II. Answer the following questions:

1. Are beliefs of certain importance in the public opinion poll?

1. Do people base their opinions on political ideology?

2. What questionnaire was worked out by Wuthnow?

3. What did the results of the responses show?

2. Do you believe that every human is a philosopher at his heart?

4. How did Clyde Kluckhohn formulate this idea?

5. What explanation was suggested by Wuthnow?

3. What definition of ideology is given in the text? Do you agree or disagree with it? Give your own definition.

9. Where is an ideology used?

10. What does an ideology consist of?

10. What does a person derive his answer from when faced with a specific issue?

11. How do a lot of people behave taking part in the survey?

10. What was the aim of the General Social Survey?

10. What results were obtained? Were they surprising for the researchers?

10. Are all people politically-minded?

III. COMPLETE THE FOLLOWING SENTENCES: l.The popular belief is that every human is a .... 2. People adopt relatively comprehensive understandings of life which ... .

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3 . Wuthnow called these understandings as ... . 4.They are sometimes called ... .

5. An ideology is a connected set of ... .

6. An ideology is used to ... .

7.The content of ideology is ... .

8. When faced with a specific issue, a person seeks to ... .

9. Very often people are not willing to ... .

10. Half of them take a mildly issue-oriented approach to ... .

IV. ENUMERATE ALL THE SURVEYS MENTIONED IN THE TEXT AND THEIR RESULTS.

5. DIVIDE THE TEXT INTO LOGICAL PARTS AND MAKE UP AN OUTLINE OF THE TEXT.

5. SPEAK ON THE TEXT.

VII. READ THE TEXT AND RENDER ITS CONTENTS IN RUSSIAN:

ELITE AND MASS OPINION

Converse recounts that a few years ago a young scholar became interested in the rise of the abolitionist movement in the northern United States: how antislavery, abolitionist beliefs spread and shaped political opinion, and how this in turn fostered the new Republican Party and culminated in the election of Lincoln and - soon after the Civil War broke out - in the Emancipation Proclamation. He was aware that the* American Anti-Slavery Society never attracted more than 200,000 members, or about 3 percent of the adult population outside the South.

So, to see how support for the abolitionist movement was translated into the nearly 2 million votes needed to elect Lincoln, he had to trace the informal channels through which abolitionist sentiments had spread beyond the con­fines of the Anti-Slavery Society. In other words, he want-

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ed to show how opposition to slavery had become an in­creasingly significant part of informal political discussion and of public opinion during the decade leading to the war.

To do this, the young scholar analyzed the contents of many large collections of personal letters saved by various families in Ohio - letters written during the 1850s and 1860s. But his study never was published or even complet­ed, because the young scholar found no references at all to abolition in any of these letters.

This forces the conclusion that mass support for Lin­coln and, eventually, for the war was based on many fac­tors, but concern about the plight of the slaves in the South was not one of them (although that may have changed once the war got going).

However, a small elite committed to abolition had suffi­cient influence to see that antislavery policies won. Moreover, the abolitionist ideology seems to have infused this elite with a sense of single-mindedness and dedication that got results.

This example does not reflect an isolated case. Leaders of social movements and political organizations usually display patterns of opinion consistent with a basic outlook or ideology.