CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The study of social values, political ideology and political trust, informs of orientations wich serves to the function of organizing the cognitiveand affective mediations from the members of the political elite, becomesrelevant to the approach of understanding the power groups, who mediate betweenthe interests and the citizens? demands. Therefore, the aim of this researchwas mainly to comparatively examine the variables of political trust, socialvalues and political ideology in groups formed by members of the three branchesof the provincial government, unions, public university and religiousinstitutions. This study was conducted with a non-probabilistic sample of N= 75 typical cases. To assess thepolitical trust, institutional trust levels were measured attributed to themembers of the elite of different social and political actors, and theSocio-emotional Climate Scale (Páez, Ruiz, Gailly, Kornblit & Wiesenfeld, 1996). Besides the Social Values Questionnaire(Gouveia, 1998) and the Political Ideology Scale (Brussino, Rabbia, Imhoff& Paz García, 2011) were administered. Data were analyzed using the ANOVAsingle factor with groups of unequal size, and post-hoc comparisons with theBonferroni´s Test. This test is the most conservative because it singles outfewer differences from those, which really exists among data. The probabilityof error Type I was set as < .05. Although the bibliography suggests thatthe test is long enough to be applied even when the assumptions do not occur,in this case non-parametric analysis were conducted to corroborate theconsistency of the results.The obtained data allows one approach to understanding ideas andrepresentations in the members of the elite, and become relevant in terms ofpolitical rol that this actors interpret. The results pointed that the political elite of Neuquén (EPN) was characterized by apredominance of subjects with tertiary and university levels of education,mostly married or partnered, and mainly young adult men. on regards to the political trust variable, on onehand only trade union representatives considered that human rightsorganizations and their own sectors were worthy of institutional trust; on theother hand as for a negative socio-emotional perception, were the members oflegislative, university and religious EPN those with a higher perception ofdisconfort, wich is opposed to de vision of representative members from anexecutive branch of provincial government. As for the results found for thesocial values variable, the religious representatives consider more importantthe normative and interactional dimensions, while the members of the threebranches of goverment attribute relevance to the achievement-realizationvalues. Also, in relation with political ideology variable, the religiousrepresentatives present the higher level of agreement with issues related tothe sexual and religious conservatism dimension, and the members of the threebrances of government are those with less level of agreement with the topics ofguarantor and multicultural liberalism. Although this is an exploratory study,the results allow understanding these power groups as to ideological andattitudinal orientations prioritized in each sector in the process of socialinfluence. However, is necessary noted that given the small sample size, which isusually conditioned by the difficulty of access to the population, thesefindings should be taken with the care and reserve that requieres anyinterpretation of data, and the social effects that requiring further studiesin this line. Also, future research would be necessary to consider in the studyof elites, the timing of the charges and positions occupied by participants ofeach sector and the autonomy enjoyed by the selective processes by which haveagreed to such places. This variables set could influence the differences indistribution of power into every policy area (Cao et al., 2011).