Formation of the Attitudes Towards Political Issues in Post-Communist Country: Case Study of Lithuania

Main goal of the dissertation is to, by analyzing Lithuanian case, explore how attitudes towards political issues develop in a post-communist country where favorable conditions for the ideological thinking do not exist. The arranged approach of the cognitive schema theories is taken as a starting point for developing the research instrument. In the first stage of the empirical research, the method of semi-structured interviews is used to uncover the cognitive schemas that play a vital role in forming the attitudes on two political issues representing, respectively, socioeconomic and moral spheres of politics. These findings are further elaborated in the second round of the research by employing the Q-sort method. It turns out that the development of political attitudes in both political areas is being determined by two main types of cognitive schemas: one based on fundamental virtues, principle beliefs, and the pragmatic schema based on rational evaluation of the policy outcomes’ efficiency (both of these schemas are compared and analyzed in detail). It is also explored that the usage of these schemas are coordinated and can be explained by one or another of the five shared social perspectives (or ideological schemas) operating in Lithuania. Conditionally they can be named as perspectives of free self-expression, strong leader, traditional morality, patronizing state and basic rights’ assurance. Some of these schemas can be loosely linked to certain “classical” ideologies. But most importantly, they prove that regardless of the unfavorable conditions for ideological thinking in Lithuania, the citizens do think about politics in a meaningful and consistent manner by applying certain shared and personally internalized belief systems