Social media and regime support in Russia: does it matter which website is used?

ABSTRACT

Since 2000, Vladimir Putin has used various means to consolidate a non-democratic regime in Russia. While regime support comes from many factors, the literature lacks consensus on whether social media use (SNS) associates with public support for non-democratic regimes. This study analyses whether using particular SNS platforms associate with more positive or negative evaluations of the regime in Russia. The mixed findings show that Russian SNS users have very nuanced attitudes towards the regime and its actors. Further, while Facebook and Twitter users are more critical of political actors and their work in protecting democracy, other platform-specific associations are additive.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• political attitudes
• Russia
• Putin

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gregory J. Love, Matthew Loveless, and Alice Cooper for their feedback on the project and previous drafts. I am also grateful to the Office of Research at the University of South Carolina for partially supporting this work in the form of a RISE grant. Finally, I appreciate the comments from the anonymous reviewers and guidance of the editorial staff who all contributed to make this a better paper. All remaining mistakes are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Matthew A. Placek is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He received his PhD from the University of Mississippi in 2014. His research focuses on the internet, political attitudes, and democratisation in Eastern Europe.

Notes

1 See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.BBND?locations=RU for more information.

2 See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?locations=RU for more information.

3 Evidence of this in the year the data was collected (2011) can be found in that Freedom House rates Russian press freedom as “not free” but Freedom on the Internet is “partly free”. This has changed in the past few years as internet freedom has decreased to “not free” levels.

4 Full methodology can be found at: http://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/851198/2/Technical_Report_survey_Russia_2012.pdf

5 See Table A2 in the appendix for full list of variables that were reweighted, as well as the covariate weighting before and after performing entropy balancing.

6 Measurements and question wording for all variables can be found in the supplemental appendix.

7 Age squared is used in this study because previous studies have shown that generational attitudes towards government and the economy in Russia are not always directly linear (see Mishler and Rose 2007; Hahn and Logvinenko 2008; Rose et al. 2008). As such, we must also include the variable age since age squared is technically an interaction term (see Brambor, Clark, and Golder 2006).

8 While a variable that directly measure's a person's family income would have been ideal, the question asked in the survey only asks a person their income if they were listed as employed. Therefore, the variable for income leads to inaccuracies as it doesn't list the income or financial status of the entire family.

9 A note of caution to readers on interpreting control variables in the table: After performing entropy balancing, all the covariates balanced are reweighted so their mean values as reported from the empirical models are not their true relationship with the dependent variables, but rather a biased one that is based on their relationship to both the dependent variable and their reweighted means dependent on the main independent variable -social media use- which was developed based on the regression equation used to reweight the data to be used in the empirical models displayed in the paper (see Rubin 1979, 2006; Ho et al. 2007; Sekhon 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Office of the Vice President for Research, University of South Carolina: [Grant Number 17880-18-47347].