 Parliament and leaders of those important political parties which failed to get into this Parliament. Presented results pertain to five aspects of politicians' attitudes: (1) opinions on qualities of persons who should be vs. actually are involved in politics, (2) normatively accepted definitions of politics, (3) visions of the good state, (4) visions of democracy, and (5) opinions on what defines political views as being either on the left or on the right. As a result, consistently found across all five domains, there is a strong attitudinal similarity among politicians of differing political parties and of divergent political orientations. This finding is interpreted as reflection of a fundamental track similarity in the way in which Polish politicians perceive the most important tasks confronting the whole political class in times of systemic transformation. Transformational correctness - believing that in such times politicians should have (or at least should display) certain views - might be a strong force behind this similarity. --

Politicians in times of transformation: "transformational correctness" or genuine differences in perception?

"The paper presents selected results of the 1996 study of top Polish politicians members of the 1993-97 Parliament and leaders of those important political parties which failed to get into this Parliament. Presented results pertain to five aspects of politicians' attitudes: (1) opinions on qualities of persons who should be vs. actually are involved in politics, (2) normatively accepted definitions of politics, (3) visions of the 'good state', (4) visions of democracy, and (5) opinions on what defines political views as being either on the 'left' or on the 'right.' As a result, consistently found across all five domains, there is a strong attitudinal similarity among politicians of differing political parties and of divergent political orientations. This finding is interpreted as reflection of a fundamental 'track similarity' in the way in which Polish politicians perceive the most important tasks confronting the whole political class in times of systemic transformation. 'Transformational correctness' - believing that in such times politicians should have (or at least should display) certain views - might be a strong force behind this similarity." (author's abstract)Es werden ausgewählte Ergebnisse einer größeren Untersuchung maßgeblicher polnischer Politiker präsentiert, und zwar von Mitgliedern des Parlaments von 1993 bis 1997 und Führern von wichtigeren politischen Parteien, die den Einzug in dieses Parlament nicht schafften. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf fünf Aspekte der Einstellungen der Politiker: (1) Meinungen über die Eigenschaften von Personen, die in der Politik tätig sein sollten oder es tatsächlich sind; (2) normativ akzeptierte Definitionen von Politik; (3) Vorstellungen vom "guten Staat"; (4) Vorstellungen von Demokratie; (5) Meinungen über die Einstufung politischer Anschauungen als eher "rechts" oder eher "links". Als Gesamtergebnis stellt sich, und zwar konsistent auf sämtlichen fünf Fragegebieten, eine starke Ähnlichkeit in den Einstellungen von Politikern heraus - über unterschiedliche politische Parteien und divergierende politische Orientierungen hinweg. Die Autoren finden hierin eine grundlegende "Verlaufsähnlichkeit" dahingehend widergespiegelt, wie polnische Politiker die wichtigsten Aufgaben wahrnehmen, die der Politik in Zeiten systemischer Transformation gestellt sind. Als starke Kraft hinter dieser Ähnlichkeit wird ein Phänomen "transformationeller Korrektheit" gesehen - die Überzeugung, daß in derartigen Veränderungszeiten ein Politiker bestimmte Auffassungen haben (oder sie zumindest zum Ausdruck bringen) sollte. (HH

Analisi della struttura di classe e della stratificazione sociale in Polonia. Studi e Ricerche (1945-75)

Studi sulla struttura sociale in Polonia: caratteristiche e dinamiche dal secondo dopoguerra a metà anni settanta.- Presentazione, Marcello Pacini #7- Indice #11- 1. Premessa #13- 2. Orientamenti teorici #21- 3. Analisi empiriche #49- 4. Struttura di classe e sue componenti #61- 5. Struttura di classe e differenziazione occupazionale #75- 6. Consumo culturale, stile di vita e sistema di valori #83- 7. Struttura di classe e prestigio occupazionale #93- 8. Aspetti psicologici della struttura sociale #101- 9. Indagine sulla mobilità sociale #10

LEGITIMIZATION AS A POPULAR PHILOSOPHY OF STATE POWER

The article discusses four facets of the subject of legitimacy. The first issue concerns the understanding of the concept of legitimacy. The Author opts for a definition which treats 'belief in legitimacy' (Legitimitätsglaube) as central for the whole concept and regards legitimacy as a 'popular philosophy of power'. The second issue deals with the Weberian type of legal-rational legitimacy. Following Mommsen the Author proposes to treat substantive and procedural brands of democracy as separate sub-types of legal-rational legitimacy. The third issue concerns the inclusion of views on the economic system as part of beliefs about state legitimacy (which was not explicitly stated by Weber). Finally, the fourth postulates introducing to academic discourse national-democratic legitimacy as a significant form of justification of a political system. The final part of the paper discusses, quite extensive, many specific details of the typology suggested by the Author

The classical bi-Poisson process: An invertible quadratic harness

We give an elementary construction of a time-invertible Markov process which is discrete except at one instance. The process is one of the quadratic harnesses studied in Bryc and Wesolowski [2005. Conditional moments of q-Meixner processes. Probab. Theory Related Fields 131, 415-441 ], Bryc et al. [2005b. Quadratic harnesses, q-commutations, and orthogonal martingale polynomials. Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. , to appear], and Bryc et al. [2005a. The bi-Poisson process: a quadratic harness ]. It can be constructed from a pair of independent Poisson processes with the same gamma-distributed intensity.Conditional moments Harnesses Linear birth process Linear death process

Free quadratic harness

Free quadratic harness is a Markov process from the class of quadratic harnesses, i.e. processes with linear regressions and quadratic conditional variances. The process has recently been constructed for a restricted range of parameters in Bryc et al. (2010) [7] using Askey-Wilson polynomials. Here we provide a self-contained construction of the free quadratic harness for all values of the parameters.Quadratic conditional variances Harnesses Orthogonal martingale polynomials Free Lévy processes Hypergeometric orthogonal polynomials