Popular Attitudes toward Markets and Democracy: Russia and United States Compared 25 Years Later

摘要

Public attitudes toward markets and toward democracy are fundamental to the well-functioning of an economy and a society. Attitudes toward markets and attitudes toward democracy are naturally connected: both are about individual freedoms, how they should be allowed, how the freedoms can be assured, or, on the other hand, how they should be limited. In 1990, a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, while one of us, Boycko, lived in Moscow, and while the other, Shiller, lived in New Haven, in the greater New York area, we did a telephone survey of the general public in the respective cities (with Ukrainian survey expert Vladimir Korobov) about attitudes toward markets. Questions were about fair prices and income inequality, resistance to exchange of money, lack of appreciation for incentives, and hostility toward business (see Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov 1991). The questions, as well as questions in our follow-up survey Shiller, Boycko, and Korobov (1992), were identical as far as the translation between Russian and English would allow, and as far as our impressions of how the questions would be understood could be.