Just sick of it? Health and political trust in Western Europe

This article explores two theoretical possibilities for why personal health may affect political trust: the psychological‐democratic contract theory, and the role of personal experience in opinion formation. It argues that citizens with health impairments are more likely to experience the direct effects of political decisions as they are more dependent on public health services. Negative subjective evaluations of public services can lower trust levels, especially if people's expectations are high. Using European Social Survey data, the association between health and trust in 19 Western European states is analysed. The results indicate that people in poor health exhibit lower levels of trust towards the political system than people in good health. The differences in trust between those in good and poor health are accentuated among citizens with left‐leaning ideological values. The results suggest that welfare issues may constitute a rare context in which personal, rather than collective, experiences affect opinion formation.     

The Democracy Wall Movement,Marxist Revisionism,and the Variations on Socialist Democracy

This article analyses the Beijing Democracy Wall Movement's argumentation on democratic reforms in 1978–1981 from the perspective of the larger genre of international revisionist Marxism critical of Leninist/Stalinist political systems at the time of the movement. The movement's argumentation contained three distinct variations on the same theme of socialist democracy, which the author calls classical Marxist, eclectic Marxist and non-Marxist lines of argument. They differed in the content of proposed institutional reforms and their intellectual sources, but shared the perception of democracy as an institutional solution to the conflict between the people and a bureaucratic class that the Stalinist political system had produced in China. All lines also accepted the socialist economic system. As discussed in the article, these ideas were heavily influenced by the Radical Red Guard criticism against the Maoist New Establishment created and popularized during the Cultural Revolution, and the need to find ideological means to refute the official Maoist ideology of the Party Left at the time through a return to the original sources in Marxism. East-European revisionist Marxism also influenced these arguments directly and indirectly.