Word study

I. GIVE RUSSIAN EQUIVALENTS FOR: Pejorative implications; a coherent set of ideas; a collec­ tion of values; a range of rival traditions; to reexamine prin­ ciples; producers and consumers; religious and ethnic loyal­ ties; absolute and universal truth; to place emphasis; to take advantage of; a core theme; in a literal sense; unquestioning obedience; to fertilize political debate; unwanted coercion; female suffrage; gender inequality; conventional doctrines.

II. GIVE ENGLISH EQUIVALENTS FOR: Противоречивый; обеспечить базу; напоминать; воп­ лощать; общие проблемы; интеллектуальное обновление; обстоятельства; освещать; замещать; основные проявле­ ния; самопожертвование; посвятить; изображать.

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III. MAKE UP SENTENCES:

1. It is necessary to place emphasis on (new ideologi­ cal doctrines; understanding the roots of religion; con­ cepts of morality; reexamining principles; intellectual per­ fection).

2. His theory provides a basis for (a coherent set of ideas; a range of prominent principles; fundamental beliefs; intellectual recarnation).

3. Their ideology embodies (absolute and universal truth; unchanging systems of thought; moral values; relationships of mutual understanding).

4. His study draws attention to (the network of rela­ tionships; ethic values; new basic techniques; contempo­ rary treatment of ideas and facts).

5. They share concern with (environmentalists in their search for optimal methods; ecologists in their striving for nature protection; scholars attempting at achieving posi­ tive solutions).

IV. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

1. Must religion be a part of everyday life?

2. Is religion an important part of the culture?

3. What is the purpose of religion?

1. Should we approve or disapprove the church-state separation doctrine?

4. Must religion be taught at schools?

2. Is the country threatened by a decline in adherence to religion?

5. Are you for religious freedom?

6. Are cults dangerous in any way?

3. Do you think that cults appear to rob members of their individuality and freedom of choice?

10. What does it mean to be religious?

V. ASK YOUR FRIEND TO ANSWER THESE QUES­ TIONS OR THE SIMILAR ONES.

Political science

Part

UNIT X

I. READ AND TRANSLATE THE TEXT ;IDEOLOGY AND PUBLIC OPINION (by Rodney Stark)

All scholars have the advantage of intimate familiarity with their objects of study. Ironically, this familiarity is also the source of much frustration because too often we expect everyone else to function as we do. Nowhere is this more evident than in the area of research on public atti­tudes and opinions. Time and a researcher has framed a hypothesis linking some set of beliefs or opinions - a link­ing that seems obvious - only to have the data offer little or no support. Some examples from a recent survey will illustrate this point. Among the opinion questions that the students were asked, were these two developed by Robert Wuthnow:

If one works hard enough, one can do anything.

• Agree strongly

• Agree somewhat

• Disagree somewhat

• Disagree strongly

The poor simply aren't willing to work hard

• Agree strongly

• Agree somewhat

• Disagree somewhat

• Disagree strongly

Wuthnow not only thought people who agreed with one would agree with the other (and vice versa), but also thought the statements formed part of a very general meaning system, or political ideology, on which people would base a whole spectrum of their beliefs and opinions. However, among the students these attitudes were hardly correlated at all. It turned out that they weren't correlated in Wuthnow's sample of the population of San Francisco either.

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In the same questionnaire, the students were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement:

It is good to live in a fantasy world now and then.

• Agree strongly —- Agree somewhat

• Disagree somewhat

• Disagree strongly

It seemed likely that people who agreed with this state­ment would be more apt to also report they liked to read novels - using reading as a way to enter a fantasy world. Not so. Nor was this item correlated with liking to read spy and detective novels. It wasn't even correlated with liking to read science fiction.

These examples help to see a very basic problem for scholars. They prefer to believe that every human is, un­derneath it all, a philosopher. As the celebrated anthropolo­gist Clyde Kluckhohn put it, there is a «philosophy behind the way of life of every individual and of every relatively homogeneous group at any given point in their histories.» Kluckhohn identified these philosophies as «world views.» Wuthnow explained in this way:

«People adopt relatively comprehensive or transcend­ent, but nonetheless identiofiable, understandings of life which inform their attitudes and actions under a wide vari­ety of conditions.»

Wuthnow called these understandings «meaning sys­tems». When such meaning systems are very prominent in a person's thought or in the discussions within a group, they sometimes are called ideologies. An ideology is a con­nected set of beliefs based on a few very general and ab­stract ideas.

An ideology is used to evaluate and respond to proposals, conditions, and events in the world around us. An ideology, then, is essentially a theory about life. If its content is primarily political, an ideology will consist of a few abstract assertions to explain why and how societies ought to be

Part II

Political science

run. Hence, when faced with a specific issue, a person seeks to derive an answer from his or her ideological premises, not simply on a pragmatic issue-by-issue basis.

Most of us and most of those we meet are amateur philo­sophers, and many have a very noticeable political ideology.However, as researchers have begun to do investigation on attitude and opinion surveys based on general populations, they have been forced to learn that although some people base their beliefs and actions on a world view, and some people base their politics on an abstract ideology, a lot of normal and competent people don't. In fact, it appears that most people don't. Moreover, a substantial part of the population in any society ignores most of the «issues», reserving attention for occasional matters of great urgency or with special personal inclinations.

One example may clarify how willing people are to ex­press seemingly contradictory opinions. In one General So­cial Survey, which asked about voting for a woman for president, respondents were also asked to agree or disagree with the following statement: «Most men are better suited emotionally for politics than are most women.» One might suppose that people who agreed with that statement would be unlikely to endorse a woman for president. In fact, 67 percent of those who agreed said that they would, never­theless, vote for a woman for president.

The survey also asked people to agree or disagree with an even stronger statement about the proper political role for women: «Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men.» But of those who agreed with this statement, 54 percent still insisted they would support a woman for president. Scholars might think these attitudes form a tight little logical package, but clearly many Americans do not.

In a classic study of American voters, Philip E. Con­verse could classify only about 3 percent as basing their decisions and opinions on an ideology. Another 12 percent

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he classified as making some use of an identifying political ideology. About half of the voters took a mildly issue-oriented approach to politics, and the rest seemed to ignore all policy, issue, and ideological matters. These results imply that some people take a very different approach to politics than do others and only some people participate in the democratic political process at all.

(from «POLITICS AND THE STATE»)

II. ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

1. Are beliefs of certain importance in the public opinion poll?

1. Do people base their opinions on political ideology?

2. What questionnaire was worked out by Wuthnow?

3. What did the results of the responses show?

2. Do you believe that every human is a philosopher at his heart?

4. How did Clyde Kluckhohn formulate this idea?

5. What explanation was suggested by Wuthnow?

3. What definition of ideology is given in the text? Do you agree or disagree with it? Give your own definition.

9. Where is an ideology used?

10. What does an ideology consist of?

10. What does a person derive his answer from when faced with a specific issue?

11. How do a lot of people behave taking part in the survey?

10. What was the aim of the General Social Survey?

10. What results were obtained? Were they surprising for the researchers?

10. Are all people politically-minded?

III. COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES: l.The popular belief is that every human is a .... 2. People adopt relatively comprehensive understandings of life which ... .

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3. Wuthnow called these understandings as ... . 4.They are sometimes called ... .

5. An ideology is a connected set of ... .

6. An ideology is used to ... .

7.The content of ideology is ... .

8. When faced with a specific issue, a person seeks to ... .

9. Very often people are not willing to ... .

10. Half of them take a mildly issue-oriented approach to ... .

IV. ENUMERATE ALL THE SURVEYS MENTIONED IN THE TEXT AND THEIR RESULTS.

5. DIVIDE THE TEXT INTO LOGICAL PARTS AND MAKE UP AN OUTLINE OF THE TEXT.

5. SPEAK ON THE TEXT.

VII. READ THE TEXT AND RENDER ITS CONTENTS IN RUSSIAN:

ELITE AND MASS OPINION

Converse recounts that a few years ago a young scholar became interested in the rise of the abolitionist movement in the northern United States: how antislavery, abolitionist beliefs spread and shaped political opinion, and how this in turn fostered the new Republican Party and culminated in the election of Lincoln and - soon after the Civil War broke out - in the Emancipation Proclamation. He was aware that the* American Anti-Slavery Society never attracted more than 200,000 members, or about 3 percent of the adult population outside the South.

So, to see how support for the abolitionist movement was translated into the nearly 2 million votes needed to elect Lincoln, he had to trace the informal channels through which abolitionist sentiments had spread beyond the con­fines of the Anti-Slavery Society. In other words, he want-

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ed to show how opposition to slavery had become an in­creasingly significant part of informal political discussion and of public opinion during the decade leading to the war.

To do this, the young scholar analyzed the contents of many large collections of personal letters saved by various families in Ohio - letters written during the 1850s and 1860s. But his study never was published or even complet­ed, because the young scholar found no references at all to abolition in any of these letters.

This forces the conclusion that mass support for Lin­coln and, eventually, for the war was based on many fac­tors, but concern about the plight of the slaves in the South was not one of them (although that may have changed once the war got going).

However, a small elite committed to abolition had suffi­cient influence to see that antislavery policies won. Moreover, the abolitionist ideology seems to have infused this elite with a sense of single-mindedness and dedication that got results.

This example does not reflect an isolated case. Leaders of social movements and political organizations usually display patterns of opinion consistent with a basic outlook or ideology.