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Meritocratic attitudes are defined as general beliefs that education and its correlates should determine personal economic outcomes. Using the International Social Survey Project (ISSP): Social Inequality Module (1992), we examine both individual-level and country-level determinants of pro-meritocratic attitudes. According to self-interest and rational-action theories, individuals with high educational attainment and high personal income are expected to have strong meritocratic beliefs because meritocracy is in their best interest-they would gain under such a system. At the same time, both modernization and post-industrial theories imply that persons living in countries with a high degree of societal meritocracy hold stronger meritocratic beliefs than persons living in countries with low degree of societal meritocracy. Results of the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis on a data set including 7,972 persons from 14 countries indicate that the impact of individuals' education and income on meritocratic attitudes occurred as theoretically predicted. We also demonstrate that the relationship between the degree of societal meritocracy and the degree of support for such a system is statistically significant even if national wealth and educational stock (as well as individual-level variables) are controlled. In addition, we discovered that at the beginning of the 1990s a post-communist regime had a negative effect on support for meritocracy.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. Does the relationship between social structure and personality during times of apparent social stability obtain as well under conditions of radical social change? There are good reasons to think that it might not. To find out, we conducted surveys in Poland and Ukraine during 1992-1993, with dramatic results. In those respects in which the socialist Poland of 1978 had shown a pattern of relationships similar to that of the capitalist United States and Japan (notably, the relationship of social structure to self-directedness of orientation), the pattern remains the same; but where socialist Poland in 1978 had differedfrom the United States and Japan (notably, in the relationship of social structure to a sense of distress), Poland now fully exemplifies the capitalist pattern. Ukraine seems to be following a similar trajectory, albeit at a slower pace. n this paper, we refine and extend a general interpretation of the relationships between social structure and for help in translating interview questions from Pol-immediately impinging conditions of life. For the dimensions of social structure we consider here-social class and social stratification-the most pertinent conditions are apt to be occupational. Thus, an advantageous class position or a high position in the social stratification hierarchy affords greater opportunity to be self-directed in one's work, that is, to work at jobs that are substantively complex, are not subject to close supervision, and are not routinized. The experience of occupational self-direction, in turn, leads to a high valuation of self-direction for oneself and one's children, to greater intellectual flexibility, and to a more self-directed orientation to self and society (Kohn 1969(Kohn , 1977 ish to Russian; to Michael Haney for training the Ukrainian interviewers; and to Michael Swafford for further training of the Ukrainian interviewers. We are also indebted to Jeylan Mortimer, Carrie Schoenbach, Carmi Schooler, Kenneth Spenner, and the ASR Editor for their critical readings of early drafts of this paper. 614

How do fluid party systems that exist in many new democracies affect democratic accountability? To address this question, the authors analyze a new database of all legislative incumbents and all competitive elections that took place in Poland since 1991. They find that when district-level economic outcomes are bad, voters in that country punish legislators from a governing party and reward legislators from an opposition party. As a result, electoral control in Poland works through political parties just as it does in mature democracies. However, the authors also find that, in contrast to mature democracies, legislators from a governing party tend to switch to an opposition party when the economy in their district deteriorates. When they do so, their chances of reelection are better than those of politicians who remained loyal to governing parties and are no worse than those of incumbents who ran as opposition party loyalists. These empirical results suggest that while elections in new democracies function as a mechanism of political control, fluid party systems undermine the extent to which elections promote democratic accountability.

The development of stable partisan commitments among political elites is crucial for party-system institutionalization in the new democracies of post-communist Europe. Little is known, however, about the partisan behavior of those who compete for national office. This study begins to fill this gap through an analysis of inter-party mobility among all candidates who ran for the lower house of parliament in two pairs of consecutive elections in Poland (1991–3 and 1993–7) and in three pairs of consecutive elections in the Czech Republic (1990–2, 1992–6 and 1996–8). We consider the overall extent of inter-party mobility, structural versus voluntary components of mobility, patterns of movement between types of parties and electoral payoffs of stable and shifting partisan affiliations. Although the overall rate of party-switching has declined substantially in the Czech Republic but not in Poland, changes in other characteristics of inter-party mobility indicate that party-system institutionalization is taking place in both countries.

In this cross-national study, soft political-protest behavior is defined as participation in a legal demonstration, signing a petition, or contacting government officials. We find that in Europe in 2006 (1) the proportion of political protesters is significantly higher in old democracies than in the new, predominantly postcommunist, democracies, and (2) the greater the income inequality in both old and new democracies, the lower the proportion of political protesters. These two regularities, established for country-level data, hold even if the democracy index and gross domestic product per capita are controlled. Using individual-level data, we find that in all countries included in the European Social Survey trust in both parliament and social position positively influences the probability of individuals' protest behavior. Combining both levels of analysis, we pay particular attention to the effects of two macro-characteristics: old/new democracies and income inequality. Both of these characteristics prove to be significant predictors of soft political-protest behavior.

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