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Is Putin’s popularity real?
Abstract
Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters? We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is within 10 percentage points of that implied by direct questioning. We find little evidence that these estimates are positively biased due to the presence of floor effects. In contrast, our analysis of placebo experiments suggests that there may be a small negative bias due to artificial deflation. We conclude that Putin’s approval ratings largely reflect the attitudes of Russian citizens.
... One question type that can cause an ambiguous reaction depending on the sociocultural context is political questions. The willingness to answer political questions largely depends on the attitude towards politics and the current political regime in the country (Frye et al., 2017;Ratigan & Rabin, 2020 Another increasingly important factor of survey data quality is the mode of administration. The number of cross-national surveys using more modes within/among countries has been steeply increasing (E. ...
... Political questions are one type of sensitive questions connected with cultural context (Callens & Loosveldt, 2018), while differences in political regimes can partly account for the variation. In nondemocratic regimes, refusal to respond to sensitive questions can be a means of self-preservation (Frye et al., 2017). Some results from China support this idea, indicating that an increased political confidence in the authorities in China may appear precisely because marginalized groups with minority political opinions are afraid to answer political questions in surveys (Ratigan & Rabin, 2020). ...
We tested the impacts of Hofstede's cultural factors and mode of administration on item nonresponse (INR) for political questions in the European Values Study (EVS). We worked with the integrated European Values Study dataset, using descriptive analysis and multilevel binary logistic regression models. We concluded that (1) modes of administration with an interviewer lead to an INR lower than those without an interviewer. In terms of Hofstede's cultural factors, we concluded that (2) the higher the power distance index in the country, the lower the INR, (3) the higher the rate of individualism in the country, the higher the INR, and (4) the higher the uncertainty avoidance index, the lower the INR. These findings stress the importance of sensitive work with cross-national data, especially with increasingly abundant data from mixed-mode surveys. ARTICLE HISTORY
... The next set of critical questions for survey-based research in the field of Russian studies deals with the sincerity of those who do make the choice to participate in surveys (Timothy et al. 2017). Building on Reisinger, Zaloznaya, and Woo's contribution (2023) to this special issue, I next provide a brief review of the (still rather thin) evidence on response bias in the wake of Russia's war. ...
... 6 Meanwhile, Frye et al.'s recent report, based on ongoing research about the trustworthiness of Putin's approval ratings, finds that "there is considerably more uncertainty about Putin's true support than was apparent in 2015" (2022, 1). Based on data collected in that year, the authors concluded in a widely cited study that Putin's high approval ratings mostly reflected sincere support (Timothy et al. 2017). However, Hale (2022), in a new analysis of data also collected in 2015, finds that misrepresentation was an important driver of the apparent surge in support for Putin after Russia annexed Crimea. ...
Amid ongoing uncertainty, regular surveying in Russia continues to date and collaborations with Western academics have too. These developments offer some basis for cautious optimism. Yet they also raise critical questions about the practice of survey research in repressive environments. Are Russians less willing today to respond to surveys? Are they less willing to answer sensitive questions? How can we design research to elicit truthful responses and to know whether respondents are answering insincerely about sensitive opinions? This article lays out some of the existing evidence on these important questions. It also makes the argument that cross-fertilization with other fields can help to ensure a rigorous understanding of and response to changes in the environment for survey research in Russia.
... Admittedly, this finding is potentially confounded by the repressive nature of these regimes, where ordinary people may not feel safe openly criticizing the president. Yet, research shows that the general sentiment is probably real even if polling numbers are almost certainly inflated (Dave, 2013;Frye et al., 2017;Siegel, 2016, pp. 194-228). ...
... Russia re-centralized state administration in the mid-2000s, a move widely interpreted as part of a broader authoritarian consolidation. Recent experimental research shows that robust public support for Vladimir Putin is "real," estimated to be at about 80% in 2015 (Frye et al., 2017). Public polling by the Levada Center consistently shows a higher "Index of Trust" for the Russian president than for sub-national authorities (2019, p. 69). ...
During the 1990s, a conventional wisdom emerged, based on literature going back decades, that political decentralization might be among the most effective forces for democratization. If ordinary people could participate in autonomous local governments, democracy would be built from the ground up, ultimately shaping the entire political system. Once decentralization reforms were implemented across the world, however, the results were disappointing. Authoritarianism not only thrived at the local level, it could also undermine democratization at the national level. Thus, local-national transference still held, but sometimes as a poison. In this context, the case of post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan is an anomaly. Here, the relative success of political decentralization—rather than its failure—nevertheless failed to spur democratization at the national level. I argue that this is because decentralization allowed national authorities to appease international donors while they consolidated their own power. Moreover, while decentralization empowered local communities, it did so in ways that personalized local authority and pitted local and national authorities against one another, resulting in intense localism and antagonistic center-local relations that undermined any democratic transference. The case study findings are based on ten months of field research, which includes interviews with local and national officials, ordinary villagers, and representatives of NGOs and international organizations.
... On the other hand, attempts to assess the scale of preference falsification in Russia after the patriotic boom of 2014-2015 demonstrate that real support does not deviate much from the observed figures (Frye et al., 2017). Hence, even though the problems of social desirability and preference falsification are relevant concerns -especially with survey data on undemocratic countries -the fluctuation of patriotic indicators suggests that Russians do not severely hide their opinions when answering social surveys. ...
... On the other hand, spreading the sense of threat and fear may strengthen exclusive aspects of patriotism. In the times of economic downturn and international sanctions in 2014-2016, Russians tended to blame external forces rather than the executive power (Frye et al., 2017;Sirotkina and Zavadskaya, 2020). If the state undertakes additional effort in this direction, this might reinforce, albeit temporarily, the image of the country under siege and thereby strengthen the connection between political support for autocracy and patriotism. ...
This edited volume explores patriotism and the growing role of militarism in today’s Russia. During the last 20-year period, there has been a consistent effort in Russia to consolidate the nation and to foster a sense of unity and common purpose. To this end, Russian authorities have activated various channels, from educational programmes and youth organizations to media and popular culture. With the conflict in Ukraine, the manipulation of public sentiments – feeling of pride and perception of threat – has become more systemic. The traditional view of Russia being Other for Europe has been replaced with a narrative of enmity. The West is portrayed as a threat to Russia’s historical-cultural originality while Russia represents itself as a country encircled by enemies. On the other hand, these state-led projects mixing patriotism and militarism are perceived sceptically by the Russian society, especially the younger generations. This volume provides new insights into the evolution of enemy images in Russia and the ways in which societal actors perceive official projections of patriotism and militarism in the Russian society. The contributors of the volume include several experts on Russian studies, contemporary history, political science, sociology, and media studies.
... The incumbent regime in Russia enjoys considerable popular support. Despite widespread fraud and manipulation in elections, the Putin regime's high public approval ratings and share of votes are not entirely fake (Frye et al. 2017). The ruling regime has endeavoured to sustain popular support. ...
Why do some authoritarian states adopt more restrictive immigration policies than others? Much of the existing literature focuses on the politics of immigration in democracies, despite the presence of large-scale immigration to autocracies. In this article, I argue that the level of electoral competition can be a key factor in immigration policymaking in electoral autocracies. Autocrats who face high levels of electoral competition tend to impose immigration restrictions as a way of mobilizing anti-outgroup sentiment and boosting their own popularity. I test this hypothesis by conducting comparative case studies on Russia and Kazakhstan, both of which are major immigrant-receiving autocracies. Based on the analysis of original data gathered from 11 months of fieldwork in the two countries, I find that the relatively high level of electoral competition in Russia in the 2010s facilitated increased immigration restrictions, while Kazakhstan depoliticized labour immigrants and enacted a de facto open immigration policy in the absence of electoral competition.
... Their result showed that the falsification was most intense among the groups that had access to alternative information but were vulnerable to political sanctions (Jiang and Yang 2016). Frye and his colleagues used a list experiment to test Putin's political support among Russian people and found counter-intuitive evidence: the high approval of Putin in Russia was genuine (Frye et al. 2017). Tang's work (Tang 2016) used a similar design and found similar 'true support' in China's case. ...
Rapid economic growth is often a disruptive social process threatening the social relations and ideologies of incumbent regimes. Yet far from acting defensively, the Chinese Communist Party has lead a major social and economic transformation over forty years, without yet encountering fundamental challenges subverting its rule. A key question for political sociology is thus - how have the logics of China’s governmentality been able to help maintain compliance from the governed while acting so radically to advance the state’s growth priorities? This book explores the issue by analysing the detailed trajectories, rationale, and effects of China’s pension reforms. It uses strong methods, including institutional analysis of resource allocation in the multiple pension schemes and programmes, and quantitative text analysis of the knowledge construction in official discourse along with the reforms. Causal identification estimates the effects of key policy instruments on public opinion about pension responsibility and political trust. Moving beyond the pension issues, the analysis discusses with qualitative evidence why falsified compliance might exist in China’s society and the mechanisms that may lie behind it. Where active counter-conduct (such as resistance) is confined, individuals may choose cognitive rebellion and falsify their public compliance. The Chinese state’s strategy to generate public compliance is hybrid, organic, and dynamic. The state rules society by its customised governance design and constant adjustments. Public compliance is not only acquired through ‘buying off’ the public with governmental performance and transfer benefits, but is also manufactured through achieving cultural changes and new ideological foundations for general legitimation.
... Personal promotion is strictly managed from the top of the single-power pyramid (Hale 2014, 4;Snegovaya 2013;Vishnevsky 2021), and any attempts to influence it from below at the level of (civil) society are systematically terminated, not only by political managers, but (since 2012) increasingly by law enforcement structures and the agenda of securitization (see Petrov 2020). Unlike Putin (Frye et al. 2017), these lower elite circles are almost completely devoid of legitimacy; thus, these networks depend on an autocratic leader and systematic coercion to thrive and reproduce themselves within the elite ranks. ...
Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1–3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approximately 60% of contemporary elites. Most have ties in the middle and lower, rather than the top, ranks of the nomenklatura. In addition, the share of those with nomenklatura backgrounds in Putin-era elites is significantly higher than the share of siloviki. These results reflect a noticeable continuity between the Soviet-era and Putin-regime elites 30 years after the transition. This often-ignored characteristic helps understand the absence of an elite split and a high degree of elite compliance with re-autocratization in Putin’s Russia.
... This can be seen from the opinion of the Russian public which has been very supportive during his administration and support him to be the president for the second, the third, and even the fourth time, despite being interrupted as Medvedev's Prime Minister (2008-2012. One of the factors that made Putin very popular in Russia was his struggle to defend Russia's national interests, although he had to sacrifice a lot of things by closing the voices of the opposition (Frye et al., 2016;Hutcheson & Petersson, 2016;Wilson & Lee, 2020). ...
This article aims to analyze the politics of historical memory, the function and meaning behind the procession of the Parade on the Russian National Victory Day (Dend Pobeda) every May 9th. The day has become a ritual for the Russian nation since the Soviet Union era; it has become a collective memory for the Russians who had defeated the Fascist German military at the end of World War II. Russia’s government during Vladimir Putin presidential tenure has tried to reproduce and reconstruct memories by holding grandeur events of the Parade in the Red Square. This article then proposes some questions: why does Putin feel that he bears the authority to reconstruct it? What are the meanings behind the Parade for the Russians and Putin’s government? It used Putin’s official speeches between 2000–2018 as the primary sources to explore and reveal what made Putin’s regime to put the Victory Day parade as the instrument to reconstruct and reproduce the post-Soviet Russian national identity. By using historical approach within the collective memory conceptual framework, it found that the May 9th Parade ritual comprises various symbolic meanings, including the meaning of giving, blessing, success, history, and togetherness. As a ritual that is practiced annually in a national-wide ceremony, the May 9th Parade has subtly functioned as a pseudo religion to Putin’s regime.
... The empirical focus below is on public opinion in post-Crimea Russia. Many observers used the "rally-around-theflag effect" to explain the post-Crimea euphoria and Vladimir Putin's popularity in Russia (Frye et al. 2017;Greene and Robertson 2014;Hale 2018). Such rally effects normally wear off quickly. ...
The sociological, group-based factors of public opinion formation are often omitted from models of public opinion that rely on survey methodology. This study employs social identity theory and focus group interview technique to demonstrate the value-added from an alternative approach to the issue of opinion formation in authoritarian regimes. The empirical focus is on public opinion in post-Crimea Russia. The focus group interviews conducted in 2016 in two Russian cities reveal the effects of national identity salience and the implications of “depersonalized” political opinion formation in post-Crimea Russia. The study speaks to the increasing repertoire of legitimation mechanisms that modern, “informational” autocrats can rely on in the context of controlled media and public sphere.
... Lijphart (1975, 2). 2. Due to general problems of accessing reliable data in authoritarian settings and especially because of the issues of conducting surveys in such surroundings, measuring the actual amount of legitimacy belief among the population of authoritarian countries poses great difficulties. First attempts are Frye et al. (2017) and Mazepus (2017). 3. A regime is autocratic if (1) the executive achieved power by other means than fair, competitive and free elections, (2) the executive achieved power by fair, competitive and free elections but changed these rules afterwards or (3) the military prevents the compliance with these rules or changes them. ...
This article analyses the language authoritarian leaders use to legitimate their rule. It examines the official speeches of autocrats in hegemonic regimes and compares them to the rhetorical styles of leaders in closed or competitive regimes and democracies. While recent autocracy research has drawn most attention to the phenomenon of competitive authoritarianism, the survival strategies of hegemonic regimes are less explored. Thus, the study focuses on the simulation of pluralism as a key feature of hegemonic regimes. By installing non-competitive multiparty systems which merely pretend pluralism, these regimes maintain a strong grip on power. The study finds that the leaders of hegemonic regimes use a surprisingly democratic style of language to sustain this façade of pluralism. The dictionary-based quantitative text analysis of 2074 speeches of current leaders in 22 countries illustrates that compared to other autocracies, hegemonic regimes overemphasize the (non-existing) democratic procedures in their country to fake a participatory form of government and gain national and international legitimacy. The subsequent case studies of Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Russia further reveal the differences in context and motives for autocrats in hegemonic, closed, and competitive regimes to use autocratic or democratic styles of language.
The child-rearing scale (CRS) as a measure of authoritarianism holds promise for cross-cultural public opinion research but its validity beyond the Western and, in particular, American context has never been investigated. We address this gap by studying the scale’s validity in Russia, a particularly interesting case due to its long history as a left-wing authoritarian regime. We also combine data from mass and elite surveys conducted in 2020 to explore the structure and performance of the CRS across different subpopulations. Using these data, we replicate the overall structure of the scale and confirm its validity. However, we also show that some indicators perform differently across masses and elites. Our findings suggest that the CRS is a valid measure of authoritarianism outside the United States but also show that its external linkages can vary across specific groups, depending on the country under examination.
Electoral authoritarian political systems have a hybrid nature, possessing very significant authoritarian features alongside elections that can produce openings for political change. The risks that elections pose to regimes are diminished if they can build winning coalitions involving voters beyond their core of loyal support. This paper considers how the construction of voter coalitions might be conceptualized in the Russian electoral authoritarian context, with reference to the case of the 2020 vote on constitutional reform, which was conducted with the primary aim of extending President Vladimir Putin’s term in office. Using data from a national survey of Russians conducted immediately after the vote, our analysis indicates that the regime’s success, even taking into account allegations of widespread fraud, was the result of its offer of additional constitutional amendments that were able to target voters beyond Putin’s core support.
Venäjän aloitettua hyökkäyssodan Ukrainaan helmikuussa 2022 sekä tiedotusvälineissä että asiantuntijapiireissä on pohdittu Venäjän kansan hyväksyntää ja tukea sodalle. Sekä valtiolliset että valtiosta riippumattomat ja oppositioon kytkeytyvät kyselytutkimukset raportoivat pian hyökkäyssodan alettua selvän enemmistön venäläisistä kannattavan sotaa. Sotakyselyt ovat herättäneet keskustelua siitä, kuinka luotettavina indikaattoreina niitä voidaan pitää. Kritiikin mukaan esimerkiksi venäläisten sotakyselyiden suuren vastauskadon takia niiden todistusvoima on mitätön, kun taas osa näkee niiden osoittavan selvästi enemmistön venäläisistä tukevan sotaa. Tässä artikkelissa esitetyn tutkimuksen perusteella kumpikin edeltävistä näkökulmista on liian yksinkertaistava. Tutkimuksen pääargumentti on, että rajoitteistaan huolimatta sotakyselyistä voidaan tehdä tärkeitä ja poliittisesti relevantteja havaintoja. Korkean vastauskadon (matalat vastausprosentit, korkeat keskeytysprosentit) takia on kuitenkin relevantimpaa analysoida sodan kannatukseen liittyvien muuttujien välisiä suhteita kuin käyttää sotakyselyitä sodan ”yleiskannatuksen” mittareina. Tutkimus tarkastelee erityisesti sosiodemografisten taustatekijöiden, mediakulutuksen ja taloudellisten asenteiden yhteyttä sodan kannatukseen Venäjällä. Vaikka tarkastelu rajoittuu näihin muuttujiin, voi tutkimuksen lähestymistapaa soveltaa myös muun tyyppisiin tutkimuskysymyksiin analysoitaessa sotakyselyitä vastaisuudessa. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the media and experts have been considering the approval and support for the war among the Russian population. Governmental, state-independent and oppositional surveys reported quickly that the clear majority of Russians support the war. These war surveys have raised discussion about how reliable they can be considered as indicators of war support. For example, according to some critiques, the high non-response in these surveys suggests that their value as evidence is negligible, while some see that they clearly show how the majority of Russians support the war. The research conducted for this article presents that both of the aforementioned viewpoints are too simplistic. The main argument of this research is that, in spite of their limitations, it is possible to draw important and politically relevant insights from the Russian war surveys. However, because of the high non-response rates (low response and completion rates), it is more relevant to analyse the relationships between the variables affecting the war support, than to use these surveys as indicators of “overall support” for the war. This article examines in particular how sociodemographic background factors, media consumption and economic attitudes relate to war support in Russia. Although the examination is limited to these variables, the approach of the research can be applied to other kinds of research questions in analysing war surveys in future.
How has Russia been studied by political scientists, economists, and scholars in cognate fields who publish in specialized area-specific and top disciplinary journals? To systematically analyze the approaches employed in Russian studies, I collected all publications (1,097 articles) on the country from the top five area studies journals covering the territories of the former USSR, the top 10 journals in political science, and the top five journals in economics from January 2010 to January 2022 and classified them based on the methods they utilized, empirical focus, and sub-fields within method. In this article, I discuss the results of this classification and the pitfalls associated with over-reliance on some methods over others, notably those that include self-reported data, in the context of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the repressive domestic environment under Putin’s autocracy. I also propose some ways of addressing the new realities of diminished access to data and fieldwork.
Concerns over political sensitivity bias in survey research in stable autocracies have been raised by previous studies. However, as democracy recedes worldwide, it remains unclear how pervasive such bias is in autocratizing contexts. This research note aims to demonstrate the extent of sensitivity bias in an autocratizing context using the case of Hong Kong, where political freedoms are rapidly shrinking. In doing so, we aim to detect sensitivity bias by analyzing panel survey data without relying on list experiments. Our analyses of online panel survey data collected before and after the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law and its related political crackdown found that pro-democracy respondents subject to political repression (1) are more likely to drop out of the panel of a political poll, (2) even when they do not drop out, they falsify some potentially sensitive past behavior, and (3) pro-democracy moderates are more likely to engage in preference falsification. Theoretical implications for understanding public opinion in autocratizing contexts are discussed.
Is coordinated anti-regime voting by opposition-minded citizens possible in authoritarian settings where the opposition does not coalesce against the regime? If so, what are the factors behind the citizens’ (un)willingness to vote strategically for the opposition? This study investigates the ‘smart vote’ (umnoe golosovanie) strategy of Aleksei Naval’nyi in the 2020 subnational elections in Russia and shows that it boosted non-regime candidates’ electoral results countrywide. The article also finds that the willingness of anti-regime voters to behave strategically depends on the candidates’ opposition credentials, and that this willingness can be affected by the scope of voter intimidation available to the authorities.
Following its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government sharply broadened what actions were illegal and raised the level of punishment. Many more topics of interest to survey researchers became politically sensitive. Questions about these topics may generate high levels of misleading responses and question-specific (item) non-responses, both of which introduce biases that undermine inference. We use survey data from 2015 and 2018 in Russia and neighboring countries to illustrate how these two problems were already issues prior to the invasion, especially for questions that invoked potential punishment by the state. In a climate of heightened state punishment, it becomes even more important to address misresponse and item non-response when interpreting survey data. We argue that, in addition to employing list experiments regularly and taking advantage of recent innovations in their design, scholars must develop ways to reduce item non-response and model how it biases estimates of interest.
Based on previous research on political trust on the one hand and the effects of perceived survey sponsors on political attitudes on the other, this paper sets out to explore the effects of misperceiving the survey sponsor on political trust among citizens. The article explores the significance of the effect of survey sponsor misperception among factors that are traditionally used to explains political trust. Using Afrobarometer data, which includes thirty-six democratic and autocratic countries and more than fifty-thousand respondents, the paper demonstrates that such an effect is significant and substantive. Hence, researchers should definitely take survey sponsor misperception into account when designing and analyzing surveys. In conclusion, the article provides an outlook on what this means for future survey research.
Overestimation of the level of democracy is prevalent among citizens in nondemocracies. Despite such prevalence, no research to date has systematically documented this phenomenon and examined its determinants. Yet given the renewed interest in the role of legitimacy in authoritarian survival, studying whether and why this phenomenon arises is important to our understanding of authoritarian resilience. I argue that, even in the absence of democratic institutions in nondemocracies, autocrats exercise media control in order to boost their democratic legitimacy. This façade of democracy, in turn, benefits their survival. Combining media freedom data with individual survey response data that include over 30,000 observations from 22 nondemocracies, I find that overestimation of the level of democracy is greater in countries with stronger media control. But highly educated citizens overestimate less. These findings shed light on media control as a strategy for authoritarian survival, and have important implications for modernization theory.
The addresses of national leaders can affect their public support and spur changes in the country's economy. To date, very few studies exist establishing these relationships, and no research has been done on the addresses from Vladimir Putin. In this paper we fill this knowledge gap by analysing the nationwide phone-ins of Putin, a special annual format where he addresses the public, and using structural topic modelling studying their topics over time. Furthermore, we relate these topics to public approval of the president and the government as well as to some Russian macroeconomic indicators such as inflation and budget expenditures. Based on our data containing 1938 responses and almost 250 thousand words, we identify 16 main topics covering areas from healthcare and education through economics to elections and legislation. We find that the topic of foreign affairs has gained in popularity over time the most (from around 4.5% at the beginning to more than 10% starting from 2014). Another topic, consistently gaining weight in the president's statements, is related to solving particular problems of the general public (from 8% to 12.5%) and is significantly correlated with subsequent decrease in the country's unemployment (Pearson's correlation coefficient-0.502). We also find that when the government's support is decreasing, Putin tends to discuss more socially significant topics (e.g., inflation, healthcare, Pearson's coef. around-0.5), while when the support is rising, he speaks more about foreign affairs (Pearson's coef. 0.773). Our study provides first evidence that Vladimir Putin may adapt the content of his phone-in meetings to gather public support and influence the country's economy.
High levels of self-reported trust in government found in China has invited skepticism about the authenticity of survey results. To address this question, we examine implicit political trust, an automatic, intuitive orientation toward government. Using the Single-Target Implicit Association Test, we found that the Chinese public holds an implicit trust in government that is unrelated to self-reported, explicit trust. Whereas early political socialization processes, represented by education and urban residency, increase implicit trust they also decrease explicit trust suggesting that agents of socialization have differential effects. Furthermore, performance evaluations, income, and social desirability affect explicit trust but have no effect on implicit trust. Controlling for explicit trust, we found that implicit trust matters for understanding various types of regime support including system justification, the social credit system, and government’s ability to handle crises. Our results have important implications for understanding regime support in the world’s largest authoritarian country.
How can researchers obtain reliable responses on sensitive issues in dangerous settings? This Element elucidates ways for researchers to use unobtrusive experimental methods to elicit answers to risky, taboo, and threatening questions in dangerous social environments. The methods discussed in this Element help social scientists to encourage respondents to express their true preferences and to reduce bias, while protecting them, local survey organizations, and researchers. The Element is grounded in an original study of civilian support for the jihadi insurgency in the Russian North Caucasus in Dagestan that assesses theories about wartime attitudes toward militant groups. We argue that sticky identities, security threats, and economic dependence curb the ability of civilians to switch loyalties.
Putin’s fourth term as president (2018–2024) has involved new challenges for Russia’s hybrid regime. COVID-19 hit the Kremlin at a sensitive time, when the old institutional forces had been demounted and new arrangements, including extensive constitutional changes, had yet to become cemented. There is an emerging gulf between state rhetoric, PR events, and patriotic performances, on the one hand, and economic chaos, social disorder and dysfunctional state capacity, on the other, which is likely to reduce system legitimacy and cause increased reliance on repressive methods. This article examines Kremlin legitimation efforts across Beetham’s three dimensions: rules, beliefs, and actions. We argue that the regime’s legitimation efforts in 2020–21 have failed to reverse emerging cleavages in public opinion since 2018. Increased reliance on repression and manipulation in this period, combined with the contrast between regime promises and observable realities on the ground, speak not of strength, but of the Kremlin’s increased weakness and embattlement.
The crosswise model is an increasingly popular survey technique to elicit candid answers from respondents on sensitive questions. Recent studies, however, point out that in the presence of inattentive respondents, the conventional estimator of the prevalence of a sensitive attribute is biased toward 0.5. To remedy this problem, we propose a simple design-based bias correction using an anchor question that has a sensitive item with known prevalence. We demonstrate that we can easily estimate and correct for the bias arising from inattentive respondents without measuring individual-level attentiveness. We also offer several useful extensions of our estimator, including a sensitivity analysis for the conventional estimator, a strategy for weighting, a framework for multivariate regressions in which a latent sensitive trait is used as an outcome or a predictor, and tools for power analysis and parameter selection. Our method can be easily implemented through our open-source software cWise .
Because of a perceived (and real) risk of repressive action, some survey questions are sensitive in more autocratic countries while less so in more democratic countries. Yet, survey data on potentially sensitive topics are frequently used in comparative research despite concerns about comparability. To examine the comparability of politically sensitive questions, I employ a multilevel analysis with more than 228,000 respondents in 37 African countries to test for systematic bias when the survey respondents believe (fear) that the government, rather than an independent research institute, has commissioned the survey. The findings indicate that fear of the government induces a substantial and significant bias on questions regarding trust, approval and corruption perceptions in more autocratic countries, but not in more democratic countries. In contrast, innocuous, apolitical questions are not systematically influenced by regime type.
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.
This article will place the 2020 amendments to the Russian Constitution in comparative perspective. Although these amendments were officially justified as strengthening the Russian state in order to tackle emerging new problems, they constitutionalise already-existing legislative trends from the last twenty years. They therefore do little to overcome existing problems of Russian state building. What was the reform process about then? It was intended to project the image of reform by involving the people in a staged process of constitutional change while further entrenching the power of the current political elite. The constitutional reforms therefore demonstrate the symbolic role that constitutional law can play in seeking to ensure the survival of mature or later-stage forms of authoritarian populism. This kind of ‘theatrical constitution-making’ is a broader reminder of how the expressive aspects of constitutional change can be (ab)used by established authoritarian regimes.
List experiments are widely used in the social sciences to elicit truthful responses to sensitive questions. Yet, the research design commonly suffers from the problem of measurement error in the form of non-strategic respondent error, where some inattentive participants might provide random responses. This type of error can result in severely biased estimates. A recently proposed solution is the use of a necessarily false placebo item to equalize the length of the treatment and control lists in order to alleviate concerns about respondent error. In this paper we show theoretically that placebo items do not in general eliminate bias caused by non-strategic respondent error. We introduce a new option, the mixed control list, and show how researchers can choose between different control list designs to minimize the problems caused by inattentive respondents. We provide researchers with practical guidance to think carefully about the bias that inattentive respondents might cause in a given application of the list experiment. We also report results from a large novel list experiment fielded to over 4900 respondents, specifically designed to illustrate our theoretical argument and recommendations.
Incumbents have many tools to tip elections in their favor, yet little is known about how they choose between strategies. By comparing various tactics, this article argues that electoral malpractice centered on manipulating institutions offers the greatest effectiveness while shielding incumbents from public anger and criminal prosecution. To demonstrate this, the study focuses on a widespread institutional tactic: preventing candidates from accessing the ballot. First, in survey experiments, Russian voters respond less negatively to institutional manipulations, such as rejecting candidates, than to blatant fraud, such as ballot box stuffing. Next, using evidence from 25,935 Russian mayoral races, the article shows that lower societal and implementation costs enable incumbents to strategically reject candidacies from credible challengers and then reduce their electoral vulnerability. In all, the technology behind specific manipulations helps determine when and how incumbents violate electoral integrity.
How do autocrats build support? This study argues that autocrats create and maintain participatory technologies—elite-mass communication strategies that promote two-way interaction between citizens and leaders—to foster support. Participatory technologies provide citizens with the opportunity to have a limited voice in otherwise closed political systems. I test this theory through a series of two nationally-representative survey experiments in Russia. Results suggest that awareness of participatory technologies increases approval of President Putin and improves perceptions that there are opportunities for voice in politics. This finding departs from previous research that suggests public opinion is influenced primarily by participation. Furthermore, I demonstrate that these effects can be directly attributed to the communicative format of these strategies, not to issue resolution or leadership effects. Finally, I demonstrate that effects are dependent upon individuals’ political sophistication and political priors, contributing to political polarization and opening up the potential for backlash against the regime.
How do international laws affect citizens' willingness to accept refugees? In full and partial democracies, citizens' attitudes can influence national policy. A growing literature suggests that international institutions can influence citizens' attitudes on foreign policy issues, and therefore lead to policy change, but those studies are almost entirely confined to domestic human rights and U.S.‐based respondents; none consider refugee policy. Using data from a survey experiment administered in September 2017 via face‐to‐face interviews with 1,335 citizens of Turkey, we investigate how international norms affect citizens' willingness to accept refugees. Our findings are surprising: reminding people about the government's responsibility under the Refugee Convention to accept refugees triggers a backfire effect, decreasing support for accepting them. This effect appears driven by respondents who support the incumbent AKP Party and by lower‐educated respondents. We therefore provide evidence that international refugee law—and perhaps international institutions generally—can trigger a political backlash, undermining the very policies that they promote.
List experiments (LEs) are an increasingly popular survey research tool for measuring sensitive attitudes and behaviors. However, there is evidence that list experiments sometimes produce unreasonable estimates. Why do list experiments “fail,” and how can the performance of the list experiment be improved? Using evidence from Kenya, we hypothesize that the length and complexity of the LE format make them costlier for respondents to complete and thus prone to comprehension and reporting errors. First, we show that list experiments encounter difficulties with simple, nonsensitive lists about food consumption and daily activities: over 40 percent of respondents provide inconsistent responses between list experiment and direct question formats. These errors are concentrated among less numerate and less educated respondents, offering evidence that the errors are driven by the complexity and difficulty of list experiments. Second, we examine list experiments measuring attitudes about political violence. The standard list experiment reveals lower rates of support for political violence compared to simply asking directly about this sensitive attitude, which we interpret as list experiment breakdown. We evaluate two modifications to the list experiment designed to reduce its complexity: private tabulation and cartoon visual aids. Both modifications greatly enhance list experiment performance, especially among respondent subgroups where the standard procedure is most problematic. The paper makes two key contributions: (1) showing that techniques such as the list experiment, which have promise for reducing response bias, can introduce different forms of error associated with question complexity and difficulty; and (2) demonstrating the effectiveness of easy-to-implement solutions to the problem.
The article offers a critical overview of nine views common in academia related to Russian messianism. The main premise of messianism which is important for its political dimension, is: Providence has a plan along which History unfolds, and in this plan the chosen one (individual or collective) has a special role to play (mission). Under «mission» we understand that a certain community (state/nation) is exceptional and that this exceptionality manifests itself in its special destiny. I discern three distinctive, but interconnected, features of «mission»: (1) the conviction of having a special destiny, (2) a sense of moral superiority, (3) the conviction that the state’s activity is motivated not only by its own national interest but also by a higher cause important for a broader (regional, global etc.) community. The first two components of mission express exceptionalism of the mission-beholder, while the third component refers to the universalistic nature of the calling.
This selection of nine views is not a complete catalogue but it does include the core concepts that may be encountered while reading about Russian messianism. The article seeks to verify and put in order the existing body of knowledge on this topic. The critical verification is based on the material that comes from two main sources. The first is the existing body of academic literature (in English and Russian) which is used to identify and cross-examine the views circulating among academia. The second source comes with the material gathered as a result of the content and discourse analysis of the official statements of Vladimir Putin. The article is structuralised along the enumeration of nine popular views on Russian messianism. Each view is critically combined with the academic literature and the empirical data. The views discussed in the article tend to essentialise Russian messianism and essentialise Russia as well.
How do citizens in authoritarian states feel about their leaders? While some dictators rule through terror, others seem genuinely popular. Using the Gallup World Poll’s panel of more than one hundred-forty countries in 2006–2016, the authors show that the drivers of political approval differ across regime types. Although brutal repression in overt dictatorships could cause respondents to falsify their preferences, in milder informational autocracies, greater repression actually predicts lower approval. In autocracies as in democracies, economic performance matters and citizens’ economic perceptions, while not perfectly accurate, track objective indicators. Dictators also benefit from greater perceived public safety, but the authors find no such effect in democracies. Covert censorship of the media and the Internet is associated with higher approval in autocracies—in particular, in informational ones—but ratings fall when citizens recognize censorship. In informational autocracies, executive elections trigger a ratings surge if there is leader turnover, but, unlike in democracies, reelected autocrats enjoy little honeymoon.
A strong leader – i.e. an individual who concentrates great power in his hands and uses it to solve the country’s problems – is often considered a good thing in contemporary politics. Vladimir Putin has always presented himself as precisely this kind of leader. This article considers whether Putin actually is a strong leader who has used his powers to do great things for Russia. The analysis begins by considering whether Putin is a strong leader in terms of the powers that he holds. It then assesses whether Putin has used these powers to solve Russia’s problems in terms of economic development, order, and national standing. Russia here is compared to the other states of the Former Soviet Union, as they all share a common Soviet heritage and have been subject to comparable structural forces. The study utilizes the data (arguably underused in the field) provided by institutions such as the World Bank to examine a large number of socio-economic factors. If Putin really is a strong leader who has transformed Russia, we would expect performance in Russia to be better than in these other countries. The article finds that Russia’s record is average at best and that Putin is an unexceptional leader.
Respondents often answer ‘don’t know’ to sensitive survey questions to avoid revealing their true opinions, especially in post-conflict societies, thus requiring difficult decisions for analysing affected survey data. Using the same five sensitive questions in ten surveys from conflict-affected societies in the former Soviet Union in the period 2005–2014, methods for coping with missing data resulting from ‘don’t know’ responses are presented. Many commonly applied missing data treatments are shown to be incompatible with the missing data mechanism for politically sensitive questions, while also significantly affecting statistical results and conclusions. Ultimately, knowledge of local context is paramount for choosing proper missing data treatments.
Our understanding of modern authoritarianism lacks a satisfying explanation for the genuine popularity of autocrats. While most of the literature on authoritarianism focuses on coercion, institutional manipulation, or clientelism, many contemporary autocrats clearly enjoy enthusiastic support even in times of economic stagnation or decline. We argue that part of the solution lies in unpacking the role of emotions in building support for rulers. Drawing on a unique panel survey conducted shortly before and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, we discover that the resulting “rally” around the authoritarian flag involves much more than simply support for the leader or a simple increase in nationalism. Rather, we witness a broad shift in respondents’ emotional orientation. Driven by the shared experience of the Crimean “moment,” this shift improves people’s evaluation of their social, political, and economic surroundings in the present, the future—and even the past. The result is a new explanation of the nonmaterial means through which autocrats may succeed in bolstering their legitimacy.
Eliciting honest answers to sensitive questions is frustrated if subjects withhold the truth for fear that others will judge or punish them. The resulting bias is commonly referred to as social desirability bias, a subset of what we label sensitivity bias. We make three contributions. First, we propose a social reference theory of sensitivity bias to structure expectations about survey responses on sensitive topics. Second, we explore the bias-variance trade-off inherent in the choice between direct and indirect measurement technologies. Third, to estimate the extent of sensitivity bias, we meta-analyze the set of published and unpublished list experiments (a.k.a., the item count technique) conducted to date and compare the results with direct questions. We find that sensitivity biases are typically smaller than 10 percentage points and in some domains are approximately zero.
This paper seeks to explain the surprising decline in Russian President Vladimir Putin's approval rating in 2011. During the previous 10 years, Putin's rating had correlated closely with Russians' perceptions of the state of the economy. Yet the fall in his approval – from 79% in December 2010 to 63% a year later – occurred despite roughly stable economic perceptions. Comparing Levada Center polls from late 2010 and 2011, the paper explores both who (what types of respondents) grew disenchanted with Putin, and why (what issues or grievances prompted this switch). It finds that (a) the fall in support for the Kremlin – although faster among members of the “creative class,” women, the rich, and residents of provincial cities – was broad-based, occurring among all social groups examined; (b) attitudes toward immigration, the West, and Russia's international status, as well as assessments of public service quality, changed little during 2011; (c) Putin's declining popularity most likely reflected stronger – not weaker – economic concerns; although the proportion judging economic performance to be poor did not increase, those who saw economic weakness became much less supportive of the Kremlin. Russians appear to have increasingly blamed their political leaders for unsatisfactory economic and political outcomes.
Surveys usually yield rates of voting in elections that are higher than official turnout figures, a phenomenon often attributed to intentional misrepresentation by respondents who did not vote and would be embarrassed to admit that. The experiments reported here tested the social desirability response bias hypothesis directly by implementing a technique that allowed respondents to report secretly whether they voted: the “item count technique.” The item count technique significantly reduced turnout reports in a national telephone survey relative to direct self-reports, suggesting that social desirability response bias influenced direct self-reports in that survey. But in eight national surveys of American adults conducted via the Internet, the item count technique did not significantly reduce turnout reports. This mode difference is consistent with other evidence that the Internet survey mode may be less susceptible to social desirability response bias because of self-administration.
Methods of Indirect Estimation The Item Count Method The National Household Seroprevalence Survey Pretest Preliminary Testing: Focus Groups and Individual Cognitive Interviews Controlled Experiments Final Version of Item Count Used in the NHSS Pretest Results from the NHSS Pretest Conclusions The Simplest form of the Item Count/Paired Estimator Showcard with Sample Item
Although much of the world still lives today, as always, under dictatorship, the behaviour of these regimes and of their leaders often appears irrational and mysterious. In The Political Economy of Dictatorship, Ronald Wintrobe uses rational choice theory to model dictatorships: their strategies for accumulating power, the constraints on their behavior, and why they are often more popular than is commonly accepted. The book explores both the politics and the economics of dictatorships, and the interaction between them. The questions addressed include: What determines the repressiveness of a regime? Can political authoritarianism be 'good' for the economy? After the fall, who should be held responsible for crimes against human rights? The book contains many applications, including chapters on Nazi Germany, Soviet Communism, South Africa under apartheid, the ancient Roman Empire and Pinochet's Chile. It also provides a guide to the policies which should be followed by the democracies towards dictatorships.
Despite its wide usage in explaining some nontrivial dynamics in nondemocratic systems, preference falsification remains an empirical myth for students of authoritarian politics. We provide to our knowledge the first quantitative study of preference falsification in an authoritarian setting using a rare coincidence between a major political purge in Shanghai, China, and the administration of a nationwide survey in 2006. We construct two synthetic measures for expressed and actual support from a set of survey questions and track their changes before and after the purge. We find that after the purge there was a dramatic increase in expressed support among Shanghai respondents, yet the increase was paralleled by an equally evident decline in actual support. We interpret this divergence as evidence for the presence of preference falsification. We also find that variations in the degree of preference falsification are jointly predicted by one’s access to alternative source of information and vulnerability to state sanctions. Using two additional surveys conducted over the span of a year, we further show that there was substantial deterioration in political trust in Shanghai six months after the purge, which suggests that falsification could not sustain public support in the long run.
Vladimir Putin's skyrocketing approval ratings originate from current political developments involving the annexation of Crimea, the para-military conflict in South-Eastern Ukraine, and the rapid elevation of political tensions between Russia and the West. The hearts and minds of Russians are also affected by a mighty state propaganda machine, which has crystallized monolithic pro-Putin support among the Russians and allowed his approval to reach as high as 90%. This research poses several crucial questions with respect to Putin's popular support. What is the magnitude of inflation in Putin's approval ratings associated with social desirability bias, both in general, and in particular, across different socio-demographic groups? What is the depth of Putin's support, i.e. is electoral support in any way affected by Western sanctions, and Russian media propaganda? Are there any temporal changes in the magnitude of social desirability bias and perception of sanctions among Russians since the start of Ukrainian crisis? This complex research, involving five data surveys collected by two Russia's national polling firms between January 2014 and March 2015, shows the presence of inflationary effects of the social desirability bias and state propaganda on Putin's approval ratings, contrasted against moderately small effects of sanctions on Putin's approval ratings and the Kremlin's policies in Ukraine.
This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution. Where the rule of law is weak and corruption pervasive, what may appear to be democratic or authoritarian breakthroughs are often just regular, predictable phases in longer-term cyclic dynamics - patronal politics. This is shown through in-depth narratives of the post-1991 political history of all post-Soviet polities that are not in the European Union. This book also includes chapters on czarist and Soviet history and on global patterns.
Despite its wide usage in explaining political dynamics of non-democracies, preference falsification remains an empirical myth for students of authoritarian politics due to the challenge of measurement. We offer the first quantitative study of this phenomenon in a non-democratic setting by exploiting a rare coincidence between a major political purge in Shanghai, China, and the administration of a nationwide survey in 2006. We construct two synthetic measures for expressed and actual political support and track their changes before and after the purge. We find that the purge caused a dramatic increase in expressed support among Shanghai respondents, yet the increase was paralleled by an equally evident decline in actual support. We interpret this divergence as evidence for preference falsification and conduct a number of robustness checks to rule out alternative explanations. We also show that falsification was most intense among groups that had access to alternative information but were vulnerable to political sanctions.
What leads people to vote for incumbent presidents in hybrid regimes -political systems that allow at least some real opposition to compete in elections but that greatly advantage the authorities? Here, the case of Russia is analyzed through survey research conducted as part of the Russian Election Studies (RES) series. The RES has queried nationally representative samples of Russia's population both before and shortly after every post-Soviet presidential election there to date, those in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. Since Vladimir Putin himself ran as head of the United Russia slate in the 2007 parliamentary election, voting in that election is also considered. The analysis reveals that Putin has consistently won votes based on personal appeal, opposition to socialism, and a guardedly pro-western foreign policy orientation, among other things. Economic considerations are also very important, though they operate in a way that is more complex than sometimes assumed. President Dmitrii Medvedev generally benefited from these same factors in his election to the presidency.
This book provides a theory of the logic of survival of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), one of the most resilient autocratic regimes in the twentieth century. An autocratic regime hid behind the facade of elections that were held with clockwise precision. Although their outcome was totally predictable, elections were not hollow rituals. The PRI made millions of ordinary citizens vest their interests in the survival of the autocratic regime. Voters could not simply ‘throw the rascals out of office’ because their choices were constrained by a series of strategic dilemmas that compelled them to support the autocrats. The book also explores the factors that led to the demise of the PRI. The theory sheds light on the logic of ‘electoral autocracies’, among the most common type of autocracy, and is the only systematic treatment in the literature today dealing with this form of autocracy. © Beatriz Magaloni 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2009. All rights reserved.
Why do parties and governments cheat in elections they cannot lose? This book documents the widespread use of blatant and excessive manipulation of elections and explains what drives this practice. Alberto Simpser shows that, in many instances, elections are about more than winning. Electoral manipulation is not only a tool used to gain votes, but also a means of transmitting or distorting information. This manipulation conveys an image of strength, shaping the behavior of citizens, bureaucrats, politicians, parties, unions, and businesspeople to the benefit of the manipulators, increasing the scope for the manipulators to pursue their goals while in government and mitigating future challenges to their hold on power. Why Governments and Parties Manipulate Elections provides a general theory about what drives electoral manipulation and empirically documents global patterns of manipulation.
We develop an informational theory of dictatorship. Dictators survive not because of their use of
force or ideology but because they convince the public|rightly or wrongly|that they are competent.
Citizens do not observe the dictator's type but infer it from signals inherent in their living standards,
state propaganda, and messages sent by an informed elite via independent media. If citizens conclude
the dictator is incompetent, they overthrow him in a revolution. The dictator can invest in making
convincing state propaganda, censoring independent media, coopting the elite, or equipping police to
repress attempted uprisings|but he must finance such spending with taxes that depress the public's
living standards. We show that incompetent dictators can survive as long as economic shocks are not too
large. Moreover, their reputations for competence may grow over time. Censorship and co-optation of
the elite are substitutes, but both are complements of propaganda. Repression of protests is a substitute
for all the other techniques. In some equilibria the ruler uses propaganda and coopts the elite; in others,
propaganda is combined with censorship. The multiplicity of equilibria emerges due to coordination
failure among members of the elite. We show that repression is used against ordinary citizens only as
a last resort when the opportunities to survive through co-optation, censorship, and propaganda are
exhausted. In the equilibrium with censorship, difficult economic times prompt higher relative spending
on censorship and propaganda. The results illuminate tradeoffs faced by various recent dictatorships.
The item count technique, used often to investigate illegal or socially undesirable behaviours, requires respondents to indicate merely the number of applicable items from among a list. However, the number of applicable items indicated via the item count question tends to be smaller than when it is calculated from the direct 'applies/does not apply' responses to each item. Because this inconsistency, which we refer to as the underreporting effect, often disturbs proper item count estimates, the causes of this effect are explored in this paper. Web survey results revealed that the order of the response alternatives is irrelevant to the underreporting effect, and that the underreporting effect is caused by the response format in which the item count question requests merely the number of applicable items and not the number of non-applicable items. It is also shown that the magnitude of the underreporting effect decreases when the respondents are asked to indicate the numbers of both applicable and non-applicable items, which we refer to as elaborate item count questioning.
I think [my grandchildren] will be proud of two things. What I did for the Negro and seeing it through in Vietnam for all of Asia. The Negro cost me 15 points in the polls and Vietnam cost me 20.
Lyndon B. Johnson
With tenacious regularity over the last two and a half decades the Gallup Poll has posed to its cross-section samples of the American public the following query, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way (the incumbent) is handling his job as President?” The responses to this curious question form an index known as “Presidential popularity.” According to Richard Neustadt, the index is “widely taken to approximate reality” in Washington and reports about its behavior are “very widely read” there, including, the quotation above would suggest, the highest circles.
Plotted over time, the index forms probably the longest continuous trend line in polling history. This study seeks to analyze the behavior of this line for the period from the beginning of the Truman administration in 1945 to the end of the Johnson administration in January 1969 during which time the popularity question was asked some 300 times.
Four variables are used as predictors of a President's popularity. These include a measure of the length of time the incumbent has been in office as well as variables which attempt to estimate the influence on his rating of major international events, economic slump and war. To assess the independent impact of each of these variables as they interact in association with Presidential popularity, multiple regression analysis is used as the basic analytic technique.
The validity of empirical research often relies upon the accuracy of self-reported behavior and beliefs. Yet eliciting truthful answers in surveys is challenging, especially when studying sensitive issues such as racial prejudice, corruption, and support for militant groups. List experiments have attracted much attention recently as a potential solution to this measurement problem. Many researchers, however, have used a simple difference-in-means estimator, which prevents the efficient examination of multivariate relationships between respondents' characteristics and their responses to sensitive items. Moreover, no systematic means exists to investigate the role of underlying assumptions. We fill these gaps by developing a set of new statistical methods for list experiments. We identify the commonly invoked assumptions, propose new multivariate regression estimators, and develop methods to detect and adjust for potential violations of key assumptions. For empirical illustration, we analyze list experiments concerning racial prejudice. Open-source software is made available to implement the proposed methodology.
Surveys usually yield rates of voting in elections that are higher than official turnout figures, a phenomenon often attributed to intentional misrepresentation by respondents who did not vote and would be embarrassed to admit that. The experiments reported here tested the social desirability response bias hypothesis directly by implementing a technique that allowed respondents to report secretly whether they voted: the "item count technique." The item count technique significantly reduced turnout reports in a national telephone survey relative to direct self-reports, suggesting that social desirability response bias influenced direct self-reports in that survey. But in eight national surveys of American adults conducted via the Internet, the item count technique did not significantly reduce turnout reports. This mode difference is consistent with other evidence that the Internet survey mode may be less susceptible to social desirability response bias because of self-administration.
How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan—the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive questions about support for different combatants. We demonstrate that civilian attitudes are asymmetric in nature. Harm inflicted by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is met with reduced support for ISAF and increased support for the Taliban, but Taliban-inflicted harm does not translate into greater ISAF support. We combine a multistage sampling design with hierarchical modeling to estimate ISAF and Taliban support at the individual, village, and district levels, permitting a more fine-grained analysis of wartime attitudes than previously possible.
While the popularity of using the item count technique (ICT) or list experiment to obtain estimates of attitudes and behaviors subject to social desirability bias has increased in recent years among political scientists, many of the empirical properties of the technique remain untested. In this paper, we explore whether estimates are biased due to the different list lengths provided to control and treatment groups rather than due to the substance of the treatment items. By using face-to-face survey data from national probability samples of households in Uruguay and Honduras, we assess how effective the ICT is in the context of face-to-face surveys—where social desirability bias should be strongest—and in developing contexts—where literacy rates raise questions about the capability of respondents to engage in cognitively taxing process required by ICT. We find little evidence that the ICT overestimates the incidence of behaviors and instead find that the ICT provides extremely conservative estimates of high incidence behaviors. Thus, the ICT may be more useful for detecting low prevalence attitudes and behaviors and may overstate social desirability bias when the technique is used for higher frequency socially desirable attitudes and behaviors. However, we do not find strong evidence of variance in deflationary effects across common demographic subgroups, suggesting that multivariate estimates using the ICT may not be biased.
List and endorsement experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists as indirect survey techniques for sensitive questions. When studying issues such as racial prejudice and support for militant groups, these survey methodologies may improve the validity of measurements by reducing nonresponse and social desirability biases. We develop a statistical test and multivariate regression models for comparing and combining the results from list and endorsement experiments. We demonstrate that when carefully designed and analyzed, the two survey experiments can produce substantively similar empirical findings. Such agreement is shown to be possible even when these experiments are applied to one of the most challenging research environments: contemporary Afghanistan. We find that both experiments uncover similar patterns of support for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) among Pashtun respondents. Our findings suggest that multiple measurement strategies can enhance the credibility of empirical conclusions. Open-source software is available for implementing the proposed methods.
Bureaucratic compliance is often crucial for political survival, yet eliciting that compliance in weakly institutionalized environments requires that political principals convince agents that their hold on power is secure. We provide a formal model to show that electoral manipulation can help to solve this agency problem. By influencing beliefs about a ruler's hold on power, manipulation can encourage a bureaucrat to work on behalf of the ruler when he would not otherwise do so. This result holds under various common technologies of electoral manipulation. Manipulation is more likely when the bureaucrat is dependent on the ruler for his career and when the probability is high that even generally unsupportive citizens would reward bureaucratic effort. The relationship between the ruler's expected popularity and the likelihood of manipulation, in turn, depends on the technology of manipulation.
In Communist regimes the party‐state used fear to make people say what the party wanted in public regardless of what they thought privately. To test for the incidence of fear distorting public opinion, the 2004/2005 round of the New Europe Barometer (NEB) survey in 13 post‐Communist countries, some free while others are not, asked whether respondents thought people are today afraid to say what they think. Overall, 51% indicated some fear, 45% did not and 4% replied don’t know. Five hypotheses are tested about why some people are afraid to voice opinions while others are not: the failure of all to account for differences implies a random distribution of fear. As a cross‐check on this finding, the paper then considers whether fearful people differ in their answers to political questions about partisanship and approval of the political system independent of their socio‐economic characteristics and attitudes. They do not. The conclusion considers the implications of publicly expressed opinions, whether freely expressed or not, for undemocratic as well as democratic political systems.
This article analyzes the dynamics of turnout and the political impact of five cycles of protest, consisting of forty-two mass demonstrations that occurred on Mondays in Leipzig over the period 1989–91. These demonstrations are interpreted as an informational cascade that publicly revealed some of the previously hidden information about the malign nature of the East German communist regime. Once this information became publicly available, the viability of the regime was undermined. The Monday demonstrations subsequently died a slow death as their informational role declined.
Like many major revolutions in history, the East European Revolution of 1989 caught its leaders, participants, victims, and observers by surprise. This paper offers an explanation whose crucial feature is a distinction between private and public preferences. By suppressing their antipathies to the political status quo, the East Europeans misled everyone, including themselves, as to the possibility of a successful uprising. In effect, they conferred on their privately despised governments an aura of invincibility. Under the circumstances, public opposition was poised to grow explosively if ever enough people lost their fear of exposing their private preferences. The currently popular theories of revolution do not make clear why uprisings easily explained in retrospect may not have been anticipated. The theory developed here fills this void. Among its predictions is that political revolutions will inevitably continue to catch the world by surprise.
A political scientist investigates the extent to which, under Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin consolidated control over the Russian media. Conceptually, a contrast is drawn between the Soviet and post-Soviet systems of media control. Data-bases are used to illuminate imbalances of television coverage of presidential candidates and public officials as well as the evolution of popular distrust of the media. Comparisons are drawn with President Alberto Fujimori's defunct regime in Peru and speculation is offered as to the fragility of the Kremlin's control over the media.
All authoritarian governments attempt to control the flow of news and information to the public--but with what effect? To answer this question, we adapt an existing model of opinion formation to conditions in authoritarian countries, validate that model on opinion data collected in Brazil during its authoritarian period, and, finally, use the model to derive expectations about patterns of regime support that exist in different kinds of authoritarian systems. The paper shows that support for regime policies depends heavily on citizens' level of political awareness. In general, highly aware persons are more heavily exposed to government-dominated communications media, but are also better able to resist the propaganda they encounter. As a result, people in the broad middle ranges of awareness--who pay enough attention to be exposed but are not sophisticated enough to resist--typically are most susceptible to government influence.
Levels of regime strength and links to the West help to explain authoritarian breakdown, but the ruler’s popularity also matters.
An abundance of survey research conducted over the past two decades has portrayed a “new South” in which the region's white residents now resemble the remainder of the country in their racial attitudes. No longer is the South the bastion of racial prejudice. Using a new and relatively unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes designed to overcome possible social desirability effects, our study finds racial prejudice to be still high in the South and markedly higher in the South than the non-South. Preliminary evidence also indicates that this prejudice is concentrated among white southern men. Comparison of these results with responses to traditional survey questions suggests that social desirability contaminates the latter. This finding helps to explain why the “new South” thesis has gained currency.
In liberal democracies, the approval ratings of political leaders have been shown to track citizens’ perceptions of the state of the economy. By contrast, in illiberal democracies and competitive autocracies, leaders are often thought to boost their popularity by exploiting nationalism, exaggerating external threats, and manipulating the media. Using time-series data, I examine the determinants of presidential approval in Russia since 1991, a period in which leaders’ ratings swung between extremes. I find that Yeltsin's and Putin's ratings were, in fact, closely linked to public perceptions of economic performance, which, in turn, reflected objective economic indicators. Although media manipulation, wars, terrorist attacks, and other events also mattered, Putin's unprecedented popularity and the decline in Yeltsin's are well explained by the contrasting economic circumstances over which each presided.
Social desirability is one of the most common sources of bias affecting the validity of experimental and survey research findings. From a self-presentational perspective, social desirability can be regarded as the resultant of two separate factors: self-deception and other-deception. Two main modes of coping with social desirability bias are distinguished. The first mode comprises two methods aimed at the detection and measurement of social desirability bias: the use of social desirability scales, and the rating of item desirability. A second category comprises seven methods to prevent or reduce social desirability bias, including the use of forced-choice items, the randomized response technique, the bogus pipeline, self-administration of the questionnaire, the selection of interviewers, and the use of proxy subjects. Not one method was found to excel completely and under all conditions in coping with both other-deceptive and self-deceptive social desirability bias. A combination of prevention and detection methods offers the best choice available.
Due to the inherent sensitivity of many survey questions, a number of researchers have adopted an indirect questioning technique
known as the list experiment (or the item-count technique) in order to reduce dishonest or evasive responses. However, standard
practice with the list experiment requires a large sample size, utilizes only a difference-in-means estimator, and does not
provide a measure of the sensitive item for each respondent. This paper addresses all of these issues. First, the paper presents
design principles for the standard list experiment (and the double list experiment) for the reduction of bias and variance
as well as providing sample-size formulas for the planning of studies. Second, this paper proves that a respondent-level probabilistic
measure for the sensitive item can be derived. This provides a basis for diagnostics, improved estimation, and regression
analysis. The techniques in this paper are illustrated with a list experiment from the 2008–2009 American National Election
Studies (ANES) Panel Study and an adaptation of this experiment.
Standard estimation procedures assume that empirical observations are accurate reflections of the true values of the dependent variable, but this assumption is dubious when modeling self-reported data on sensitive topics. List experiments (a.k.a. item count techniques) can nullify incentives for respondents to misrepresent themselves to interviewers, but current data analysis techniques are limited to difference-in-means tests. I present a revised procedure and statistical estimator called LISTIT that enable multivariate modeling of list experiment data. Monte Carlo simulations and a field test in Lebanon explore the behavior of this estimator.
This article is based on a much longer paper published in German in Ernst Forsthoff and Reinhard Horstel (Eds.) Standorte im Zeitstrom: Festschrift fur Arnold Gehlen. Zum 70. Geburtstag am 29.1.1974. Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1974. The longer version documents in detail (33 tables) the results of surveys conducted to test the propositions contained in the five hypotheses presented in this article. The propositions are confirmed or refuted, or they are tentatively supported by the data, or they await further testing. Research is being continued. A complete English translation of the paper is available to interested scholars upon request.
Although much of the world still lives today, as always, under dictatorship, the behaviour of these regimes and of their leaders often appears irrational and mysterious. In The Political Economy of Dictatorship, Ronald Wintrobe uses rational choice theory to model dictatorships: their strategies for accumulating power, the constraints on their behavior, and why they are often more popular than is commonly accepted. The book explores both the politics and the economics of dictatorships, and the interaction between them. The questions addressed include: What determines the repressiveness of a regime? Can political authoritarianism be ‘good’ for the economy? After the fall, who should be held responsible for crimes against human rights? The book contains many applications, including chapters on Nazi Germany, Soviet Communism, South Africa under apartheid, the ancient Roman Empire and Pinochet’s Chile. It also provides a guide to the policies which should be followed by the democracies towards dictatorships.
The item count technique is a survey methodology that is designed to elicit respondents’ truthful answers to sensitive questions such as racial prejudice and drug use. The method is also known as the list experiment or the unmatched count technique and is an alternative to the commonly used randomized response method. In this article, I propose new nonlinear least squares and maximum likelihood estimators for efficient multivariate regression analysis with the item count technique. The two-step estimation procedure and the Expectation Maximization algorithm are developed to facilitate the computation. Enabling multivariate regression analysis is essential because researchers are typically interested in knowing how the probability of answering the sensitive question affirmatively varies as a function of respondents’ characteristics. As an empirical illustration, the proposed methodology is applied to the 1991 National Race and Politics survey where the investigators used the item count technique to measure the degree of racial hatred in the United States. Small-scale simulation studies suggest that the maximum likelihood estimator can be substantially more efficient than alternative estimators. Statistical efficiency is an important concern for the item count technique because indirect questioning means loss of information. The open-source software is made available to implement the proposed methodology.
From World War II to the war in Iraq, periods of international conflict seem like unique moments in U.S. political historyâbut when it comes to public opinion, they are not. To make this groundbreaking revelation, In Time of War explodes conventional wisdom about American reactions to World War II, as well as the more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adam Berinsky argues that public response to these crises has been shaped less by their defining characteristicsâsuch as what they cost in lives and resourcesâthan by the same political interests and group affiliations that influence our ideas about domestic issues. With the help of World War IIâera survey data that had gone virtually untouched for the past sixty years, Berinsky begins by disproving the myth of âthe good warâ that Americans all fell in line to support after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The attack, he reveals, did not significantly alter public opinion but merely punctuated interventionist sentiment that had already risen in response to the ways that political leaders at home had framed the fighting abroad. Weaving his findings into the first general theory of the factors that shape American wartime opinion, Berinsky also sheds new light on our reactions to other crises. He shows, for example, that our attitudes toward restricted civil liberties during Vietnam and after 9/11 stemmed from the same kinds of judgments we make during times of peace. With Iraq and Afghanistan now competing for attention with urgent issues within the United States, In Time of War offers a timely reminder of the full extent to which foreign and domestic politics profoundly influenceâand ultimately illuminateâeach other.
States like Russia and Ukraine may not have gone back to totalitarianism or the traditional authoritarian formula of stuffing the ballot box, cowing the population and imprisoning the opposition - or not obviously. But a whole industry of 'political technology' has developed instead, with shadowy private firms and government 'fixers' on lucrative contracts dedicated to the black arts of organising electoral success. This book uncovers the sophisticated techniques of the 'virtual' political system used to legitimise post-Soviet regimes: entire fake parties, phantom political rivals and 'scarecrow' opponents. And it exposes the paramount role of the mass media in projecting these creations and in falsifying the entire political process. Wilson argues that it is not primarily economic problems that have made it so difficult to develop meaningful democracy in the former Soviet world. Although the West also has its 'spin doctors', dirty tricks and aggressive ad campaigns, it is the unique post-Bolshevik culture of 'political technology' that is the main obstacle to better governance in the region, to real popular participation in public affairs and to the modernization of the political economy in the longer term. 'This is a splendid study that captures the essence of post-Soviet politics, getting to the core of Putin's Russia and showing the author's unmatched command of Ukrainian political life. It is a book to be read by anyone with an interest in the machinations of contemporary politics' James Gow, King's College London
We present a formal model of government control of the media to illuminate variation in media freedom across countries and over time, with particular application to less democratic states. The extent of media freedom depends critically on two variables: the mobilizing character of the government and the size of the advertising market. Media bias is greater and state ownership of the media more likely when the need for mobilization is large; however, the distinction between state and private media is smaller. Large advertising markets reduce media bias in both state and private media, but increase the incentive for the government to nationalize private media. We illustrate these arguments with a case study of media freedom in postcommunist Russia, where media bias has responded to the mobilizing needs of the Kremlin and government control over the media has grown in tandem with the size of the advertising market.
finds that Putin increasingly lost the confidence of two groups during this period: those dissatisfied with the state of the Russian economy and those with a negative attitude toward the West
- Treisman
Treisman (2014) finds that Putin increasingly lost the confidence of two groups during this period: those dissatisfied
with the state of the Russian economy and those with a negative attitude toward the West.
Public Opinion in Russia: Russians' Attitudes on Economic and Domestic Issues Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, accessed at http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/ public-opinion-in-russia-russians-attitudes-on-the-economic-and-domestic-issues
- See Colton
See Colton and Hale (2013) and " Public Opinion in Russia: Russians' Attitudes on Economic and Domestic Issues, "
Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, accessed at http://www.apnorc.org/projects/Pages/
public-opinion-in-russia-russians-attitudes-on-the-economic-and-domestic-issues.aspx.
Putin's Poll Numbers Are Skyrocketing, but They Aren't Going to Last Center on Global Interestsputins-poll-numbers-are-skyrocketing-but-they-arent-going-to-last
- Mark Adomanis
Adomanis, Mark. 2014. " Putin's Poll Numbers Are Skyrocketing, but They Aren't Going to Last. " Center on Global Interests, April
10. http://www.globalinterests.org/2014/04/10/putins-poll-numbers-are-skyrocketing-but-they-arent-going-to-last/.
List: Statistical Methods for the Item Count Technique and List Experiment
- Graeme Blair
- Kosuke Imai
Blair, Graeme, and Kosuke Imai. 2011. List: Statistical Methods for the Item Count Technique and List Experiment. Comprehensive
R Archive Network (CRAN). http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=list.
Assessing Presidential Character: The Media, Elite Opinion and Popular Support
- Richard Brody
Brody, Richard. 1991. Assessing Presidential Character: The Media, Elite Opinion and Popular Support. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford
University Press.