Making good use of multinational surveys in post0communist countries

摘要

Every modern society needs a continuous flow of information between governors and governed. In a democracy, there is lots of informaiton at hand from disparate and competing sources, such as elections, markets, government statistics and independent sample surveys of public opinion. Undemocratic regimes suppress feedback, and Communist regimes were extreme in doing so. The commanders of a command economy were not interested in learning about popular demands, but in imposing their goals on society. Communist regimes did not want feedback; in Deutsch's phrase, dictatorships are concerned with emphasising "the priority of output over intake, the ability to talk instead of listen; the ability to afford not to learn" [1]. That power is now broken