In This Issue
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512107079820 |
| Date | 01 September 2007 |
| Published date | 01 September 2007 |
| Author | Kay Lawson |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
In This Issue 395
International Political Science Review (2007), Vol. 28, No. 4, 395–396
In This Issue
Although they vary greatly in the questions they pose, in methodology, and in
the degree and kind of controversy their arguments may provoke, the fi ve articles
in this issue of the International Political Science Review have one point in common:
all address the relationship between popular attitudes and values on the one hand
and the course of government on the other.
Do mass attitudes favoring freedom for others increase the likelihood of dem-
ocracy? Because some have doubted that they do, Christian Welzel (“Are Levels
of Democracy Affected by Mass Attitudes? Testing Attainment and Sustainment
Effects on Democracy”) has brought an impressive array of new data together
to substantiate the argument (made by himself and Ronald Inglehart in earlier
work) that they do.
Are the individual members of a security community (a region “in which
large-scale use of violence is very unlikely”) more likely to have attitudes of tolerance
toward out-groups and trust toward one another? Yes, says Andrej Tusicisny, but
notes also that in many respects the attitudes of members of such communities
are not all that different from those in more isolated peaceful countries. In
“Security Communities and Their Values: Taking Masses Seriously,” he fi nds no
confi rmation for the common assumption that they will be more strongly com-
mitted to democracy and more involved in civil society.
What about moral traditionalism and authoritarianism: are they really so
strongly associated as is commonly assumed? Do these values produce highly
sim-ilar results at the polls and shape governments accordingly? Not necessarily,
say Willem de Koster and Jeroen van der Waal in “Cultural Value Orientations
and Christian Religiosity: On Moral Traditionalism, Authoritarianism, and their
Implications for Voting Behavior.” Although their opposites (non-traditionalists
and non-authoritarians) “go hand-in-hand,” under certain circumstances moral
traditionalists vote quite differently from authoritarians, as these authors show
was the case in the Netherlands during the period studied in this article. Not
everyone will agree with the authors’ arguments as to why this should be so, which
makes the fi ndings – and the arguments – all the more interesting.
And speaking of elections, do values and attitudes on the most signifi cant issues
confronting a nation ever really make their way forward into voting decisions and
thus, possibly, into the course of government policy? Not if we judge by the quality
of deliberation over the Israeli–Palestinian confl ict in the fi ve Israeli elections
analyzed by Michal Shamir and Jacob Shamir in “The Israeli–Palestinian Confl ict
DOI: 10.1177/0192512107079820 © 2007 International Political Science Association
Sage Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore)
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