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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References
Why Politicians Are More Tolerant: Selective Recruitment and Socialization Among Political Elites in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States
TL;DR: This paper showed that national legislators are more tolerant than the public in Britain, Israel, New Zealand and the United States, and proposed two explanations for this phenomenon: selective recruitment of Members of Parliament, Knesset and Congress from among those in the electorate whose demographic, ideological and personality characteristics predispose them to be tolerant.
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Democracy and Its Critics
Robert A. Dahl
- 01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: A theory of the democratic process: justifications -the idea of equal intrinsic worth personal autonomy a theory of democratic process the problem of inclusion as discussed by the authors, and a critique of guardianship, is presented in the paper "The Sources of modern democracy: the first transformation to the democratic city-state toward the second transformation - republicanism, representation, and the logic of equality".
Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement
TL;DR: The idea that a successful democracy requires the existence of a large measure of consensus in society is a recurrent proposition in political theory as mentioned in this paper, but it has not been formulated in very precise terms.
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The Civic Culture
Gabriel A. Almond,Sidney Verba +1 more
- 01 Jan 1963
TL;DR: Ouvrage de science politique as mentioned in this paper, which popularised la culture politique comme champ de recherche, was published in 1963, edition mise-a-jour en 1980 : The civic culture revisited ; traduction espagnole en 1970