The political implications of popular support for presidential term limits in Russia

ABSTRACT

With Vladimir Putin having commenced his second term, the issue of the constitutional limit of two successive terms for the president has again become politically salient in Russia. In this article, two specialists of Russian politics investigate public support in 2018 for term limits. They address three questions. Why does the issue of term limits matter? To whom in Russia does it matter? Is opposition to abolishing terms limits likely to be politically divisive? Their findings point in general to a shift in the level and character of support for term limits since 2012. Opposition to term limits has grown over time, and while in 2012 support for term limits was drawn from supporters of more authoritarian leadership, today it includes engaged democrats with negative views of the economic situation. They also find that supporters of term limits remain more likely to support political protest.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• public opinion
• term limits
• presidents
• protest

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank The British Academy for supporting this research (project reference SG17016), and the reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. This constitutional amendment was introduced on 24 May 1991.

2. This scenario has been played out in Kyrgyzstan in recent times, with the newly elected President Sooronbai Jeenbekov establishing his powerbase by ousting (often punitively) the supporters of his predecessor Almazbek Atambaev (RFE/RL 2018).

3. The dependent variable (support for term limits) is ordered from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” with respondents who were undecided (“neither/nor” or “did not know”) coded as the middle category. We follow the same coding rule when dealing with the undecided respondents for all the independent variables..

4. Vladimir Zhirinovsky has consistently supported the removal of term limits (see Farizova 2007).

5. Attitudes amongst nationalist elites have not consistently followed mass attitudes. Putin has continued to face criticism from nationalist leaders, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 (see Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2016).

6. As per Chaisty and Whitefield (2013), we identify respondents as ethno-nationalists if they held highly xenophobic attitudes on questions about Jewish people and Gypsies. In 2012, bivariate correlations between support for term limits and ethno-nationalist attitudes and support for LDPR were significant at the p≤.001 and p≤.01 levels. This analysis is available on request.

7. These results are available on request.