Oligarchs and Democrats, page 7
conclusions are not entirely consistent. A positive relationship between support for markets and
support for democracy shows up in some datasets but not others, with some measures but not
others, and in bivariate analysis more often than when other relevant variables are controlled.
For instance, Ada Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz found that support for political reform was
unconnected to a commitment to individual responsibility for well-being.
but a different survey, Arthur Miller, Vicki Hesli, and William Reisinger came to the opposite
related to preferences for individual responsibility when other factors, like personal financial
situation and certain economic values, were controlled.
Duch and James Gibson both found that support for markets was at least moderately related to
support for democratic institutions.
from the rest of the population. Miller, Hesli, and Reisinger found that elites who strongly
supported democracy preferred a controlled economy.
Kullberg and Zimmerman argued elites
were significantly more likely than ordinary people to be liberal democrats, supporting both
markets and democracy.
Much of the disparity in these findings is attributable to the fact that
the various studies employ very different measures, based on differently worded survey
questions. But it is also clear that the correlation between support for democracy and support for
markets among Russian citizens is not overwhelmingly strong. On the one hand, some
proponents of markets are skeptical about democracy. Under the Yeltsin regime, for instance,
supporters of markets sometimes favored undemocratic policies or procedures for political
reasons: governors appointed by the president and a weak parliament might provide fewer
skeptical of some of the results of unregulated markets and favor a strong social and economic
25
Ada Finifter and Ellen Mickiewicz, "Redefining the Political System of the USSR: Mass Support for
Political Change," American Political Science Review (1992) 186 (December): 857-874.
26
Arthur H. Miller and Vicki L. Hesli, and William M. Reisinger, "Reassessing Mass Support for Political
and Economic Change in the Former USSR," American Political Science Review 88 (June 1994): 399-
411.
27
Miller, Reisinger, Hesli, "Understanding Political Change,” Table 4, p. 163.
28
Raymond M. Duch, "Tolerating Economic Reform: Popular Support for Transition to a Free Market in
the Former Soviet Union," American Political Science Review 87 (September 1993): 590-608; James L.
Gibson, "Political and Economic Markets: Changes in the Connections Between Attitudes Toward Political
Democracy and a Market Economy Within the Mass Culture of Russia and Ukraine," Journal of Politics 58
(November 1996): 954-84.
29
Arthur H. Miller and Vicki L. Hesli, and William M. Reisinger, "Conceptions of Democracy Among Mass
and Elite in Post-Soviet Societies," British Journal of Political Science 27 (1997): 182.
30
Kullberg and Zimmerman, “Liberal Elites.”
31
Jerry F. Hough, "The Russian Election of 1993: Public Attitudes Toward Economic Reform and
Democratization," Post-Soviet Affairs 10, no. 1 (1994): 16-19.
Convention