DID SOCIO-POLITICAL CHANGES IN SERBIA CHANGED THE LEVEL OF AUTHORITARIANISM AND ETHNOCENTRISM OF CITIZENS ?

The subject of this paper is the comparison of the results of the survey of public opinion before and after the change of the regime in Serbia as of 5 October 2000. Both researches (May 2000 and June 2001) were field researches, reaching for households, using random sample of the citizens of Serbia, without Kosovo. The obtained results show that the change of regime in Serbia was followed with the change in the sense of decreased expression of authoritarianism and ethnocentrism after one year of democratic rule. However, the question which still remains is whether the registered change is the result of social-political circumstances, and whether it is the reflection of essential changes of value systems, or just different experience of social desirability of particular attitudes.

conflicted nations, and, of course, to bringing the Balkans closer to European social values and standards.
The underlying results of the study of the social (ethnic) distance among Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (called Muslims at that time) in Bosnia and Croatia as of 1990, that stand in favour of the changeability of value orrientations, say that this ethnic distance was quite minor (Pantić, 1991), which casts serious doubt into the existance of "hatred" among these nations -before the war.Of course, the war took it tribute and the ethnic distance among the nationalities that were in war has drastically increased.Accodring to the findings of Šiber (1997), the ethnic distance of Croats to Serbs and Bosniaks (Muslims) significantly increased (in comparison with 1990) in his research from 1995, and then it slightly decreased in the research from 1997.As a comparable example, we will take an item from Bogardus' Scale2 for measuring Ethnic Distance: "Would you accept that a member of a …… nation become your son-in-law or daughter-in-law?"Only 18% of Croats would accept "blood" relationship with Serbs andBosnianks in 1995, andin 1997, this percentage moves to 21% regarding Serbs, and 23% regarding Bosniaks.
Also, the research in Serbia from 1993 (Kuzmanović, 1994) shows similar changes: only 25% of Serbs would accept "blood" relationship with Croats, 19% with Bosniaks and 16% with Albanians.However, in our research from 1997 (Biro, 1997), we obtained the significant decrease of the ethnic distance (comparing with the results from 1993): 54% of Serbs was ready to have family relationship with Croats, 41% with Bosniaks/Muslims, while the lowest percentage (32%) was registered with Albanians.
Theoretical discussion, which we commenced, is also contributed by our paper (Biro et al, 2000) on the impacts of media to political attitudes and value orientations of the citizens of Serbia.According to the results of this research, national media in Serbia 2000 succeeded to, with reference to politics (and values), direct a part of population, but only that part which did not have or had loose value systems.Contrary to this, media did not have impact to citizens with stable values, rather they chose media that were appropriate to their orientations!Taking into account dramatic political changes that occurred in Serbia on 5 th October 2000, it was interesting to see whether these changes brought changes in the value orrientations of the citizens of Serbia.
Since the above mentioned research was done in May 2000, and that the change of regime in Serbia was done on 5 th October of the same year, we had a specific experimental situation and the possibility to, through repeated study after one year, "measure" changes occurred as the consequences of changes in the political atmosphere and information and value messages sent by national media and (new) political elite.

PROBLEM
The subject of this research is the comparison of the results of the survey of public opinion before and after the change of the regime in Serbia as of 5 th October 2000, i.e. the comparison of results using the instruments that were aimed at registering the existence of authoritarianism and ethnocentrism.

METHOD
Both researches (May 2000 and June 20013 ) were field researches, reaching for households, using random sample of the citizens of Serbia, without Kosovo.The sample was representative in relation to region and size of inhabited place, and the representation in relation to gender, education, and age was provided through poststratification.The research from 2000 and 2001 included 1100 and 1513 subjects, respectively.For analysis of ethnocentrism, only the citizens who stated that they were Serbs or Montenegrins were included (902 in 2000, and 1348 in 2001).
The research was made in the form of standardised interview, and it was performed by trained interviewers from the agency SMMRI.
The questionnaire, besides demographic data, contained two scales, as well as several additional questions that referred to the attitudes to democracy, followed by xenophobia and nationalistic attitudes.The Authoritarian Scale (13 items) covers three clusters of attitudes: authoritarian submissiveness, authoritarian aggressiveness and conventionalism, according to the Altemeyer's (1996) concept.The Ethnic Distance Scale contained of four items -readiness to accept the members of 10 different nationalities as: a citizen of Serbia, neighbor, boss, and son-in-law/daughter-in-law.As seen from Table 1, the average score on the Authoritarian Scale, obtained in 2001, is statistically significantly lower than the one obtained in 2000.

Graph 1: Distribution of scores on the Authoritarian Scale in 2001
Nevertheless, the score distribution4 points out to the fact that two-thirds of the citizens of Serbia are still in the category of "high authoritarianism" (score 6 and higher).
Although the average score is, of course, the best indicator, we will also show the results on one of the items that well illustrate the change we discuss.Chi-square = 0.03; p = 0.86

Ethnocentrism
As the basic indicator of ethnocentrism, we used the results on the Ethnic Distance Scale, and we supported these results with the results regarding individual statements with reference to nationalistic and xenophobic attitudes.As seen from table 3, the average score on the Ethnic Distance Scale from 2001 is statistically significantly lower than the same score in 2000.Let's take a look at the distribution of total scores for 2000 and 2001 according to nationalities (Graph 2) and the distribution of scores according to the specific items for the nationalities where the highest distance is from 2001 (Graph 3)5 .

Graph 3.: Ethnic distance in 2001 according to the items
Similar to the ethnic distance, the results for the individual questions concerning nationalistic attitudes also have a decreasing trend.We will show them in Tables 4, 5, 6, and 7. Chi-square = 24.54;p = 0.000

DISCUSSION
The enthusiasm that might have affected reader, must be, unfortunately, quickly disturbed through the presentation of the data from previous researches.Namely, the fact that the average scores of authoritarianism and ethnic distance in 2001 are significantly lower than the scores on these scales for 2000, does not say much, for both scores from 2000 are certainly the highest ones ever obtained!Was this the consequence of fresh memory to the bombardment of Serbia in 1999, or the culmination of the propaganda of hatred of fallen regime, remains to be discussed and it will not be the subject of our consideration.Only, it should be emphasized that the decrease of the authoritarianism and ethnic distance evidenced during the first year of the rule of democracy is still insufficient to bring this score closer to lower scores obtained in previous years!

Average score on Authoritarian scale
While the score from 1997 (Biro et al, 1997) on the Authoritarian Scale is approximate to the scores obtained in previous researches, and thus we may consider it relevant for comparison, the things are not so simple with the score on the Ethnic Distance Scale.Namely, our research (Biro, 1997) was done at relatively small (although representative) sample of 400 subjects, and more importantly, it is not in accordance with some other researches done in the same year (Sekelj, 2000), which obtained higher ethnic distance (but, which, unfortunately, used different methodology, thus the comparison is not possible).However, in case of the ethnic distance, we, thanks to the kindness of the Federal Ministry for National and Ethnic Communities, obtained the data from their research performed in February 2002 (the research was, according to the same methodology, performed by SMMRI), thus we also included this result in our comparison (Graph 5).As seen from the graph, in this last research, higher ethnic distance scores were once again obtained!They are, namely, still lower than in 2000, but higher than in 2001.

Graph 5.: Ethnic distance for blood relationship according to years
What has happened?If we accept the basic thesis from this paper -that value orientations may be changed under the influence of media and the messages of political elite, then, we may conclude that both the authoritarianism and the ethnic distance were decreased immediately after the change of the regime in Serbia.But we may also conclude that these messages contributed to re-increase of nationalistic ideas and ethnic distance to other nationalities in 2002.Of course, for such a conclusion to be methodologically correct, it is necessary to analyze the contents of media and political messages of leading political persons, and measure their possible effects by using other instruments, too.To what extent are obtained data reliable?Can our instruments be believed in?Besides good metric characteristics our instruments demonstrated in our researches6 , the fact that the correlation and the ranking of items, as well as, the "ranking of desirability" of particular nationalities behaved almost identically in all researches speaks in favor of obtained data reliability.

Do not accept as a son/daughter-in-law:
However, the theoretical issue has remained unsolved -whether the registered changes are actually the changes of value orientation or is it only the change of perception of social desirability of particular value systems?Namely, the question whether the political atmosphere and media messages actually change the attitudes of people, or just send the message to the people: "now it is OK for you to think in this way", thus citizens become freer to express their authentic attitudes and beliefs.In the research we studied the attitudes to (democratic) legal state (Biro et al, 1997;1998), for example, authoritarian subjects zealously accepted democratic attitudes and solutionsif they were convinced that they were regulated by valid laws!So, if one in authoritarian manner suggests to authoritarian subject -now you should be democrat and you must tolerate minority nations -he will behave in authoritarian manner in accordance with the messages of accepted authorities.
However, if methodological limits disable us to connect the cause and effect, what we may certainly do is to analyze the effect.For such an analysis the results of the above mentioned research from 2002 may serve very well, for they clearly point out to the fact that public opinion in Serbia is not ready to face the contribution of its own nation in war and war crimes (Tables 8 and 9).And, until such awareness is lacking, there will be no chance for the decrease of ethnocentrism and xenophobia.