performance as excellent or good, compared with 29% of the young women in the poorest barrios.

Turning to responses on questions of domestic policies, one finds women and men split along predictable lines according to their varying roles and positions in society. Women saw their economic situation worsening more than men did, with women in poor barrios and men in affluent neitghborhoods at the two extremes when asked how their current economic situation compared with last year.

The Sandinista neighborhood committees (CDS), which have, at their best, organized access to government-supplied subsidized food and neighborhood self-help efforts, were not surprisingly more supported by women than men in all types of neighborhoods (54% of all women surveyed supported the CDS system, compared with 46% of the men). Nonetheless, the fact thatonly a bit more than half of the women interviewed were positive about the only organization designed to involve people at a neighborhood level signals a real failure. The low participation of women—poor women and those at home, particularly—in the country's political life may highlight a more general failure of FSLN mass organizations such as the CDS and the women's organization, AMNLAE, to reach them.

Looking at the more abstract questions about Nicaragua's democracy, the general patterns hold true. When asked what they thought about the relationship between the FSLN, the state and the armed forces, for instance, young people, especially young men, were more likely to support the current arrangement than were older people, while women were about twice as likely as men to say they didn't know.