People in the former Eastern bloc countries now rate their lives markedly higher than they did in 1991 shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Czechs, Poles and Slovaks report the highest levels of life satisfaction – and some of the greatest gains over the past two decades. Hungarians and Bulgarians are least likely […]
Americans and Western Europeans agree on the extremist threat from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but divisions remain over the Afghan war
Most of the publics in the 14 nations included in the survey are dissatisfied – some by overwhelming margins – with the way things are going in their countries, and majorities in all see their economies as struggling. In most of the Eastern European and former Soviet countries surveyed, people see their nations plagued by […]
The current survey was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 24, 2009 among 14,760 respondents in Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Ukraine and the United States. In each country, interviews were conducted in local languages with representative samples of the adult population (for details see Methods in […]
With the collapse of communist rule and the end of the Cold War, nationalism reemerged as a major issue throughout much of Eastern Europe in the 1990s. As the current survey highlights, nationalist sentiments have not disappeared, particularly in Russia. A majority of Russians consider the demise of the Soviet Union a great misfortune, and […]
Europeans and Americans share concerns about Iran’s emergent nuclear capabilities, though Russians are less worried.
One of the major findings from the 1991 Times Mirror Center study was the high level of antipathy toward ethnic and religious minorities in Eastern Europe. With communist rule over in most of the region, and in its final stages in the Soviet Union, long-simmering conflicts among groups within these societies were reemerging. Today, in […]
Publics in most former communist countries generally express low levels of religious commitment. Majorities in the Czech Republic, Russia, Hungary, Bulgaria and the former East Germany say they seldom or never attend religious services, and few say religion is very important in their lives or that they pray at least once a day. Poles are […]
A Crisis of Confidence in Capitalism?