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In an effort to persist with providing members--and interested others--with the content of workshops from the 32nd Annual Conference held in Norfolk, the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) has decided to develop a hybrid publication that has materialized in two parts. Part I includes 11 papers: (1) Adventure Coaching (Doug Gray); (2) Democracy in Russia: Today's Youth--Tomorrow's Leaders (Alayne Torretta); (3) Developing Peoples' Critical Thinking Skills through Experiential Education Theory and Practice (Mary C. Breunig); (4) Emotional Intelligence (Doug Gray); (5) Expanding a Critique of Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory (Drew Brennan); (6) Extended Stay Outdoor Education, Self-Esteem and Health-Related Fitness (Stephen Jelley); (7) Gender and Technical Skills (TA Loeffler and Karen Warren); (8) It's Not Just Camping with Kids: Curriculum Design in Adventure Education (Jeff Bairelein); (9) Lasting Learning During One-Day Ropes Course Programs (Leslie Schreiber); (10) Playing the Change Game: Approaching Outdoor Education as School Reform (Jayson Seaman); and (11) Ritual, Symbol, and the Raccoon Circle (Tom Smith). Part II consists of 35 workshop program descriptions submitted as part of the 2004 workshop proposals that have been formatted as abstracts. They are: (1) Accidents in Outdoor Pursuits: Their Causes and Cures (Jed Williamson); (2) ACCT Standards: What Do You Need to Know? (Sylvia Dresser); (3) Action Therapy: Moving from Passive to Proactive (Danie Beaulieu); (4) Adventure Therapy Supervision: Models and Application (Mark Gillen); (5) Approaching and Using Culture in Outdoor Education Research and Practice (Nina S. Roberts); (6) Assessing and Learning From an Experiential Application Process (Zabe MacEachren); (7) Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Your Ability to Serve the Corporate Client (Earl Davis and Andre Darger); (8) Bringing Learning to Life: Experiential Approaches with Psycho-Educational Groups (Bonnie Dyck and Jackie Cupples); (9) Building a Body of Knowledge (Pete Allison and Alan Ewert); (10) Building Resiliency among Adolescents with Substance Abuse Problems (Eddie Hill); (11) Connecting Youth to Nature and Culturally Diverse Communities (Annie Jonas); (12) Cultural Change in Our Schools: Is It Possible? (Laurie Frank and D.D. Sturdevant); (13) Deepening the Metaphor (Cheryl Willcocks); (14) Developing Effective Interventions in Adventure Therapy (Sandra L. Newes and Sean Hoyer); (15) Dewey's Principals of Interaction and Continuity Are Alive and Well in 4-H (Richard P. Enfield and Rebecca L. Carver); (16) Facilitating Your Staff Toward Peak Performance: Charting New Possibilities (Marc B. Levy); (17) Facilitation on the Edge: An Experiential Exploration of the Double Black Diamond Model (Scott Bandoroff and Christian Itin); (18) Fun in the Workplace: Theory to Practice (Don Taylor and Ezra Holland); (19) Games and Activities for Teaching Tolerance and Diversity (Marilyn Levin); (20) Games for Change, Bringing Spirituality into the Process (Lisa Prosser-Dodds); (21) Hot Topics: Wilderness Medicine Issues in Program Management (John Jacobs and Deb Ajango); (22) Leading from the Inside Out: Becoming a Self-Aware Leader (Betty Martin-Lewis); (23) Let's Talk Journaling! (Timothy S. O'Connell and Janet E. Dyment); (24) Making the Family Connection: Use of Initiatives with Families (D. Maurie Lung and Melissa Meyer); (25) Modified Adventure: Facilitating Adventure Activities with Special Needs At-Risk Youth (Michael Young and Carolyn Romaon); (26) More Lessons from the Couch (Dene Berman and Mark Gillen); (27) Murder by Numbers: Educational Reform and the Biospheric Number (Jay W. Roberts); (28) New Tips, Tools, and Tricks in Wilderness Medicine (Shana Lee Tarter); (29) Preventing Paddling Accidents and Fatalities (Laurie Gullion); (30) Processing Tools Galore! (Michelle Cummings and Jennifer Stanchfield); (31) Raccoon's Medicine (Tom Smith); (32) Rites of Passage: A Historical and Future Perspective (Dennis Call); (33) Sixth Annual Supervision in Adventure Therapy: Bring Your Best and Worst Cases to an Active, Experiential Brainstorm (Michael A. Gass and L Gillis); (34) Third Annual: Emergency Response Drills for Experiential Education Programs (Greg Friese); and (35) Using Adventure Education to Fulfill Content Standards in Physical Education (Bruce Martin). (Individual papers contain references.)

This paper describes higher education reform in post-Soviet Russia. Basic educational reform began in 1987 towards the end of the Soviet period, moving through two earlier stages, and is now in the third stage. The first stage was an ideological shift in the vision of education as a social institution and a profound change in the philosophy, content, and methods of education (with an emphasis on humanization). In the second stage, the old dogmatic approach to education management was phased out, and a new concept management other than direct administration was implemented. This stage decentralized and democratized higher education to allow higher education institutions more academic and financial autonomy, created non-state institutions, and put greater emphasis on human-centered studies. It also codified the legal basis of reform. The third stage is a technical one; the main objective of which is fostering and putting into effect earlier reforms. The paper also offers details on the structure and mechanisms of the development of higher education in Russia and presents a comparative analysis of higher education in Russia and in the world's leading countries. The paper concludes with a description of Chita State Technical University, an example of an institution in the third phase of the reform process. (SM)

The Spirit of Democracy Project was initiated in 2000 by the University of New Brunswick (Canada) Faculty of Education in partnership with the Russian Association for Civic Education, and was made possible through financial contribution from the Canadian International Development Agency. The focus of the Project is the development of online citizenship education curriculum resources for use by teachers in Russia and Canada. The Canadian and Russian project teams are developing materials for similar topics based on local content. Researchers, on both sides, create learning opportunities using situations and springboards. The situations present democratic issues and concepts, for example, the value of loyalty, or the meaning of privacy. An important role in the Project is assigned to visual materials and creative use of hypermedia. The Project led to close collaboration between Russian and Canadian social sciences researchers, teachers and students. (Contains 10 references.) (Author)

Why have the Russian media failed to support grass-roots political initiatives? In particular, the powerful medium of state television has sided continually with rulers rather than popular movements. This paper examines television content over several Russian election campaigns to track the development of the post-Soviet media as a tool of the state rather than a voice for the masses. The paper focuses on content analysis of campaign news, including the 2003 Duma elections, to analyze the lack of balance and objectivity in the Russian news process. At the same time, the study shows that there is still significant variation in content between nightly news on the prime state-run and commercial channels. How valuable are these differences? Are Russian viewers able to get enough information to make wise vote choices? Does commercial television, albeit now operating in the shadow of the Kremlin, provide a lifeline for media freedom in an increasingly oppressive system? Data from surveys and focus groups suggest that while viewers perceive the differences in coverage ? as well as the fact that they are not being given access to full information ? many have come to prefer orderly, authoritative media over the messier, more democratic approach to news. A cross-national review of media performance across a decade of elections in Russia and four other post-Soviet states shows that the pervasive problems of a lack of a professional media have presented a persistent obstacle to democratization [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What could be motivating voters in emerging democracies to vote for leaders who have proven themselves to be skilled at violating human rights, repressing civil rights and liberties, and ruling without democratic institutions? If voters elect former authoritarians because they prefer authoritarianism to democracy, and if the former authoritarians use their public mandate to subvert democracy once they take office, then the future of democratic consolidation could be in serious danger. As we note in this paper, there are numerous instances around the world in which voters are supporting former authoritarians. This paper looks at two such cases, Bolivia and Russia, by tapping into voters’ motivations for choosing former authoritarians in two presidential elections. We carry out a least-similar-systems design in which we search for common predictors of vote choice in countries that differ in their past and current political and economic situations. After testing the implications of a number of different theoretical approaches, our major finding is that, in both cases, support for authoritarian attitudes and values appears to be a very important predictor of the likelihood of voting for former authoritarian rulers, more so than social capital, trust in institutions, demographic characteristics of the respondent (particularly in Bolivia), and concern over specific issues (particularly in Russia). Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two newly democratized post-Soviet giants, Russia and Ukraine, share a host of post-communist parallels. The long dominance of the CPSU in both countries denied them a legacy of open, democratic politics. Based on these parallels, one would expect their patterns of legislative behavior to mirror each other. Commonalities exist in the legislative behavior of both chambers; however, in at least one area, they are not analogous: the level of parliamentary party discipline among SMD deputies.the Ukrainian SMD deputies of the first mixed-member Rada (1998-2002) voted with the majority position of their parliamentary party at higher rates than their Russian brethren did in the first mixed-member Duma (1994-1995). In this paper, I attempt to find an answer for this conundrum by analyzing the roll-call voting behavior of SMD deputies in both legislatures. I argue that the higher level of discipline among SMD deputies in the Rada is a function of a more pronounced social cleavage found in the Ukrainian electorate. While both Russia and Ukraine feature a pro-reform/anti-reform cleavage, only Ukraine features a reinforcing regional cleavage built on ethnic and linguistic differences between eastern and western Ukraine. The presence of this reinforcing cleavage helps solidify behavior in the Rada, while Russia, lacking such cleavages, features a more fluid legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that political parties can be an important mechanism by which to better integrate states in the developing world. Despite this, in Russia parties continue to only weakly penetrate provincial politics and thus do not help to integrate the state and enhance its abilities to govern in the periphery by extension. Drawing on evidence of weak central state capacity to govern in the Russian provinces and correspondingly weak political party penetration, the paper argues that emergent political and economic actors have little interest in building political parties and increasing state integration and capacity as a result. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the argument and analysis for the future of Russian political and economic development. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of post-communist democratization needs to be better connected theoretically and empirically to fundamental political questions such as the character and legitimacy of state-society relations. Focusing on Russia and China in the 1990s, this paper finds that the legitimacy of national state institutions has declined in both countries, although the decline appears to be less steep in China while the current level of legitimacy appears to be comparatively lower in Russia. The paper also draws upon different kinds of data to show that the decline in legitimacy is not a function of a growing "longing" for democracy that has been stifled under an authoritarian Chinese state and a "superpresidential" Russian state. In spite of a high level of support for ?democracy? in the abstract in Russia, in neither country does the preference for specific features for democracy appear to weigh in significantly in evaluations of the state, and illiberal and undemocratic attributes of the state are not only tolerated but welcomed if they promise to deliver political order, economic well-being, reduced crime and corruption, social justice, and a coherent national identity emphasizing historical distinctiveness and cultural particularism. As an alternative to arguments that conflate levels of democracy and legitimacy, we offer some tentative hypotheses that combine elements of currently popular and previously respected theoretical projects and that provide a partial explanation for both the decline in state legitimacy in post-communist Russia and China, and the comparatively higher level of legitimacy in the latter. We contend that the most relevant legacy inherited from the communist era in examining attitudes towards democracy and the state have to do with the stable, widely acknowledged dualism of formal and informal norms and practices that allowed ordinary citizens to incrementally improve their immediate situations outside of the officially sanctioned system of political control, economic exchange, and social organization. We also suggest that two features of the post-communist state -- the extent to which it is identified with familiar institutional practices and the extent to which it permits regularized channels of communication and exchange between state-connected elites and locally emergent networks -- affect the patience of the citizenry in evaluating the legitimacy of state institutions in the midst of transition. On both counts, China has fared better than Russia thanks to its incremental strategy and the separation of political and economic reform: the survival of recognizable state institutions has provided Chinese citizens with a sense of continuity and stability while limiting the attentuation of various tiers of connectivity linking local communities to state institutions and state-connected elites, while the more radical transformation in post-Soviet Russia has brought disorientation and detachment among Russians, while concentrating power and wealth in the hands of ?oligarchs? who are far fewer in number and far less connected to local actors than was the old Soviet nomenklatura elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both Russia and Venezuela are rentier states; their economies rely on windfall profits from oil and gas. The majority of literature argues that for rentier states high oil profits tend to result in poor economic performance, unbalanced growth, weakly institutionalized states, and authoritarian regimes. Thad Dunning's Crude Diplomacy argues that some Latin American countries such as Venezuela have experienced an increase in democracy when crude prices rise. Dunning argues that the positive relationship has to do with a political bargain between the elite and society, particularly the role of minimal taxes on the elite in non-oil sectors and increased spending by the government on social programs. This paper applies Dunning's hypothesis to Russia and asks: What factors enable some resource abundant states to utilize their natural resources to promote democracy? Does Dunning's hypothesis work for Russia? I will consider the 2000s through the financial crisis of 2008, when Presidents Chavez of Venezuela and Vladimir Putin of Russia consolidated their power amid high oil profits. The first section of the paper reviews the debate in the rentier state literature. The second section places Dunning's work on Venezuela within this literature. The third section explores Russia's policies concerning taxes and social welfare spending. The paper concludes by comparing the experiences or Russia and Venezuela. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the post-communist era in Russia is presented which is prepared for presentation at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, in Toronto, Ontario, from September 3-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the regime of President Vladimir Putin, the Soviet regime's official ideological commitment to building socialism, and sovereign democracy.

Much recent research demonstrates that the structural conflict between the propertied and the poor in non-communist authoritarian states affects the likelihood, timing, and outcome of democratization. In highly unequal societies, democratization has a strongly redistributive effect.The effect of transition in postcommunist democracies was quite different. Given the absence of private property in most means of production, the deliberate policies of wage compression, the widespread availability of income-support mechanisms, and the importance of collective consumption funds in such social goods and services as housing, healthcare, education, transportation, cultural goods and recreation, both income and consumption differentials were narrow compared with democratic capitalist societies at similar development levels. The transition, therefore, brought substantial increases in aggregate income inequality to the post-communist countries, with some post-communist countries reaching levels higher than those of some West European countries.Much political economy literature suggests that democratization is expected to make government more responsive to wider segments of society, more inclined to supply universal collective goods and services such as security of person and property, health care, education, and infra-structure, as well as to provide some minimum level of social insurance against the hazards of catastrophic income loss. These public goods and services should foster productive behavior on the part of economic agents, and thus growth, as well as the mitigation of extremes of poverty and inequality.However, collusion in rent-extraction by post-transition elites might be consistent with high rates of economic growth under some circumstances. If the elites take advantage of the new institutional environment of a post-communist state and capture control over productive assets for themselves, they might well use them to increase their own incomes, yielding rapid aggregate growth the benefits of which are concentrated in a narrow elite. The institutional advantages of democratization and property rights might be restricted to those holding monopolies over property, and not broadly shared. Their policies would lead to higher growth rates after an initial period of disorganization was overcome. But the benefits of the growth would be distributed unequally. An oligarchic democracy would complement an oligarchic form of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of the dual political and economic transition on income inequality trends, taking Russia's subnational regions (the subjects of the federation) as the units of observation. Noting that the regions differed widely both in their starting conditions and in the increase in income growth and differentiation as a consequence of the transition, it seeks to identify the political mechanisms that explain variation in income and inequality growth following the transition. Using both direct and instrumental measures of democracy by region, the paper finds evidence consistent with the "oligarchic democracy" model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing literature on the strategies authoritarian regimes utilize to resist regional and global democratic trends. This paper seeks to contribute to this debate by examining the ways in which the Putin regime has used rhetoric to defend Russia against external criticisms of its shift toward autocracy. In many ways the Kremlin in engaged in wordplay similar to that of its Soviet predecessor: claiming that it is a democracy (even though nearly all outside observers dispute that claim), but that its ‘form’ of democracy simply looks different than those in the West. This has become apparent in Russia’s promotion of the principle of ‘sovereign democracy’, as well as its link of external criticisms with neo-colonialism. In addition, this paper will look at how the Kremlin’s definitions of democracy are flexible and often hypocritical; for example, Russia has called into question international organizations when they criticize Russia, but attempted to use those same organizations to criticize the human rights records of others (namely the Baltic states) for offenses which are often weaker than those found in Russia itself. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant parties are widely seen as stabilizing hybrid regimes, but there is less agreement on how these parties emerge and serve their stabilizing function. This paper draws on a logic of elite and mass collective action to argue that ideas and other sources of genuine popular support are likely to be crucial in underpinning the initial emergence and subsequent success of dominant parties in ways not usually recognized. In particular, such support can be crucial to the successful functioning of even the most coercive sources of party and regime power. Russia provides a rare opportunity in the world of comparative scholarship to study the initial emergence of a hybrid regime dominant party at the micro level, using mass opinion surveys. This paper demonstrates the important role of ideas and other forms of popular support (most notably economic assessments) using the Russian Election Studies series of surveys that span the emergence of Russia's increasingly dominant United Russia Party as well as the election cycle before that party first appeared (that is, 1995-2008). The most recent survey wave, conducted in spring 2008, includes embedded experiments and other items specially designed to identify more precisely the bases of United Russia's power. This includes the party's relationship to Putin, which turns out to be more complicated and less one-sided than previously thought. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has focused attention on the diversity and complexity of civil-social life in Russia and post-communist Europe, undermining normative and 'communist-legacy' explanations of the weakness of civil society in that region, and underlining the need for theory-building that is both generalizable and sensitive to the specifics of each individual case. This paper attempts to take another step in that direction, exploring how the ways in which elites in semi-authoritarian regimes compete for power - and the social meaning of the power they are competing for - shape the development of civil society. Examining elements of civil society, the paper presents evidence from extensive field research of key variations in the relationship between civic activism and power and argues that these variations can be traced back to crucial differences in the competitive incentives political elites in each context. Specifically, the prospects for civil society appear better when elites - even closed, corrupt and authoritarian elites - are forced to engage one way or another with society at large. The paper will argue that elite-led state-society engagement, regardless of its nature, is essential to building the framework on which citizens construct notions of justice and right, while disengagement and elite autonomy significantly impede the development of civic identities. Indeed, the evidence in comparative perspective suggests that civil society may do better when it is repressed than when it is simply ignored. This, then, points to the disengaged nature of the contemporary Russian regime, rather than its authoritarianism, as a major explanatory factor in the weakness of civil society in that country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion research has shown that many of Russia?s democrats are skeptical about markets. While they may be democrats, they are not liberal democrats. The usual explanation for this tendency is that egalitarian and paternalistic orientations have produced a political culture in Russia that is hostile to economic individualism. This paper builds a different case. Relying on intensive interviews with ordinary Russians, I examine in depth the ideas of Russia?s market skeptical democrats. I conclude that the issue in Russia is not a problematical set of cultural preferences, but problematical markets. Capitalism as it exists in Russia does not have the qualities that help to reconcile tensions between capitalism and democracy. Market mechanisms and hence outcomes seem tilted to the benefit of the few and seem to reward impudence instead of industry. Unlike Russia?s liberal democrats, market skeptical democrats have these particular conditions in mind when they respond to questions about markets. Their suspicion of markets has more to do with how markets function in Russia than with preferences for greater egalitarianism or government control of the economy. Market-doubting democrats in Russia embrace the ideals of liberal economic freedom as readily as do most liberals. They are simply unconvinced that the markets developing in their country provide most people with those freedoms. Russia?s market-skeptical democrats, then, do not oppose the construction of liberal democratic institutions in Russia. They are simply withholding their approval of markets until markets start to function in a way that appears to serve the majority of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on democratic peace theory this paper argues that NATO can play an important role in encouraging good neighbourly relations between Russia and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the best explanations for the rapid collapse of communist regimes focus on disintegrative processes unintentionally set in motion by the Soviet system. The persuasiveness of these explanations rests on their ability to uncover the internal chaos behind the façade of communist power. With communist power now gone, that chaos has emerged into full view. But the systemic dysfunction of Soviet-style communism or of the ‘bandit capitalism’ that followed it has received little attention in studies of Russian public opinion. Many public opinion scholars seem to assume that, as long as the Soviet Union existed, Russians inhabited a system that lived up to its hype: a system that provided order, security, and a predictable if not free existence. Presumably, this system successfully inculcated a set of popular attitudes supporting a paternalistic, authoritarian state. Hence the implicit question of many studies of Russian public opinion is whether Russians really can be democrats, given their past. In this paper, I argue that the key to understanding ordinary Russians’ apparently imperfect support for democracy lies not in the past but in the present conditions of their lives, conditions characterized by significant amounts of disorder and unpredictability. I show that the more Russians are troubled by the chaotic conditions of their daily lives, the less consistent they are in their support for democracy. I demonstrate this through analysis of intensive interviews I conducted with ordinary Russian citizens in 1998 and 2000 in cities and towns across Russia. Unlike mass surveys, intensive interviews permit respondents to articulate their concerns at length and in their own words. This provides a more detailed account of what respondents find troubling about democratic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since mixed electoral systems were adopted in the 1990s by a number of new democracies, a debate has evolved about the extent to which Duverger’s work can help us to understand their effects on the party system. At the core of this debate lies the question what mechanical and psychological effects we should expect to observe in mixed electoral systems. This paper addresses the debate through a case study of Russia’s mixed electoral system. Analysing Duma election results from 1993 to 1999 we find that Russia’s superposition system has effects which set it apart from pure PR and pure plurality systems, but which can be understood by examining the mechanical and psychological effects, which the electoral rules give rise to. This suggests that Duverger’s logic, not his predictions for pure electoral systems, should inform our study of mixed electoral laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework for analyzing the quality of democratic policy processes, and illustrates it through a study of pension reform policy-making in Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Kazakhstan in the 1990s and 2000s. The intention is to shed light on progress of democratization in these countries, and to provide a general analytical framework for future research in other countries and policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the institutional legacies of the one-party regime in Mexico and Russia respectively as they make the transition to democracy and market economies. Despite their differing histories, the countries are responding to similar globalization pressures, in roughly similar ways. However the Soviet legacy of strict limits on institutional pluralism and lack of a mechanism for ensuring leadership rotation left Russia ill-prepared for the democratic transition in comparison with Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]