Russia's Authoritarian Elections: The View from Below

Election results are aggregates; electors are individuals; and no satisfactory alternative has yet been found for the national representative survey if we are interested in the distribution of their opinions across entire societies. The survey method has its limitations, however, particularly in a post-communist context.1 It provides an impression that is specific to the time at which it was conducted; and there may be a tendency to offer responses that are ‘expected’ by the culture, or whoever is asking the questions—such as claiming to have voted in much greater numbers than were officially recorded at the time. In our national survey in early 2008, 77% claimed to have cast a ballot in the Duma election two months earlier, although the official turnout figure was only 64%.2 Still more important, the survey instrument—the questionnaire—incorporates the assumptions of those who prepare it. It may assume (for instance) that elections are party choices when the opportunity is available to vote for independents; and it will typically specify a limited number of responses, defined by the investigators themselves. There are likely to be additional difficulties in securing an adequate representation of opinion outside the main areas of settlement and the majority culture.3

In our view, the inherent limitations of the survey method add to the arguments in favour of complementary, more ‘qualitative’ approaches to the analysis of the electoral process; not least, for a focus group approach, allowing ordinary citizens to express their views about such matters and to do so in their own words. We followed established practice in limiting groups, in principle, to 8–10 adult members of the society, with balanced numbers of males and females and of the various age-groups; we prepared a list of prompts or gid beforehand, which was used by a local moderator to guide the discussion so that it concentrated on the issues of most interest to our investigation in the course of a discussion that typically lasted for an hour and a half.4 Qualitative methods of this kind have arguably been underrepresented so far in post-Soviet studies, although there is a growing list of exceptions (see for instance White 2005; Kertman 2005; Mickiewicz 2008). We hope to add to these contributions with a study that is drawn from eight discussions that took place in ‘middle Russia’ over the period that followed the December 2007 and March 2008 elections (full details of the locations, dates and membership profiles of our various groups are provided in the Appendix).

Our questions began with the voting decision: whether our participants had voted or not, and if not, why not. We went on to ask about the electoral process as a whole, and how ‘free and fair’ it appeared to have been. This led to a series of questions about the political process more generally—the variety of ways in which citizens relate to the conduct of government in post-communist Russia, and seek to influence it. Elections are only one of those mechanisms, even if they may often appear the most important. Therefore we also asked what effect they appeared to have had, for individual voters (or non-voters) and what other mechanisms, such as political parties and non-governmental organisations, could be used. We asked, finally, about elections within the context of the wider society. Was Russia, in the view of our respondents, affected by what President Putin had identified at the time of the Duma election as an ‘age-old problem—the alienation of government from the citizens’?5 We hope to make full use of their potential in the discussion that follows.

To vote or not to vote?

According to the official returns, 63.7% of the 109,145,517 Russians who were eligible to cast a ballot did so on 2 December 2007, of whom 64.3% voted for United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya); and 68.9% cast a ballot in the presidential election that took place on 2 March 2008, of whom 70.3% voted for Dmitri Medvedev.6 The result was scarcely in doubt in either case, if opinion poll predictions were to be believed; and yet these were relatively large turnouts, by the standards of other developed societies in the early years of the new century, and substantially above the figures that had been recorded at the previous elections in Russia, in December 2003 and March 2004, respectively.

As elsewhere, there was a mixture of motives; and, as elsewhere, a sense of civic duty was among the most important—a belief that, whatever the result might be, it was an obligation of citizenship to take part.7 According to studies in the comparative literature, the moral obligation to vote is generally ‘by far the most important determinant of voting’ (Blais et al. 2000, p. 190; similarly Blais 2000, p. 136). In our groups, Dmitri, for instance, in Group 6, just knew that by his participation he had ‘fulfilled [his] civic duty. And it's not that important to me whether my vote had any influence on the outcome or not’. Vladimir, in Group 5, was sure his vote would have made no difference, but ‘all the same, the expression of my own position at elections is a civic duty for me’. As Valerii, in the same group, explained, ‘It's our job to vote. And their job to keep order’. Galina, in Group 2, told us that ‘I always vote—for me it's a civic duty’. For Viktor, in Group 4, it was the same: ‘Of course. I always vote. I am carrying out a civic duty’. Anna, a lawyer in her late twenties in Group 3, put it the same way: ‘I think voting is the duty of every citizen’. Aleksei, in Group 1, took a similar view: ‘I always vote. And I think everyone should vote. Otherwise they really will decide everything for us’. So did Liliya, in Group 4: ‘I always take part, I think it's my duty’; and so did Tanya, in Group 3: it was ‘important’ she should cast her vote, even if it was just a ‘drop in the ocean’. Alla, in Group 8, had voted ‘all her life’ and ‘never missed a single election’; Yuri, in the same group, had ‘always vote[d]: after all I'm a citizen!’

In some cases, duty had clearly developed into a stable predisposition. For Irina, in Group 4, for instance: ‘I usually vote, but more than anything else out of habit. I somehow don't think much about civic duty’. For Vyacheslav, in the same group, it was ‘always a habit to vote’. For Alexander, in Group 2, it was more like a ‘kind of ritual’; and for some of the older participants, it was a habit that had its origins in the Soviet period. Yana, for instance (in Group 5), in her late sixties, explained that it was a ‘real holiday for us pensioners … . You go, you meet old acquaintances, you talk about who you voted for, and about life’. She herself had voted for Medvedev: ‘they're increasing pensions and they're paid on time. What else do we need? And they've made things better in the country as a whole’.

Yuri, in Group 6, was also struck by the similarities with the Soviet period: ‘How festive it was at these elections, like before, in Soviet times! And they gave out all kinds of presents. Except for giving beer to young people—that's not good, I would say. Tempting young people with beer! Though I was glad to have some myself’. Dmitri, in the same group, had also enjoyed the beer and the whole occasion—‘we've had nothing like it in town for a long time’. For others, it was the former president who was the decisive consideration, and whatever he had asked them to do. As Galina, in Group 6, explained: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich—that's our everything, and what we would have done without him I don't know. Elections are a formality, that's how I understand them, and I don't get much exercised about them. If they say I have to vote, I do so’. Raisa, in Group 5, was another who had voted ‘because I love our former President V. V. Putin very much. I trust and believe him. So if he nominated Medvedev as his successor, that must be right. Although, to be honest, I'm not too fond of Medvedev’.

Party loyalties might also be involved. Yuri, in Group 6, for instance, was another who had gone out to vote, ‘and I will do so as long as there is an LDPR [Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Liberal'no Demokraticheskaya partiya Rossii] and a Vladimir Vol'fovich [Zhirinovsky]’. Nikolai Nikolaevich, in Group 3, had always voted for the Communists (Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiiskoi Federatsii, KPRF), as their ideas were close to his own: ‘I was aware they wouldn't have many seats in the Duma, but thought it was my duty to use my vote to support them’. Viktor, in Group 4, had voted ‘out of inertia. You have to fulfil your civic duty’; but he had also wanted to ‘help the Communists against United Russia’, and had influenced 20 people in his workplace to do the same.

There were additional, more specific reasons for voting. Valentina, in Group 6, explained that her husband voted all the time, ‘and I sometimes keep him company’. In Yuri's case (Group 1), it was his daughter who was responsible: she ‘always brings me, and her grandmother as well, and checks on how we voted’. He was too embarrassed to do otherwise. He just ‘didn't want to disappoint her. She really believes that we take our ballot papers and actually choose someone, that our vote will be taken into account. It was somehow just awkward; I didn't want to seem like a cynic’. Vladimir, in Group 5, had been a member of an electoral commission in December 2007 and had obviously voted: ‘how could I possibly avoid it?’; and for a few, the fact that it had been a presidential election in March 2008 was important enough in itself to encourage them to turn out. As Lilya, in Group 4, explained, ‘How could I not take part? It's not every year we elect a President’. Or as Viktoriya, in Group 6, put it: ‘These were presidential elections! That's an important event’.

However, there were just as many who had not taken part, and who had often not done so because they thought their vote would have little influence or because they were dissatisfied with the choice of parties or candidates. Sergei, in Group 6, was disgusted by the March 2008 election in particular: ‘just a sort of circus with ponies: entertainments at the entrance to the polling station, beer as a reward for demonstrating your willingness to fulfil your civic duties, the “poodle” [nominally independent candidate Andrei] Bogdanov, a new successor half a metre tall, fights on television … . What a disgrace for Russia!’

The unprepossessing nature of the choice was a feature of many other responses. Valentina, in Group 6, could not bring herself to vote for the chosen successor; she had assumed Putin would stay for a third term, and not this ‘joke of a candidate [kandidatishka]!’ After Putin himself it had been ‘somehow not serious to vote for Medvedev. He wasn't in the same league’. Galina, in Group 6, took the same view, although she would have been glad to vote for Putin if he had been standing again. Even participants who had voted for Medvedev (such as Yuri in Group 5) were still wondering if they had been right to do so, given the lack of a genuine alternative.

Many others had no principled reason for refusing to vote, but quoted all kinds of personal circumstances. Ill health was a common explanation, not surprisingly in the case of elections that were taking place during the winter months. Valentina, in Group 6, had not voted in December 2007 as she had ‘a heavy cold at the time and was in bed with a temperature’. Marina, in Group 1, had been unwell at the time of the presidential election. Polina, in the same group, complained that age was a factor—‘I'm not as young as I was’ (in any case she ‘didn't see the point’). Galina, in Group 2, ‘always used to vote’, but ‘now my legs ache, and it's hard to walk’; in the Duma elections she had ‘felt unwell and didn't take part’. Larisa, in Group 4, admitted that she sometimes failed to vote because of illness, or because there were ‘more important things than elections’. Raisa, in Group 5, had been on holiday. Sergei, in Group 6, had also been out of the country, but all the same he would not have voted as there was no-one he could have supported. Andrei, in Group 4, had been ‘busy’. Tanya, in Group 3, explained that ‘sometimes there's no time’. Ivan, in Group 2, offered the same explanation. In fact, one or two of our participants were simply too young to have qualified for the vote at the time the election took place.

There were others, however, who objected to a contest that had actually been a foregone conclusion, in December 2007 and still more so in March 2008. Galina, in Group 6, had ‘seen no point’ in voting, as ‘everything [had been] decided in advance’. Larisa, in Group 4, took the same view: ‘it was so clear that Medvedev [would] win’. Yelena, in Group 1, was another who had ‘seen no point’ in voting, as (once again) ‘everything [had been] decided in advance’. Nikolai Nikolaevich, in Group 3, explained that ‘Vote or not, all the same the United Russia people were going to win. That was all decided at the top’. ‘Why’, asked Anatolii in the same group, ‘do something that is completely meaningless?’, and the pre-election campaign had been ‘quite absurd’. Nina, in Group 4, was another ‘principled’ non-voter, as ‘whether she [voted] or not, nothing [would] change’: it had ‘already been decided at the top who [would] win’. Oleg, in Group 1, had similarly decided not to vote ‘on principle. I also think it's pointless, as we decide nothing. Everything is decided up there, at the top … . We don't decide anything’.

For Yaroslav (Group 1), they had ‘long ago decided on our behalf, and elections [were] needed just to create the appearance of democracy’; for Marina, in Group 3, her vote ‘influence[d] nothing … . The authorities themselves decide what and how things will be’; and for Galina, in Group 2, ‘everything [had been] decided from above … . They know what result they want, plus or minus 5%, and that's what they get’.

How representative were these various opinions? In Table 1 we set out some evidence drawn from a national survey that was fielded in late January 2008, just a few weeks after the Duma election had taken place. Clearly, a sense of duty was widely distributed; more than 64% were committed to voting under any circumstances, about the same as the turnout figure that was officially reported. Another 17% were broadly disposed to vote, but not necessarily if it was ‘inconvenient to do so’; and just 14% were not inclined to vote under any circumstances. Among those who chose not to vote in December 2007 there was a wide range of motivations. Practical considerations came first: for whatever reason, substantial numbers of respondents had been unable to visit a polling station on the day in question (and had evidently not made use of the facility to vote at home or in advance). The second most important motivation, however, was a sceptical attitude towards the electoral mechanism itself: indeed, if these various responses had been combined into a single measure of disaffection, it would have been the most typical response on the part of those—admittedly a minority—who had chosen not to exercise their democratic rights.

TABLE 1 
Reasons for Electoral Abstention, January–February 200 8

Response	%
‘I couldn't get to the polling station’	32
‘Nothing depends on my vote’	23
‘I don't trust any of the current politicians’	15
‘I am fed up with politics and the struggle for power’	7
‘There's no party that represents my interests’	5
‘I don't understand anything about politics’	4
‘I thought the elections would be unfair’	4
‘The Duma elections don't influence the government's actions’	3
Source: Authors' post-election survey conducted by Russian Research (n = 2,000, fieldwork 30 January–27 February 2008), showing the distribution of responses among those who reported not voting in rounded percentages; other responses account for the residual.

Free and fair?

Opinion was equally divided when we asked if the elections had been ‘free and fair’. A common response was that they had, at least, reflected public opinion. This was quite unlike the Yel'tsin period, Yana (Group 2) explained, when his campaign staff had given out sausage and vodka to persuade people to vote for him, and when Zyuganov (she believed) had actually won, as huge numbers of votes had been improperly attributed to his main opponent: ‘Now everything is honest. People love Putin, he's doing a lot of good. That's why we elected his party and his successor’. Valerii (Group 5) also thought the elections had been honest, as ordinary people were very satisfied with the governing authorities: ‘Maybe they help themselves to certain things—how could it be otherwise?—but they don't forget about ordinary people’.

Were the elections democratic or not, asked Yuri from Group 3? ‘If you compare us with the West, then they were probably not democratic elections. But if you consider the final result as an expression of the popular will, then they were.’ Vyacheslav, in Group 4, was impressed by what the national and international monitors had reported: Zyuganov had spoken of violations, and some other parties had also complained, but ‘according to the observers, everything had apparently taken place democratically’.

Given the support that clearly existed for Putin and United Russia, there were many other participants who shared the view that falsification had simply been ‘unnecessary’ and that if anything of the kind had taken place, it would certainly not have been ‘widespread’ (as Galina, in Group 2, put it). Yevgenii, in Group 1, thought there had been falsification in earlier elections, ‘but now there's no point, people trust their president. Putin, I mean’. And when the former president agreed to head the United Russia list, then ‘everyone voted for it’. For Anatolii, in Group 3, there had been ‘hardly any’ serious falsification, as unlike the finely balanced presidential contest of 1996, there had been ‘no need for it’; at most there might have been an ‘exaggeration of the vote for United Russia and Medvedev’. Igor’, in Group 5, was another who believed the Kremlin-sponsored candidates would ‘certainly have won, but without such large majorities’. Valentina, in Group 6, thought there must have been very many people like her, who supported Putin but not Medvedev, and would not go and vote for him; ‘so it was simply a logical necessity that there should be falsification, so that Medvedev won enough votes’. What did it matter anyway if people were living well, asked Marina in Group 3? The federal authorities ‘seemed to be doing their best. That's what is most important to me. How they get their votes doesn't interest me that much’.

For Polina, however, in Group 1, this overwhelming consensus in favour of a single party and a single candidate was exactly why the elections had not been democratic. Everyone had voted for United Russia because Putin was at the top of its list of candidates: ‘Everything followed a single line—a Putinist one. And nobody had an idea what anyone else was proposing’. The one-sided nature of both contests was a recurring criticism. The whole thing had been too unbalanced, complained Larisa in Group 4: ‘everything was done to advantage a single candidate—United Russia’. Yaroslav, in Group 3, thought it was ‘hard to say definitely’ what the actual totals had been (only the top leadership was in a position to know); but he had been angered to hear that in ‘hundreds of districts nationwide 100% of voters [had] supported United Russia’8—that was just ‘suspicious’. In the elections that had taken place in Tsarist Russia, apparently, when a single party won 100% of the vote the results had been annulled; it would have been ‘more honest’ if the same kind of practices had continued into the post-communist period. Several participants mentioned the media, which had placed the candidates in ‘different positions’ (Aleksei in Group 1). As Yuliya, in the same group, recalled, ‘always and everywhere it was just United Russia’. All they heard about was ‘where Putin had been, and where Medvedev had been, and how many kindergartens they had opened’, complained Nikolai Nikolaevich in Group 3.

Other participants had more specific complaints. Yuri (in Group 6), an LDPR supporter, thought the elections had ‘not been honest or democratic’; his own party had collected evidence that made it clear an ‘enormous numbers of violations’ had taken place around the country, but had reported them to no effect. In other places there had been food and drink and entertainment at the polling stations themselves at the same time as it was ‘politely made clear you had to cast your vote for United Russia and for Medvedev’ (Vladimir, Group 5). There were also other forms of pressure, particularly in the workplace. As Ekaterina, another Group 5 participant, reported, the director of the factory where her mother worked had made it ‘very clear to [her] mother and her colleagues for whom they should vote’; actual violations were ‘not obvious and not widespread’, but it was ‘simply a fact that people were given instructions from above to vote for Medvedev and United Russia’. In another case, reported by Nikolai Nikolaevich in Group 3, the director of a local factory in Novomoskovsk had been a United Russia party member and had made it clear to all his subordinates how they would be expected to vote; ‘Just like in the communist times’, commented another participant (Anna), although not all agreed with this comparison.

Some thought there was simply no other way in which a Russian election could take place: ‘we have that kind of country’, explained Viktor, in Group 4, despairingly. There were others, however, who identified a specific mechanism, which was that in every region the governor would want to ingratiate himself with the federal authorities who had nominated and could replace him by making sure there was the largest possible vote in his area for United Russia and Putin's chosen successor. There had been no violations in his own district, explained Vladimir in Group 5, except for some communist campaigners who had tried to influence voters on their way into the polling station. All the same, there might have been some ‘improvement’ of the results, not necessarily because the federal authorities themselves had initiated it, but because the governors had begun to fear them. Before, when governors had been directly elected, they depended at least to some extent on the support of local citizens; now they were ‘loyal subjects’. It was hard to call such a system democratic. Viktor, in Group 4, took the same view: ‘They pass down the plan from above, and you have to make sure you fulfil it’. Irina, in Group 4, who worked herself in an electoral commission and knew what had actually taken place, refused to comment: ‘we're not allowed to talk’.

Again, we set out our survey responses in Table 2. Around 60%, depending on the question, thought the December 2007 election had been ‘free and fair’; around a quarter took the opposite view. Were these ‘high’ or ‘low’ proportions? For comparative purposes we have set the Russian results beside the analogous results of a survey we commissioned in Ukraine, following the parliamentary election that had taken place in that country a few weeks earlier. The results, in fact, are remarkably similar. However, both Russia and Ukraine secured among the lowest scores on this dimension of all the countries that were included in the first module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems at the end of the 1990s,9 and the conclusion of the most elaborate study of its kind that has so far been conducted was that the 2007–2008 elections were, in fact, a ‘significant step on Russia's return to undemocratic elections’—elections that were as unfair as those that had preceded them, and no longer free (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 28). Without such interference, argue Buzin and Lyubarev, the parties represented in the Duma would have probably been the same because of the 7% threshold and other circumstances, but the distribution of seats among them would have changed and the political effect of the entire exercise would have been rather different (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 63).10

Elections and political efficacy

Did elections, of this or any other kind, make a difference? Indeed, should they make a difference? At least for some of our respondents, government should simply be allowed to discharge its responsibilities. For Valerii in Group 5, for instance, ‘the main thing for us older people is that our pensions are paid and increased, and that our children live well’. Yuri, in Group 5, took the same view. For him, governing the country was not a matter for ordinary people; those in power should simply be given the opportunity to do so, and approach their duties with a proper sense of obligation: ‘The point is that the people don't have enough understanding of what they actually want. So that if in our country ordinary people began to have their full influence on politics, nothing good would come of it!’ Raisa, in the same group, also thought she had no influence and had no wish to have any. Politics was the business of government, and they should be allowed to get on with it: ‘If it was all bad, there would long ago have been a revolution. Or else everybody out of desperation would have voted for Vol'fovich [Zhirinovsky]. Things aren't so bad, and people really trust the authorities'. Ordinary people were too busy in any case, explained Nina in Group 4, working as they did from morning to night.

TABLE 2 
How ‘Free and Fair’ Were the Elections ?

	Largely fair	Somewhat fair	Somewhat unfair	Entirely unfair
Filling out ballots and counting of votes
Russia	19	41	20	5
Ukraine	16	34	28	7
Representation of people with different opinions
Russia	19	40	18	5
Ukraine	21	35	23	5
Television coverage
Russia	19	40	21	7
Ukraine	19	36	26	4
Local campaign
Russia	19	41	18	5
Ukraine	19	40	21	4
Source: for Russia, as Table 1, in rounded percentages; for Ukraine, a Socis survey carried out for the authors between 11 November and 3 December 2007 (n = 1,200); other responses account for residuals.

There were very few who believed they had in fact exercised any real influence on the final outcome. Had her vote made any difference, asked Polina in Group 1? ‘Not in the slightest … our whole leadership is oriented upwards, they don't care in the slightest what ordinary people think.’ Larisa, in Group 4, thought she had exercised no influence of any kind: ‘We weren't needed at all. It was quite clear beforehand who would win’. None of them had influenced the outcome in any way, agreed Irina in Group 4: local officials had simply been given the percentages and had then done their best to meet the expectations of the national leadership on whom their own position depended; whenever it was necessary, the results would in any case have been adjusted. Aleksei (Group 1) saw similarities with the elections of the Soviet period:

Nothing depended on us. Just as in the Soviet Union 99.99% were for the CPSU, so now the same—just for United Russia. And if you hadn't voted, they would have said all the same that you had. In any case the result was going to be the one they had arranged. Nina, in Group 4, thought she might actually have exercised some influence by not voting, now that the ‘against all’ option on the ballot paper had been removed; but others, such as Andrei, also from Group 4, warned that if a ballot paper was unclaimed, it could more easily be used to falsify the final tally.

The same sentiment—that everything had been decided in advance and that the elections themselves were an empty formality—was very widely shared. For Lilya, in Group 4, they could hardly be called elections at all: the new president had been presented to them as the choice of the outgoing president, and all that had happened was that a publicity campaign had been arranged in his support. Vyacheslav, from the same group, had voted all the same, but ‘now everything [was] in the hands of the ruling elite’; they had ‘obliterated the communists’, and there ‘[wasn't] anyone else to vote for’. As Viktor put it (also Group 4), ‘In Russia everything is decided by the bosses [verkhushka]’. For Irina, in the same group, ‘Everything [was] clear in advance, how it [would] end, who [would] be elected, and how they [would] govern’. For Polina, in Group 1, ‘everything was too predictable’. Yevgenii, another member of the same group, thought he had exercised no influence at all on the outcome of the Duma election, because it had been clear in advance who would win: ‘United Russia, of course, because Putin convinced everybody he needed the support of their leadership so much, so that his plan could be carried out. And everyone just went along with it. What was there for me to influence? How could my own vote decide anything?’

For a few, their vote might have made some difference in earlier years. For Yuliya, in Group 1, for instance, when Alexander Zhukov, later a deputy premier, had been their candidate, first of all for the municipality (he had been a member of the Bauman district council in Moscow in the late 1980s, and then a Duma deputy); but in 2004 he had left parliament for the federal government. There were even a few who thought their vote could still make a difference—it was just one of many, argued Raisa in Group 5, but taken together they could have a measurable impact on the outcome. All the same, as Oleg (in Group 1) pointed out, even if he had bothered to turn up and cast a vote against, he would have joined a tiny 0.1% of the electorate: ‘We don't have a people, we have a herd of cattle. It was told whom to vote for, and that is what it did’. Their elections, complained Polina (Group 1), were ‘not democratic, they're just called that’. They had ‘democracy only on paper. We're ruled by oligarchs. They robbed the people and filled their own pockets. Money decides everything. Whoever has money has influence. And we have none, so we can't have any influence’. As Oleg (Group 1) put it, they had wanted to get Medvedev elected, and so they had: ‘They decided it all themselves, without the people’.

How, once again, did these responses compare with the views of the country as a whole, and with those of a wider range of nations? Somewhat fewer than half, in our 2008 survey, thought elections gave ordinary voters some opportunity to influence the Russian government; but a slightly larger proportion took the opposite view (see Table 3). A still larger proportion thought Russian elections had the potential to alter the ‘course of events in our country’, although again there were almost as many who disagreed. Ukrainians were slightly more optimistic in both respects, although the two distributions were otherwise very similar. This, all the same, left both countries at the low end of the entire spectrum of political systems in which inquiries of this kind have been carried out. In the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems module that was fielded in the late 1990s, for instance, 15% of Russians agreed that ‘who people vote for makes a difference’, as did 18% of Ukrainians. By contrast, some 39% across all the 28 countries that were included in the entire exercise took the same view, and still higher proportions in the major Western democracies (40% respectively in France and Spain, and 45% in the United States).11

Elections and the repertoire of political action

Were there other ways of exercising political influence, if elections offered few opportunities of this kind? Not, at least, for Marina, in Group 3: ‘No, I can't influence anything. Let other people, the politicians, get on with it’. Nor for Viktor, in Group 4: ‘With us it's all useless! Even when people go on hunger strike for a day, or a month, nobody takes any notice’. Corruption, he went on, was ‘everywhere. There is no-one to complain to. Procurators and everyone else are all corrupt’. It was also dangerous to take any kind of action at the workplace: ‘if you're against the management, they'll throw you out, and that's it!’ What could you do in a small town in any case, asked Tanya in Group 3? Politics was ‘just on the television. And only at elections can we express our views’. Ordinary people had no influence at the local level either, complained Irina (Group 4): in Podol'sk, where she lived, the mayor's entire family was in power, and all he had done for local people was to make a single street look presentable. It was much the same in the region: ‘All the people I know vote “against”, but all the same he wins the elections'.

TABLE 3 
Elections and the Conduct of Government, 2008

	Russia	Ukraine
Do elections give ordinary citizens the opportunity to influence the national government?
Definitely agree	10	15
Inclined to agree	34	36
Inclined to disagree	26	26
Definitely disagree	22	15
Can elections affect the course of events in our country?
Definitely agree	15	18
Inclined to agree	37	42
Inclined to disagree	27	23
Definitely disagree	14	11
Source: as Table 2, in rounded percentages; other responses account for residuals.

There were other cases where changes had taken place that reflected public opinion, but without any reason to believe the change had necessarily been a consequence of public opinion. Yuliya (Group 1), for instance, had been in a polyclinic when it was announced that the unpopular health minister, Mikhail Zurabov, had been dismissed: ‘Everybody applauded’; but there was no evidence he had lost his job because of the dissatisfaction of ordinary people—it was just the outcome of a much larger struggle within the leadership as a whole (‘tam svoya bol'shaya politika’). People had to have an opportunity to express their views and defend their interests, complained Konstantin in Group 5, ‘otherwise it's not a country, but a sheepfold’. The current regime, although it was an improvement on the system that had existed in the Yel'tsin years, had gone too far in the other direction: ‘A completely submissive society—that's not right’. Anna, in Group 3, thought the problem was even deeper: people were ‘too passive’ in general, and had no experience of ‘asserting their rights’ or of trying to ‘change something to their advantage’; ‘we have a slave mentality’. Or in the words of another participant, there was ‘no historical tradition’ of a more assertive form of public politics (Nikolai, in the same group).

What about trade unions, which existed to represent the interests of ordinary people and defend their rights and living standards? For many of our participants it was unclear what function they still performed, if any. Did they even exist, asked Viktor (Group 4)? ‘We hear nothing about them, and don't see them’, commented Ivan (Group 2). Katerina (Group 5) hadn't heard of them either, or of independent organisations of any other kind: ‘Maybe in Moscow or St Petersburg they still have some influence, but definitely not in the provinces’. Yuliya (in Group 1) had to ask ‘What's that?’ It was a term she nowadays came across ‘only in foreign films’; she had ‘forgotten the word itself’. Yuri, in the same group, seemed to remember they had ‘existed in [his] student days’. Galina (in Group 2) also remembered that trade unions had collected dues in the Soviet years, and arranged holidays; ‘But now—more or less zero’. Where Aleksei worked (Group 1), the trade union committee had not been re-elected for 20 years, ‘and now nobody knows if we have a trade union or not’. There was a deeper problem, commented Andrei in Group 4, in that the trade unions had effectively become ‘government structures’ and ‘acted on their instructions’; the trade union leader himself, Mikhail Shmakov, had ‘more or less become a state official’ (Zhangir, Group 8).

What, then, about political parties? Did they at least provide a means by which ordinary people could articulate their concerns and seek to advance them? ‘In principle’ they could do so, commented Marina (Group 2), ‘but just not in Russia. We have that kind of a system …’. There were practical difficulties, in any case. They had ‘too big a territory’, explained Galina in the same group; ‘no party [could] establish itself in all the regions, or be run from a single centre. Only the party of power [could] do so’. There were mixed views about this party of power, United Russia. For Lidiya, in Group 4, it reflected the interests of ordinary people to a greater extent than other parties did; Vera, in Group 2, thought it took account of all sections of the society. Vyacheslav in Group 4, a former communist, still had hopes of the new ruling party, but would have liked it to give more attention to the concerns of ordinary people. Nina, in the same group, was less satisfied: United Russia worked only for itself, it was not a people's party, and it had been ‘imposed from above’. For Marina, in Group 1, it was all too reminiscent of the CPSU, even though it had been undertaking some useful work. Oleg, in the same group, was annoyed by the way it was attempting to develop a ‘cult of personality’, for instance, by visiting his sports club and handing out Putin T-shirts.

There was, however, no greater confidence in any of the other parties. Viktor (Group 4), who had been a member of Anpilov's left-wing Russian Party of Communists (Rossiiskaya partiya kommunistov), had few illusions about the communists; it was not clear any longer what they stood for, and anyway they had ‘no practical effect’. The party had just ‘outlived itself’, commented Nina (Group 4), and party leader Gennadii Zyuganov, already an elderly man, had given no indication that he was ready to make way for a successor. There used to be other parties, like Rodina, remarked Andrei in Group 4, but then it had disappeared, absorbed into A Just Russia, which was unduly dependent on the government itself; it had been created, according to Yaroslav (Group 3), ‘just to give the impression of some competition with United Russia’. Nikolai Fedorovich, in the same group, a former member of the Liberal Democrats, was ‘disappointed in all of them’; Anna, who had formerly been in the Union of Right Forces (Soyuz Pravykh Sil), was also disillusioned—the discussions that had taken place with Yabloko had shown how little could be expected of the country's ‘democratic forces’, and the election results had left them as ‘political corpses’. Anatolii, also from Group 3, complained that all the parties had to offer was ‘empty declarations and slogans’, and ‘no concrete programme that correspond[ed] to reality’.

The Western literature had often suggested that non-governmental organisations would develop in strength and number as the restrictions on their existence were removed, and would then help to sustain a viable ‘civil society’, but they were no more than a marginal presence by the end of Putin's second presidential term, if the views of focus-group participants were representative. Evgenii, in Group 1, asked ‘what's that?’ when invited to comment. Yuliya, in the same group, ‘[hadn't] heard of them’; nor had most of the other participants. NGOs, thought Yaroslav (Group 3), had enjoyed some influence in the past, when they had their own groups of lobbyists in the Duma; at this point the Kremlin had cut off their oxygen supply, many had closed down, and those that remained were less active. Nor, indeed, was this necessarily a bad thing: ‘after all it was through them that Western money came in, and not all of it was used for the right purposes’. Anatolii, in the same group, went even further. All the various NGOs, he thought, had done ‘a lot of harm to Russia during the 1990s’; it was ‘clear to everyone who and for what reasons [was] giving Russia money through these organisations’. Andrei, in Group 4, took a similar view: there were ‘very few’ such organisations any more, just ‘provocative’ ones that had been set up with American or Western money and which had ‘[done] more harm than the government itself’.

The same views about what Marina (Group 1) described as ‘some kind of American organisations’ were very widespread. For Konstantin (Group 5), for instance, according to a television programme he had seen, the non-governmental organisations had ‘all [been] organised with American money, with specially trained people organising provocations’. Yuri (in Group 6) took the same view: all they did was squander Western money, concealing what they were doing from the wider society; or as Yuliya (in the same group) put it, they used the money for their own purposes, and their official activities were simply a cover. In any case, what could they do? Just have discussions and stir up discontent, thought Viktor (Group 4); ‘and if they [thought] of doing anything, the OMON [riot police] [would] come and break them up’. Marina (Group 3) thought they had no influence at all: ‘people can get angry but all the same no-one will listen to them’, except perhaps in the big cities; ‘out here in the provinces they have no influence on anything’. Civic organisations of this or any other kind did not have the same kind of role as they did in the Western democracies, explained Vladimir in Group 5: ‘We sort of have them, but they were finally strangled by the law on NGOs that came out a year and a half or two years ago [at the start of 2006]’.

There were difficulties about many of the other ways in which ordinary citizens might seek to advance their collective interests. The attacks that had taken place on demonstrators, for instance, led to concerns about physical safety; ‘you could not go there with children’, commented Yuliya in Group 6—the television reports she had seen had made it clear they might be assaulted—and there were other implications. Dmitri (Group 6) had been invited to attend one of the dissenters’ marches, and his travelling costs would have been paid, but he might have lost his job, and with that his deferment of a military call-up; it could ‘all disappear in a moment’. Nikolai Nikolaevich (Group 3) had relatives in Moscow who had told him how many riot police had been on duty during the marches; more than the number of demonstrators themselves. In any case, what effect did they have? More likely than not, the marches had not alarmed the government but only irritated it, thought Yaroslav (Group 4). The demonstrations that had taken place when pensioners' benefits had been monetised at the start of 2005 showed the potential of action of this kind, objected Tanya (Group 3), but Yuri (Group 1) worked on Pushkin Square in central Moscow: ‘There, every day someone is having a meeting. But people no longer pay any attention. They have their meeting, and then go their separate ways’. ‘Protest or not, who takes any notice?’ asked Oleg (Group 1).

Indeed it could be risky to express any kind of views that were at odds with those of the local or national authorities. Yaroslav (Group 3) gave an example from his own experience. He had a friend in Perm’ who was an activist, and by orientation a liberal. He had tried in various ‘inoffensive ways’ to suggest through the media that things were not as satisfactory as the authorities sought to represent. That spring he had given an interview to a regional newspaper: ‘An essentially harmless interview, in which he had listed some of the shortcomings of the current government, and what was wrong with it. The result was that he was prosecuted for “extremism”’. As Nikolai Nikolaevich complained (Group 3), ‘Under communism you were punished if you did anything, but now there are no limits at all. They do what they want. And try to say one word against them!’ Dmitri, in Group 8, took the same view: the means that were available to influence government were underdeveloped, and in any case it was ‘dangerous’ to make use of them—‘you can be put in prison if you cause too much trouble’.

What was left? Perhaps there were some ways of influencing policy, reflected Marina in Group 3, ‘but they make no difference. The government itself decides what policies there will be’, and those who had money could in any case get what they wanted by paying whatever was necessary to obtain it. As Raisa (Group 5) explained, if you had money you could exercise influence, like the big businessmen who simply bought up deputies and then pushed through the laws they wanted, but as far as ordinary people were concerned, explained Anatolii in Group 3, it was only if they were ‘driven to the limits of their patience, then they [could] have some kind of influence. Here I mean really major and powerful protest actions that could at any moment develop into a full-scale revolutionary movement. Russia's experience has been that the people can influence the government by an insurrection [bunt]’. Apart from this there were ‘street demonstrations’ (Roman, Group 7), or ‘protest actions’ of various kinds (Oleg, in the same group), or in the last resort, ‘extremist methods [or] terrorism’ (Yuri, Group 1). Otherwise, commented Yelena from the same group, government took very little notice of the concerns of ordinary people: it existed in ‘some kind of enclosed space, behind a wall’.

Again, how representative were these various opinions? Did ordinary people, on the basis of a rather wider sampling of opinion, believe the repertoire of political action that was available gave them any real opportunity to influence the government that spoke in their name, and if so, how much? On the evidence of our 2010 survey, most Russians were not particularly optimistic (Table 4). Nor were Ukrainians, when we asked them the same question in a comparable exercise immediately after their 2007 parliamentary election, although they were slightly more likely to believe in the efficacy of elections as compared with other forms of political agency. For a plurality of our Russian respondents, there was no means of any kind that allowed them an opportunity to exercise an influence on national decision making; for a plurality of Ukrainians, the most effective way of doing so was to cast a ballot in a regional or national election. (It had, of course, been through the ballot box that they had eventually been able to elect Viktor Yushchenko in the second-round presidential ballot at the end of 2004.) Differences of this kind, however, were relatively minor; it was a rather more obvious conclusion, on the evidence of the cross-national survey, that in both countries there were fewer who believed they had a range of mechanisms that offered some opportunity to influence the actions of central government than in the other countries of the developed world.12

Elections, regime and society

To what extent, finally, did elections and other opportunities for political action give ordinary Russians a belief that they could exercise a more general influence over the decisions of national government? This is what political scientists have normally defined as ‘political efficacy’: the belief, realistic or otherwise, that ordinary citizens can exercise some degree of effective influence over those who govern.13 There could be little basis for a sentiment of this kind in the Soviet period, with a single ruling party, elections that lacked any element of choice, and a legal system that was entirely in the hands of the authorities. A cleavage between ‘two Russias’ was, in fact, of much longer standing: one of them the ‘official Russia’ of the court and national politics, the other the ‘people's Russia’ of daily life outside the capital.14 Formally, at least, the establishment of a post-communist system had changed many of these assumptions. The new constitution declared a rule of law, and a separation of powers; there were regular and competitive elections; there were independent as well as government-controlled media—and yet this was evidently not enough to persuade ordinary Russians that they could actually influence those who ruled in their name or that their views were sufficiently considered.

TABLE 4 
Comparing Agencies of Political Action, 2007 and 2010

	Russia	Ukraine
To what extent can ordinary people influence the actions of the central government?
To a great extent	4	2
To some extent	17	15
Not much	25	29
Not at all	51	48
What is the most effective way of influencing national decision making?
No such way	37	34
Voting in regional or national elections	36	43
Taking part in a demonstration	8	10
Write to the government	5	2
Write to the newspapers	4	3
Source: for Russia, authors' survey conducted by Russian Research, fieldwork 12 February–1 March 2010, n = 2,000; for Ukraine, as Table 2; rounded percentages.

How far, we asked the various groups, did government ‘take into account the views of ordinary people?’; and ‘whose interests were mostly reflected by the current regime?’ For some, it was not too much to claim that the authorities were guided in their decisions by the concerns of the population as a whole. For Tanya in Group 3, for instance, it was obvious that government would think about itself, but it thought about the people as well. Leading officials certainly lived better than others, but they had shown the ability to advance themselves and so they quite properly enjoyed some of the benefits:

Remember what went on in the 1990s [she continued]. Then people didn't live, but simply existed. Perhaps we don't live now as well as in America or Europe, but there is already a lot we can allow ourselves. If the government didn't think about the people, there would be nothing of the kind.

It was easy enough to criticise them, thought Raisa (Group 5), sitting in the provinces. If any of them had power themselves, would they forgo the money, cars with chauffeurs and private villas? Some might also ‘divorce their wives and find young blondes’. Things were certainly better than in the past, according to Valerii in Group 5:

Under Yel'tsin we were more or less thrown to the winds of fate. People with higher education had to get jobs as doormen! Then all they were interested in was looking after the oligarchs. They drove around in expensive cars and built themselves palaces, leaving ordinary people without pay for half a year at a time!

The same mixed but at least partly positive judgements were apparent elsewhere. For Anatolii (Group 4), the authorities did ‘somehow or other’ take the concerns of ordinary people into account, as their various social programmes made clear. It depended, for others, on the conscientiousness of the politicians concerned. In her own area, commented Marina in Group 1, they seemed to be trying to make things better. Deputies held regular meetings with local people, and problems were being resolved. It was cleaner in town, the roads were better, and there were flowers. All of this reflected not just the interests of officials themselves, but those of ordinary people, ‘because if they didn't, they wouldn't have a peaceful life’. Yuliya (Group 2) thought officials were normally inclined to take some interest in the concerns of ordinary people, otherwise they would take to the streets. Vladimir (Group 5), similarly, thought officials did take some account of the concerns of ordinary people, but once again for reasons that had less to do with altruism and rather more with their wish to avoid a political upheaval. They would pay ‘exactly as much attention to the concerns of ordinary people as [was] necessary to ensure they [did not] take to the barricades’, as Alexander, in Group 2, put it.

There were, many more, however, who thought public officials promoted their own interests exclusively, or those of the oligarchs in general (if they could be distinguished). Whose interests did the authorities reflect, asked Igor’ in Group 2? ‘Their own interests and nobody else's.’ For Nina (Group 4), they were ‘just out for themselves’. For Yuri (Group 1), similarly, public officials had no interest in the concerns of anyone else—they ‘just want[ed] to fill their own pockets’. For Polina, from the same group, the ruling group were only concerned about themselves; if they made a trip to a local area it was just window-dressing, so that they could be seen doing so on television. Nikolai Nikolaevich (Group 3) was another who shared the view that the ruling group thought exclusively about themselves: ‘Under Yel'tsin the oligarchs robbed us, under Putin the state officials’. For Zhangir, in Group 8, Putin and Medvedev were doing their best to represent the interests of Russia as a whole, but they were under the influence of a self-interested ‘bureaucratic class’; for Roman, in Group 7, the government elite and state officials were better understood as a single ‘ruling class’, and just as Marx had predicted, it was their own interests they most actively promoted.

A slightly different but overlapping view was that government policy reflected the interests of the rich, not just of those who took charge of government itself: it was ‘president, officials and the oligarchs—all of them’ who were robbing the people, according to Yuri in Group 6. ‘Whoever has money has power’, as Nina (Group 4) put it succinctly. Government, from this perspective, reflected the interests of those who could ‘buy Fabergé eggs’ (Yuri, in Group 1: presumably a reference to one of the super-rich, oil magnate Viktor Veksel'berg, who had spent ‘more than $90 million’ to buy the world's second-largest collection in 2004 so that they could be returned to Russian ownership).15 Polina (in Group 1) was another who thought the Russian government simply represented ‘the rich, those who have money, oligarchs’; but for Viktor, in Group 4, not ordinary people from whom they were ‘still very distant’. What then had happened to Mikhail Khorodkovsky, at one time the richest of them all? The trouble (explained Yuri, in Group 1), was that he had not shared out his wealth ‘half to [himself], and half to the Kremlin. If he had done so he would have had a quiet life. He was greedy and didn't share’. Thus, when he developed political ambitions that were out of line with the Kremlin's own preferred scenarios, he had paid the price.

There were other, more specific suggestions. For Yevgenii (Group 1), it was the interests of the Federal Security Bureau and intelligence agencies that were given the most attention. They were ‘all FSB-ists and KGB-ists in power at the moment’, he explained; they had ‘taken over everything, both government and business’. For Irina, in Group 4, it was ‘the mafia’ who were in power. Politicians thought about the people when they wanted to take power, added Nikolai 1 (Group 3), but ‘as soon as they receive it, they forget about people and begin to think about their own enrichment’. Take, for example, the state corporations that had been established in the Putin years: for whose benefit did they operate? Not for the benefit of ordinary people, but for ‘officials and major owners’, as an easier way in which their big money could be laundered. Meanwhile prices were going up faster than the state pension (Larisa, Group 4); and although the minimum wage had been raised from R2,500 to R4,000 a month (in 2008, about $160), ‘how could you live on such an income?’ (Viktor, from the same group).

It was, of course, a universal to believe that government looked after its own interests rather better than those of the mass public that had returned it to office, yet other countries had mechanisms, such as the rule of law and genuinely competitive elections, that helped to restrain the greed of elected officials and exposed them periodically to the possibility of dismissal. At least in the view of ordinary Russians, there was no system internationally—at least, none in the West—that ensured that the conduct of central government was entirely and exclusively devoted to the wellbeing of ordinary citizens. There were, however, certainly differences of degree, on the evidence of our survey responses (Table 5). More than three-quarters of our Russian respondents thought ordinary people had no influence over central government in their own country, or almost none; in the West, as our respondents saw it, it was not much more than half who thought ordinary people had little or no influence of this kind. Opinion in Ukraine was almost as sceptical about the ability of ordinary citizens to exercise influence in their own country, but still more positive about the extent to which the mass public had apparently been able to secure an effective degree of control over the conduct of government in the major Western democracies.

TABLE 5 
Comparing Political Efficacy, 2010

	In Russia	‘In the West’	In Ukraine	‘In the West’
To what extent can ordinary people influence the central government?
To a significant extent	2	8	2	24
To some extent	17	22	19	30
To an insignificant extent	25	17	34	11
Not at all	53	38	42	21
Source: as Table 4. Russians and Ukrainians were also asked to evaluate the extent to which ordinary people could influence the central government in their own countries and ‘in Western countries like Great Britain, Germany and the United States’; rounded percentages; other responses account for residuals.

Conclusions

Focus groups provide no more than part of an understanding of a complex and continually renegotiated relationship between regime and society, but at least in principle, they allow us to access the ‘actor's frame of reference’: the perspective of participants themselves, in their own words, and without the bias that is unavoidably introduced by an attempt to capture that perspective in questionnaire responses developed outside the culture itself. We lose any sense of distribution, beyond the participants themselves; and we lose the ability to compare over time and across space that the survey method makes possible; but to precisely the same extent, we gain an insight into the views of those directly involved of a kind that is afforded by no other methodology. Our approach, in this study, has been to regard focus group evidence as complementary to other forms of evidence, not an alternative, and best employed when it is considered against this wider background. In this case, we have sought at every stage to consider the statements of focus group participants against the context that is provided by survey responses, in Russia itself and in other countries.

Several views emerged with particular clarity. It was striking, for instance, how few of our participants regarded elections of the Russian kind as a means of holding government to account—and if necessary, replacing it. Those who were broadly supportive of the Kremlin were supportive because they approved of the policies it was promoting, such as increasing the value of state pensions, and believed those policies represented the best interests of the society as a whole; but not because the government itself had been their ‘choice’. Indeed, there were some who supported the Kremlin and its policies in spite of the fact that they had little confidence in the ‘joke of a presidential candidate’ it had put forward in March 2008, or the one-sided campaign that had secured his election. Equally, where there was dissatisfaction with the Kremlin it was generally because of the effects of its policies, not because of the way in which the president and the ruling party had been able to secure the right to govern. What did it matter anyway, if people were living well? Would it not simply make governing more difficult if ordinary people were allowed to take part in it? What was the point of even trying to do so, if the authorities were in a position to arrange whatever result they wanted?

The survey evidence certainly makes clear that a substantial part of the large majority that had voted for United Russia and Dmitri Medvedev could be attributed to the satisfaction that derived from the policies with which they were associated, above all higher living standards (McAllister & White 2008; White & McAllister 2008). Levels of turnout were very close to the proportions that had indicated they would be likely to take part, and levels of support for the parties and candidates were very close to those that had been predicted in the final opinion polls.16 For the head of the Central Electoral Commission, results of this kind left little doubt that the result of the elections had been a fair reflection of the wishes of the voters.17 The focus group evidence helps to identify some of the ‘administrative’ measures that lay behind these impressive levels of support. One of the most important was the change that had taken place in the appointment of governors at the end of 2004, ending their direct election and introducing a system in which they had to be nominated by the president and approved by local assemblies. Governors, as our focus group participants pointed out, became increasingly attentive to those on whom they now depended, and increasingly concerned to produce the kind of voting figures that would ensure their own advantage.

How were these priorities carried into practical effect? On the evidence of our focus group participants, one of the most important methods was to apply pressure in schools and places of employment. Press reports had already suggested some of the ways in which the state itself had been directly involved in the Duma election campaign, maximising support for United Russia and disadvantaging its various opponents. In Nizhnii Novgorod, foremen went around the workforce at the city's massive vehicle factory telling them to vote for Putin's party and to phone in after they had left the polling station; parents were ordered to attend mandatory meetings with United Russia representatives at their children's schools; the pupils themselves were threatened with bad grades if they refused to take part in ‘children's referendums’; students were told they would be evicted from their dormitories unless they voted for the ruling party (they went out and ‘voted like a line of soldiers’) (Levy 2008, pp. 1, 14). As focus group participants reported, factory managers elsewhere had issued very similar instructions. In Novomoskovsk, as we were told, the manager of a local factory was himself a member of the ruling party, and had simply told all his employees to vote for it. In Kaluga it had been the same story: strong pressure from the factory management to vote, and for whom in particular.

For whose who wished to express a dissenting view, there were many ways in which their opportunity to do so could be restricted or entirely eliminated. There was little confidence, in our survey evidence, in other means of attempting to influence the Russian government, such as demonstrating or writing letters to the local or national authorities. Demonstrations, it was thought, would have little effect. Or they would be broken up, perhaps violently. The media were overwhelmingly dominated by the Kremlin: ‘you couldn't put on the television’, complained Elena in Group 1. ‘Just agitation. If there hadn't been television, no-one would have known about this Medvedev.’ The mass meetings of the 1990s had gone, explained Zhangir in Group 7, ‘and now we see on television how they break them up’. Supportive meetings were, of course, less difficult to organise. Natal'ya, for instance, in Group 7, had taken part in a picket of the Estonian embassy in Moscow that had been organised by the pro-regime youth organisation ‘Nashi’; or you could write to the reception office that the presidency had organised in Kaluga, ‘and you will get a reply’. Under current circumstances, however, it was only the ‘nomenklatura’ that had any influence ‘because everything [was] formalised and the feedback links between the authorities and the people [were] blocked’ (Oleg, in the same group).

There was strikingly little confidence in the agencies that might seek to aggregate the interests of ordinary citizens and represent them in such circumstances. Certainly not trade unions—according to our groups, they were a presence in the Kaluga trolleybus park but otherwise almost invisible, and indeed scarcely relevant: ‘A nineteenth century idea’, explained Roman in Group 8, with ‘zero effectiveness in contemporary society’. Something Lenin had written about at the time, added Andrei. ‘At one time they [had been] an important part of the Soviet system, and the trade union leaders [had been] respected people’, suggested Sergei, from the same group, ‘but now there is nothing of the kind’. Non-governmental organisations were widely seen as a Western implantation that had almost disappeared after the legislative changes at the start of 2006. There was a single dominant party, and any others were effectively controlled by the Kremlin or outside the political process entirely. United Russia, indeed, was hardly a party at all, in the view of some participants, any more than the CPSU had been a party; it was more a ‘governmental support’ (Oleg, in Group 7), or a ‘mechanism for winning elections’ that had been necessary at the time (Dmitri, in Group 8). Who needed the minor parties in any case, asked Elena (Group 7), ‘if all normal people vote for United Russia’?

In the end, perhaps the largest questions were those about the regime itself. If its policies were widely supported, it would hardly encounter any difficulties in the electoral arena whether or not the electoral procedures were themselves authoritarian; but if its policies began to lose support, distributional issues would become more important. There were certainly very few who offered us the view that a particular set of policies had been pursued because they reflected the will of the electorate, and should be supported for that reason. Rather, ‘they decided it all themselves, without the people’. All would be clear if they looked at how state officials and the United Russia leadership lived their own lives, as Alla explained in Group 8: ‘They are up above, and we are down below’. In this respect, the gulf between regime and society that Putin had identified at the time of the 2007 election campaign had not been closed; nor had the much older gap between the ‘two Russias’. Authoritarian elections, in the end, simply restated the problem. A regime that pursued popular policies would be supported, however it had been elected; but a regime that was less popular would find it difficult to retain its position on the basis of an electoral process that it had emptied of useful content.

Notes

The focus group evidence on which this essay principally relies was gathered by the Institute of Applied Politics in Moscow with the support of ESRC grant RES-062-23-1378. The 2008 survey on which we also draw was conducted by Russian Research with the support of ESRC grant RES-000-22-2352 as part of a collaborative award to Stephen White and Ian McAllister of the Australian National University; our 2010 survey was conducted by the same agency and supported by the ESRC under grant RES 062-23-1378 and the Australian Research Council under grant LX0883137 to Ian McAllister. We are grateful to Ol'ga Kryshtanovskaya and her colleagues in the Institute of Applied Politics in Moscow for their assistance in conducting the focus groups, particularly Ol'ga Voronkova. An early draft was written while Stephen White was a Program Visitor at the School of Politics and International Relations of the Australian National University in Canberra and later versions were presented at the annual conference of the UK Political Studies Association at Edinburgh in March 2010 and the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association at Washington DC in September 2010.

¹See for instance Alexander (1997) and Volkov and Grazhdankin (2008).

²In Western societies over-reporting of this kind can regularly exceed 20% (Karp & Brockington 2005, p. 825).

³For a particularly striking report relating to the traditionally Muslim republic of Dagestan see Remmler (2006). In this example, the Russian language was gradually disappearing, women were reluctant to reply to questions without instructions from their husbands, and respondents typically expected to be paid in the same way as they were routinely rewarded for other purposes, such as collecting the signatures that were necessary to register a party's electoral list. Gerber and Mendelson (2003, p. 188) have drawn attention to the maladministration of a survey by the VTsIOM affiliate in the Altai region as a ‘cautionary reminder’ of the technical problems that continue to beset such exercises.

⁴There is a substantial methodological literature. See for instance Litosseliti (2003), Hennink (2007), Barbour (2007) and Krueger and Casey (2009). There is also a Russian-language literature, which includes Belyanovsky (2001), Levinson and Stuchevskaya (2003) and Mel'nikova (2007).

⁵ Rossiiskaya gazeta, 14 November 2007, p. 1.

⁶See the official election communiqués in Vestnik Tsentral'noi izbiratel'noi komissii Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 19, 2007, pp. 5–6; Vestnik Tsentral'noi izbiratel'noi komissii Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 3, 2008, pp. 215–16.

⁷A few members of our study groups had forgotten if they had voted at all, although the discussions took place only a few months after polling day.

⁸The most startling of all such results in December 2007 was in the Khabez constituency in the Karachai-Cherkess republic, where all 17,779 voters were reported to have exercised their democratic rights; not only this, they had all voted for United Russia and not a single ballot had been invalid (Buzin & Lyubarev 2008, p. 116).

⁹Across the 29 countries included in the exercise, the mean was 7.6 on a 10-point scale and the highest score was Denmark, at 9.5; Russia was the fifth-lowest, at 5.7, and Ukraine the third-lowest, at 5.1. (We are grateful to Ian McAllister for these and other computations.)

¹⁰Myagkov et al., in their econometric analysis, conclude that these were hardly ‘elections’ at all and that ‘anywhere between 20 and 25 per cent of United Russia's vote was won in a way that would not pass muster in an established or transitional democracy’ (2009, p. 137).

¹¹Based on a scale in which 1 represented entire agreement that ‘no matter who people vote for it won't make a difference’, and 5 entire disagreement (the question wording is taken from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems second module, variable B3014; further information and entire data sets may be downloaded at www.cses.org).

¹²On our evidence, for instance, 46% of Russians thought political parties had no interest in the concerns of ordinary people (points 4 and 5 on a 5-point scale, 2010 survey); on CSES evidence just 24% took this view in the United Kingdom, and 25% in the United States.

¹³This is a concept that ‘lies at the heart of many explanations of civic activity and involvement, and has been measured in many different ways’, with its origins in Almond and Verba's notion of ‘subjective competence’ (Verba et al. 1995, p. 346; for the political formulation see Almond and Verba (1963, chapter 7)).

¹⁴See Tucker (1972, pp. 121–42), who in turn traces the concept of a ‘dual Russia’ to Alexander Herzen in the nineteenth century.

¹⁵ Izvestiya, 6 February 2004, p. 1.

¹⁶ Izvestiya, 5 December 2007, p. 2.

¹⁷ Rossiiskaya gazeta, 5 December 2007, p. 3.

Appendix. The focus groups and their participants

Group 1: Obninsk, Moscow region, 25 June 2008, eight participants

1.	Yuri, born 1971, auditor, higher education.
2.	Yuliya, born 1962, financier, higher education.
3.	Yevgenii, born 1981, manager of a construction company, college education.
4.	Yelena, born 1982, librarian, college education.
5.	Aleksei, born 1934, a pensioner working as a security guard in a clinic, secondary education.
6.	Marina, born 1964, teacher, higher education.
7.	Oleg, born 1983, programmer, college education.
8.	Polina, born 1938, a pensioner working as a concierge, college education.

Group 2: Mytishchi, Moscow region, 26 June 2008, nine participants

1.	Galina, born 1946, engineer by profession, now a pensioner, higher technical education.
2.	Ol'ga, born 1986, official in a municipal office, incomplete arts higher education.
3.	Marina, born 1983, a sports trainer, sports institute education.
4.	Alexander, born 1972, entrepreneur, higher arts education.
5.	Vera, born 1988, a university arts student in her third year.
6.	Yuliya, born 1986, an office manager, legal college education.
7.	Galina, born 1964, college teacher, higher technical education.
8.	Igor’, born 1950, pensioner, secondary education.
9.	Ivan, born 1984, sales manager.

Group 3: Novomoskovsk, Tula region, 25 June 2008, seven participants

1.	Anatolii, born 1949, head of a security firm, higher legal education.
2.	Nikolai, born 1958, entrepreneur (and former state security official), higher military education.
3.	Nikolai Nikolaevich, born 1942, pensioner, college education.
4.	Yaroslav, born 1984, manager, higher economic education.
5.	Marina, born 1976, housewife, secondary education.
6.	Tat'yana, born 1946, pensioner, college education.
7.	Anna, born 1980, lawyer, higher legal education.

Group 4: Podol'sk, Moscow region, 28 June 2008, eight participants

1.	Viktor, born 1950, worker, secondary education.
2.	Irina, born 1957, book-keeper, college education.
3.	Larisa, born 1952, cook, college education.
4.	Andrei, born 1963, manager, college education.
5.	Liliya, born 1965, market salesperson, higher education.
6.	Vyacheslav, born 1951, head of a section in a compressor workshop, college education.
7.	Nina, born 1954, conveyer operator, secondary education.
8.	Anatolii, born 1940, pensioner, secondary education.

Group 5: Kaluga, 28 June 2008, eight participants

1.	Igor’, born 1961, engineer, higher technical education.
2.	Valerii, born 1940, pensioner, college education.
3.	Yuri, born 1956, guard, higher military education.
4.	Vladimir, born 1950, teacher, higher pedagogical education.
5.	Konstantin, born 1985, economist, higher economic education.
6.	Raisa, born 1951, dentist, higher medical education.
7.	Yana, born 1941, pensioner, secondary education.
8.	Yekaterina, born 1983, designer, college education.

Group 6: Kursk, 15 July 2008, seven participants

1.	Viktoriya, born 1965, personnel officer, higher technical education.
2.	Valentina, born 1958, housing official, higher engineering education.
3.	Galina, born 1954, economist, higher economic education.
4.	Yuliya, born 1980, book-keeper, higher economic education.
5.	Yuri, born 1951, driver, higher technical education.
6.	Sergei, born 1962, entrepreneur, higher humanitarian education.
7.	Dmitri, born 1983, sales manager, higher technical education.

Group 7: Kaluga, 15 January 2010, seven participants

1.	Natal'ya, born 1982, accountant, college education.
2.	Yelena, born 1968, trolleybus management employee.
3.	Sergei, born 1948, retired engineer.
4.	Mikhail, born 1992, student at a commercial college.
5.	Andrei, born 1990, student at Moscow Aviation Institute.
6.	Roman, born 1977, postgraduate at Moscow State Juridical Academy.
7.	Oleg, born 1970, history schoolteacher.

Group 8: Ul'yanovsk, 22 January 2010, eight participants

1.	Oksana, born 1984, nurse.
2.	Zhangir, born 1970, history teacher.
3.	Alla, born 1950, pensioner, philology graduate.
4.	Yuri, born 1947, staff member at Ul'yanovsk State Pedagogical University, higher degree in law.
5.	Yekaterina, born 1980, housing advisor.
6.	Dmitri, born 1976, specialist in consulting.
7.	Oleg, born 1988, student at Ul'yanovsk Technical University.
8.	Mariya, born 1990, student at the Polytechnical Institute.