When the party’s over: political blame attribution under an electoral authoritarian regime

ABSTRACT

Which reaction takes the upper hand: a “rally around the flag,” born of geopolitical success, or grievance over economic misfortune? By means of a survey experiment, we aim to explore the mechanisms of blame and credit when a rally around the flag coincides with a major economic downturn, and we estimate the effects of the Crimean events and the economic crisis on how Russians assess the performance of federal political institutions. Our findings suggest that economic hardships are attributed exclusively to the government and the State Duma, while it is only the president who benefits from the rally around the flag. Moreover, the president receives an additional benefit when the “patriotic unity” priming meets the “economic hardship” priming, thereby resulting in a double rally around the flag effect. This suggests that the president stands apart from state institutions when responsibility is assigned, and he is the only one to enjoy national consolidation around him, which is further reinforced by poor economic conditions. Spotlighting the president increases his popularity and consequently increases the costs of political divides, while the legislature and the government can be exploited as scapegoats for policy failures.

KEYWORDS:

• Blame attribution
• economic crisis
• rally around the flag
• public opinion
• electoral authoritarianism
• Russia
• survey experiment

Acknowledgments

We thank the research team at the Center for Comparative History and Political Studies (Aleksei Gilev and Andrey Semenov) and the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (Eduard Ponarin, Nika Kostenko, Boris Sokolov, Anna Shirokanova, and Sergei Shevchuk) for valuable comments and criticism, and the participants of the PONARS Workshop, especially John Reuter, Josh Tucker, Paul Goode, Henry Hale, Regina Smyth, and Irina Soboleva. Special thanks go to Alexei Stephenson for his assistance.

Notes

1. Previous scholarship (e.g. Frye et al. 2017) provides evidence that the true preferences of Russian citizens are not that far from the numbers reported by Russian pollsters.

2. We avoid the term “annexation” in the question’s wording, since it clearly implies the illegal nature of the event for respondents and could skew further responses, or the term “rejoining,” to prevent the opposite bias.

3. We formulated questions for the main explanatory variables based on our knowledge of the general public attitude toward Crimea joining Russia and the economic crisis. Preliminary expectations about the answers to these questions were obtained from the media and all-Russia surveys, which earlier reported that almost 83% of the Russian population supported Crimea joining Russia, while about 70% (in August 2016) agreed that Russia was undergoing an economic crisis. We expected that the wording of our priming questions: (1) would not provide any new information for respondents; and (2) would provoke a positive answer to both questions.

4. Initially, we used the group with no priming questions as the control group, but we did not include it in the analysis, as using it does not correspond to the initial research question. If we compare treatment groups with the control one, we will learn how much priming shifts people’s responses. However, this is not the only purpose of the study: rather, we wish to explore how both events shift blame attribution compared to the group with the Crimea event. To this end, one should take the “single-treatment group” (the Crimea group) as baseline and the “double-treatment group” (Crimea + Economy) as the experimental group.

5. This approach leads respondents to compare the three political institutions with each other instead of evaluating them separately. Asking them to evaluate the government after the president, for example, might skew the evaluation of the government toward lower estimates, since the less popular government is to be compared with the extremely popular president. However, in the three groups, the evaluation questions are asked in the same order, so that the shift in assessment between the groups can only be attributed to the effect of the treatment, even though the president is being systematically assessed in comparison with the Duma.

6. According to the 1 to 4 Likert scale mentioned earlier.

7. We coded the Crimea group with “0” and the Crimea + Economy group with “1.”

8. The Levada Center website: https://www.levada.ru/2017/08/31/samye-ostrye-problemy-2/.

Additional information

Funding

This article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program of the HSE University Basic Research Program and funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project “5-100”; the Russian State Scientific Foundation (RGNF) under [Grant No.16-33-01049] “Politics in Hard Times: Political Legitimacy in Russia”; and the IPRA Foundation’s small research grants.