Society and Politics in Russia: Preparing the 1993 Election Study for Analysis

This is a study of the 1993 election for the legislature of Russia. The grant will specifically support preparation of an excellent survey dataset with fully 53,000 Russian respondents in all 16 former autonomous republics, 34 of the 55 oblasts, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The survey contained sixty demographic variables including many items on social origins and family characteristics, as well as crucial items on political orientation and attitudes toward the changes sweeping Russia. Linguistic items include language spoken with various family members and the first names of parents and children. Immediate research plans begin with a study of Russian social mobility and its impact on attitudes, plus work testing theories of democratization, but the data will support many other studies in future. %%% This study is of great policy importance, because it permits scientific evaluation of the sources of nationalism, reactionary communism, and other political movements within the former Soviet Union. The dataset will be of great value for answering questions in sociology, political science, linguistics, and other social sciences, and it will be archived swiftly for use by a large number of researchers.