Journal Article10.2307/2960233
Institutional Learning versus Value Diffusion: The Evolution of Democratic Values among Parliamentarians in Eastern and Western Germany
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TL;DR: This paper examined the effect of institutional learning and value diffusion processes on political elites' views regarding civil liberties and found that while eastern and western MPs differ little over general democratic rights, eastern MPs are considerably less tolerant than western MPs.
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Abstract: After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, public opinion surveys persistently document that eastern Germans are surprisingly supportive of general democratic rights, like other publics in East-Central Europe. Analysts frequently resort to a value-diffusion model to explain the apparent evolution of democratic cultures in former socialist nations. In contrast to this perspective, an institutional learning perspective, which stresses that democratic restraint is mainly internalized through practice, would predict that eastern Germans are less democratic than western Germans. This article uses 168 personally conducted interviews with members of the united Berlin parliament to examine the effect of institutional learning and value diffusion processes on political elites' views regarding civil liberties. I find that while eastern and western MPs differ little over general democratic rights--which corroborates the diffusion argument--eastern MPs are considerably less tolerant than western MPs. Moreover, an ope...
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Principled Tolerance and the American Mass Public
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Report from the Laboratory: The Influence of Institutions on Political Elites' Democratic Values in Germany
TL;DR: The authors examine political elites' conceptions of democracies in the united Germany in 1991, using a survey of 168 parliamentarians from the united parliament in Berlin, and find that the socialist and parliamentary institutions in the East and the West, respectively, have substantially influenced elites' perceptions of democracy in Germany, leading to a value divergence across the East-West boundary.
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"Putting Up With" Fascists in Western Europe: a Comparative, Cross-Level Analysis of Political Tolerance:
Raymond M. Duch,James L. Gibson +1 more
- 01 Mar 1992
TL;DR: In this paper, Cayrol et al. analyzed the 1989 European Election Study, the first wave of which was fielded as part of the same Omnibus Survey that contained our questions.
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Political Intolerance in the USSR The Distribution and Etiology of Mass Opinion
James L. Gibson,Raymond M. Duch +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on two surveys of public opinion conducted in the USSR in 1990, and demonstrate that political intolerance is fairly widespread in the Soviet Union and the objects of intolerance are focused, not dispersed pluralistically.
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