Cultural differences and features of perception of slogans (All welcome)

[Elisa_meow]

Hi, everyone We are doing a practice part of our linguistic diploma and we really-really need your help!!! We will be glad if you take a test. You should have a gmail:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link

This research is being conducted by Elisa Yarov (BA) and Marina Shul (PhD) at the University of Kuban State.
All data is de-identified and no IP addresses and e-mails are collected.

If you have questions, feel free to ask me!

And we do not mind a discussion of this topic here. We would like to read your assumption and arguments on this subject. Probably, all they would be out source of imagination

Thank you in advance!

[Khemehekis]

I answered your questions, but . . . is "democratic" really a perfect antonym for "authoritarian"?

[Elisa_meow]

I answered your questions, but . . . is "democratic" really a perfect antonym for "authoritarian"?

According to thesaurus.com 'democratic' is acceptable and at least clear to all people. Moreover, we can not use synonyms having too negative connotation like t*rannical and t*talitarian.

And in accordance with the meaning of 'authoritarian' (Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom)
'democratic' is appropriate as antonym.
Thank you for participation!

[Arayaz]

Currently, it is possible for a person to fill out the survey multiple times. You should probably correct that.

[Elisa_meow]

Currently, it is possible for a person to fill out the survey multiple times. You should probably correct that.

Thanks a lot for your observation! I have corrected it

[Salmoneus]

I answered your questions, but . . . is "democratic" really a perfect antonym for "authoritarian"?

According to thesaurus.com 'democratic' is acceptable and at least clear to all people. Moreover, we can not use synonyms having too negative connotation like t*rannical and t*talitarian.

And in accordance with the meaning of 'authoritarian' (Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom)
'democratic' is appropriate as antonym.
Thank you for participation!

Just so you know, in English-language political science and 'intellectual' political discussions (i.e. newspaper columnists and people at universities, not people at a random bus stop in Tottenham), "democratic" and "authoritarian" are definitely not antonyms.

"Democratic" refers to a system by which authority figures are selected. Democracy is a process whereby the population (or the vast majority of it) has the right and ability to vote to determine which people will be given authority.

"Authoritarian" refers to the policies carried out by authority figures. Authoritarianism is a policy approach in which the population are given relatively little freedom to make their own life choices.

There have been many authoritarian democracies - countries where political leaders are elected (reasonably) fairly and freely, but impose policies that greatly restrict personal freedoms. Such things are particularly common in post-Soviet and Latin American countries. Conversely, there have been some relatively non-authoritarian non-democracies: countries where political leaders are not elected, but also have little interest in restricting personal freedoms. To give a historical example, this is famously true of the Restoration era in English history (the 1660s and 1670s), when Charles II, the "Merry Monarch", granted amnesty to all political enemies and allowed Puritans, Catholics and secular libertines to all explore their own lifestyles, and even hold political power.

There are, to be fair, very strong correlations. Over time, authoritarian democracies tend to become less democratic (elections become less free and fair), and may stop being democratic at all. Because authoritarians always want more power, and once the people have few freedoms they have little ability to hold on to the ones they have. And once a country accepts that one Strong Man should decide everything, why not accept that the Strong Man should also decide how long he remains in power, and who his successor will be? Conversely, liberal non-democracies are rare because non-democratic rulers have little incentive to protect liberty (other than personal ideology), and the people, allowed freedom in everything else, will soon demand freedom in selecting the ruler as well.

But in theory the two things are entirely different. Political scientists, for instance, are often careful to use the phrase "liberal democracy", not simply "democracy", because authoritarian democracies do exist and work quite differently.

Unfortunately, neither word has a common perfect antonym in English.

The technical antonym of "authoritarian" is "liberal" or "libertarian". However, both those words can have more specific meanings for some people.

The common antonym of "democracy" is "dictatorship". However, in an academic context a dictatorship is only one possible sort of non-democracy (a dictatorship is a system where one individual, or possibly a small number of individuals acting as one, have absolute power, which describes most modern non-democracies but not all theoretical non-democracies).

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I'm not trying to judge on your behalf what words are most suitable for your own purposes, but simply clarifying the differences for you and anyone else reading the thread.

[Salmoneus]

I'd also note that "conservative" and "liberal" are antonyms for Americans, but not necessarily for the rest of us, and both terms mean very different things in the political language of different countries. [eg in the UK there are politicians (and voters) who consider themselves "liberal conservatives"]

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A bigger things I'd say, though, is that this seems like a question about political knowledge, not linguistics. You're asking about expressions that will evoke very different feelings depending on the context - and that might well be used very frequently in many different contexts in daily life. Using them by themselves, and using evaluative terms that make no sense outside of politics, makes clear that you're talking about the political slogans (so you won't get linguistic insight into ordinary usage), but reactions to those slogans will depend entirely on whether someone is familiar with their political context. And other than asking where I live you don't know how familiar I am with them.

What's the linguistic interest in asking someone whether they think the slogan of the British Conservative Party in the 2017 general election "sounds conservative" or not? That just feels like a trivia question about whether I remember the 2017 general election campaign or not...

[since the phrases themselves are virtually meaningless outside of their use in specific election campaigns]

[Elisa_meow]

Many thanks for your deep discussion! We will take into consideration your points and note them as disadvantages of our survey

We would like to explain that we intentionally want people of different cultures to evaluate these two expressions without certain context. That's why, we don't indicate anywhere that these are political slogans and who said these slogans.

For instance, I (Elisa) am from Spain and for me 'Yes we can' without political context means rather politeness, activity, democracy and freedom whereas 'Strong and stable' has an opposite perception. However, as for my scientific supervisor who is from the UK, she finds 'YWC" slogan rude, weak, informal and not serious at all. So we suppose that it depends on our cultural difference.

[Arayaz]

We would like to explain that we intentionally want people of different cultures to evaluate these two expressions without certain context. That's why, we don't indicate anywhere that these are political slogans and who said these slogans.

But it's inherently obvious that they're political slogans. You ask what political faction we feel like they align with!

[Elisa_meow]

We would like to explain that we intentionally want people of different cultures to evaluate these two expressions without certain context. That's why, we don't indicate anywhere that these are political slogans and who said these slogans.

But it's inherently obvious that they're political slogans. You ask what political faction we feel like they align with!

The idea is that the majority of respondets (regardless of culture) chooses 'YWC' as more liberal and democratic than 'Strong and Stable'. This is a test of general perception. Then people from different cultures evaluate these two slogans (it doesn't matter if they realized who said these political slogans and which their party is) in accordance with the level of activity, politeness, power and others.

So far, the results confirm our hypothesis: people from England, for example, tend to perceive the second slogan 'Strong and stable' more positively, while people from France consider the first slogan more favorable.

Perhaps, our hypothesis may be disproved in a month.

[Khemehekis]

Just so you know, in English-language political science and 'intellectual' political discussions (i.e. newspaper columnists and people at universities, not people at a random bus stop in Tottenham), "democratic" and "authoritarian" are definitely not antonyms.

. . .

The common antonym of "democracy" is "dictatorship". However, in an academic context a dictatorship is only one possible sort of non-democracy (a dictatorship is a system where one individual, or possibly a small number of individuals acting as one, have absolute power, which describes most modern non-democracies but not all theoretical non-democracies).

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I'm not trying to judge on your behalf what words are most suitable for your own purposes, but simply clarifying the differences for you and anyone else reading the thread.

Thank you for explaining this to Elisa_Meow, Salmoneus.

[Glenn]

This has nothing to do with your survey, I’m afraid, but I wanted to say that I was at Kuban State University (Кубанский государственный университет) in Krasnodar in the fall of 1991, as part of a program through the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) and the Great Lakes College Association (GLCA) that brought American students to Krasnodar to study the Russian language. (The program was started in 1987 and was still in operation as of c. 2005; I don’t know if it exists anymore.)

Of course, I am sure that the university (and the city) are entirely different these days, as shown by the mere fact that we can communicate with each other like this. When I was a student there more than thirty years ago, the World Wide Web did not exist, the Internet and cell phones were barely on most people’s radar, and communications between the US and the then (just barely) USSR were limited: when I and my classmates in the dormitory wanted to speak with our families in the US, we had to take the tram downtown and order an international call from the lobby of the international hotel; we only called home about once a month, and the calls were only a few minutes each. (By the time I returned to Russia the second time in 1994, I could make overseas calls easily, and when I returned the third time in 1996, I had E-mail and an Internet connection.)

As I said, this has nothing to do with the topic of the thread, but the name of your university jumped out at me, and I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity to take a stroll down memory lane.

[Elisa_meow]

As I said, this has nothing to do with the topic of the thread, but the name of your university jumped out at me, and I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity to take a stroll down memory lane.

Your memories are so touching! Thank you for sharing them! You have no idea how we appreciate your words

By the way, in 2020 the university celebrated its 100th anniversary. Definitely, a lot of changes have happened for 30 years, but the good old red and yellow trams are still riding around the city - a nice piece of the past!