New Watersheds in Russian Society

Abstract

Survey data on the general public's political views and preferences in Russia show that the constituencies of the major parties are widely dispersed. Party preferences at present are based not on any “strategic” or ideological vision but on a more complex set of motives such as attitudes toward ruling authority, the personality factor, and the presence or absence of authoritarian dispositions.

This article is the republished version of:

New Watersheds in Russian Society

Notes

^1. A monthly per capita income of less than 15,000 rubles.

^2. A monthly per capita income of more than 40,000 rubles.

^3. A monthly per capita income of 25,000–40,000 rubles.

^4. For the purposes of the analysis, a subsample of respondents was singled out with the provisional designation of the middle class. Assigned to it are all of the respondents who reported a monthly per capita income of more than 40,000 rubles, as well as respondents with an income of more than 25,000 rubles who live in the provinces and have a higher education.

^5. VTsIOM press release 2209, January 18, 2013.

^6. VTsIOM press release 2076, July 25, 2012.

^7. VTsIOM press release 2120, September 26, 2012.

^8. VTsIOM press release 2034, May 31, 2012.

^9. See J. Colomer, Political Institutions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 7–17.

^10. See S. Khantington [Huntington], Politicheskii poriadok v meniaiushchikhsia obshchestvakh [Political Order in Changing Societies] (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2004), p. 151.

^11. See R. Inglehart and C. Welzel, “Changing Mass Priorities: The Link Between Modernization and Democracy,” Perspectives on Politics, 2010, vol. 8, no. 2 (June), pp. 551–67.

^12. L. Pye's well-known observation, see Lucian W. Pye, “The Non-Western Political Process,” journal of Politics, 1958, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 468–86.

^13. The well-known observation about “singing circles” as fertile soil for a civil society. See Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic traditions in Modern Italy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

^14. A comment on methodology. Cluster analysis is the task of breaking down a given sample of objects into subsets that are called clusters so that each cluster consists of similar objects, while the objects in the different clusters differ substantially. For our survey we used the most popular of the many methods of clustering, the so-called k-means method. The effect of the algorithm of this method is such that it strives to minimize the summary quadratic deviation of the points of the clusters from the centers of these clusters:

$V={\displaystyle \sum _{i=1}^k} {\displaystyle \sum _{x_j\in S_i}}(x_j-{\mu }_i),$

where k is the number of clusters, S_i represents the clusters that are obtained, i = 1, 2, …, k and μ_i represents the centers of the masses of the vectors $x_j\in S_i$.

English translation © 2014, 2015, from the Russian text © 2013 by the Iurii Levada Analytical Center (Levada Center) and the Interdisciplinary Academic Center of the Social Sciences (Intercenter). “Novye vodorazdely v rossiiskom obshchestve: popytka rekonstruktsii,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia. Dannye. Analiz. Diskussii, 2013, no. 1, pp. 7–21. A publication of the Levada Center and Intercenter. Comprehensive sociological surveys were conducted in the context of preparing an analytical report by the Center for Political Technologies, ordered by the Committee for Civil Initiatives (a collective of authors consisting of I.M. Bunin, A.V. Makarkin, and B.I. Makarenko). One of the studies was a survey carried out by the Levada Center on February 15–18, 2013, on a representative nationwide sample of the urban and rural population, consisting of 1,600 people age eighteen and older, in 130 population centers of forty-five regions of the country. The statistical error of the data from these surveys does not exceed 3.4 percent. The present article is based on the materials of that survey, which were used in preparing the report. The cluster analysis described in the article was carried out by A.E. Kovalevskii. The author is grateful to L.D. Gudkov and A.I. Grazhdankin for assistance in conducting the survey and discussing its results.Boris Igorevich Makarenko is employed at the Center for Political Technologies, Higher School of Economics National Research University.Translated by Kim Braithwaite. Translation reprinted from Sociological Research, vol. 53, no. 4. doi: 10.2753/SOR1061-0154530402