Suchergebnisse

What is 'good government'? Is it transparent, responsive, small and unobtrusive, or on the contrary, big and active? And is 'good government' the same everywhere, or do regional differences of opinion have to be acknowledged? This short study aims to answer some of these questions by presenting the opinions of 7,127 respondents from China, Denmark, Finland, Japan, Korea and Sweden. Surprising results were revealed: within the global political context, the political cultures of East Asia and the Nordic countries have common traits regarding people's expectations of their governments. Unexpectedly, popular control of government is not alien to East Asian political opinion; even more surprisingly is, however, the fact that the moral, paternalistic leadership style so widely accepted in East Asia attracts a positive response in the Nordic countries as well. This volume offers a first glimpse of a comprehensive comparative study conducted by the Eurasia Political Culture Research Network (EPCReN) in 1999-2000. This is a pioneer study that aims to spear-head comparative social science research springing from the growing mutual interest between Asia and Europe.

This article investigates the relationship between culture, personality, and deception in a simulated international management negotiation at multiple levels of analysis. `Deception' was operationalized here as the propensity to lie and bribe. As predicted, at the cultural level the results from a scenario study with 1583 participants from eight cultures suggested that cultural collectivism was positively related to reported use of deception in negotiations, and to greater emotional reactions (i.e. guilt, shame, and disgust) after the use of deception. At the individual level, however, the personality variable of allocentrism (consisting of behaviors found in collectivist cultures) was negatively related to the use of deception. Theoretical implications are discussed.

The universality versus culture specificity of quantitative evaluations (negative-positive) of 40 events in world history was addressed using World History Survey data collected from 5,800 university students in 30 countries/societies. Multidimensional scaling using generalized procrustean analysis indicated poor fit of data from the 30 countries to an overall mean configuration, indicating lack of universal agreement as to the associational meaning of events in world history. Hierarchical cluster analysis identified one Western and two non-Western country clusters for which adequate multidimensional fit was obtained after item deletions. A two-dimensional solution for the three country clusters was identified, where the primary dimension was historical calamities versus progress and a weak second dimension was modernity versus resistance to modernity. Factor analysis further reduced the item inventory to identify a single concept with structural equivalence across cultures, Historical Calamities, which included man-made and natural, intentional and unintentional, predominantly violent but also nonviolent calamities. Less robust factors were tentatively named as Historical Progress and Historical Resistance to Oppression. Historical Calamities and Historical Progress were at the individual level both significant and independent predictors of willingness to fight for one's country in a hierarchical linear model that also identified significant country-level variation in these relationships. Consensus around calamity but disagreement as to what constitutes historical progress is discussed in relation to the political culture of nations and lay perceptions of history as ...