Political-ideological orientation and party preferences of the population in Vojvodina

Taking into consideration the theory of political cleavage, the political culture as mediating variables and the hypothesis of multidimensional ideological space, this research work attempts to establish whether and to what extent different socio-economic status and diverse socio-cultural identities contribute to latent configuration of the political culture and to political-ideological values. The research was conducted on a sample of 500 respondents - adults in Vojvodina belonging to different ethnic background. The results have shown that identification of political cleavages in Vojvodina is possible, based on an evident relationship between the political-ideological values, social structure and party preferences. The result of discriminative analysis shows the existence of significant interconnection between social-structure variables and political-ideological values, based on which significant social divisions in Vojvodina could be identified. These divisions are mostly related with differences between 1) generations, originating from the affiliation to former communist system, between 2) different ethnic groups, depending on the level of acceptance of values of egalitarianism, collectivism and militarism, 3) between social-economic groups in relation to acceptance of the centralistic distributive economy, 4) religious-secular division between the traditional moral values and 5) between those supporting either pro or anti-western attitudes. Discriminative analysis with party preferences included brings forward the three outstanding political cleavage in Vojvodina: asymmetrical class, cultural-values and political-ideological cleavage. The second aim of this study was to establish whether and to what extent authoritarian tendencies and dimensions of social and political alienation contribute to the latent structure of political-ideological patterns and party preferences. Results of research show that socio-structural characteristics, authoritarian tendencies, dimensions of social and political alienation are in such associations that is possible to distinguish different types of political culture in Vojvodina: moralistic political culture, authoritarian-conformist and hierarchic culture, alienated egalitarian political culture, liberal individualistic political culture and militaristic etathist political culture. Polazeći od teorije političkih rascepa, dimenzija političke kulture kao posredujućih (medijator) varijabli i pretpostavke o višedimenzionalno