On double miss in Russian studies: can social and political psychology help?

ABSTRACT

This essay highlights the potential analytical leverage from the import of recent approaches in social and political psychology into the study of politics in Russia. The core argument is that social psychology offers suitable conceptual and analytical tools to explore the political phenomena that have come to the forefront of social and political processes in Russia over the past decade. Social psychology is best at dealing with collective emotions and allows for integrating into the political analysis such affective issues as resentment, national humiliation, and collective victimhood. It also enables the appreciation and exploration of the phenomenon of political leadership from a collective perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Russian studies
• interdisciplinarity
• collective emotions
• politics

Introduction

Social scientists aspire and work to develop credible and verifiable analyses of social phenomena using robust, empirical methodologies. Yet scientific evolution itself is not linear. It is shaped by social factors and, if we follow Thomas Kuhn’s ideas, at any given moment scientists work within a disciplinary matrix (a shared paradigm) that defines the boundaries of research, sets the core assumptions and norms of undertaking research, and the universe of questions legible within that shared paradigm (Kuhn 1962). This “normal science” phase allows for knowledge accumulation and progresses until the time when a community of scientists comes to the realization that the number of unexplained puzzles requires a paradigmatic shift.

Studies of political behavior, institutions, and processes have always been central to the political science discipline and have generated much progress in our understanding of politics around the world (Goodin 2009). When Russian studies emerged out of the field of Sovietology – which due to the Cold War context and lack of access to data occupied a niche of its own – political scientists studying Russia have invested massive efforts to bring Russian studies into the mainstream theoretical and methodological developments within the political science discipline. Timothy Frye’s recent Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia (2021) highlights some of the notable analytical achievements that have resulted from this endeavor. And Regina Smyth’s virtuoso essay in this issue (Smyth 2023) strikes a perfect balance between recognizing the remarkable developments in the field and calling for a more, non-zero sum, interaction between disciplinary and area studies.

Frye’s overview shows that that the ongoing knowledge accumulation in the vibrant field of Russian studies has been mostly advanced within the framework of new institutionalism and political behavior analysis. The radical institutional transformation in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union coinciding with the growing realization within political science and economics that institutions are central for political and economic outcomes made this research direction most promising and compelling (Peters 2019). The prolific scholarship within this tradition has become a testament to the successful transition of the study of Russian politics to the “normal science” processes within the political science discipline and away from the exceptionalism of Sovietology. The growing studies of mass political attitudes, electoral behavior, and mobilization in the post-Soviet region have supported this trend. The new generation of Russian and post-communist scholars learned new tricks of the trade, diving into experimental research, extensive survey-based studies, game-theoretic analyses and modeling.

The vibrancy and healthy ambition within Russian studies notwithstanding, the reality of actual developments in Russia over the past decade has been deeply humbling for many experts. Even the most insightful of the analysts failed to predict Russia’s brazen annexation of Crimea in 2014 and a full military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It was as if our focus on politics as a “constrained use of power” was overwhelmed by our attention to constraints, while underappreciating agency, and the processes through which these constraints were eliminated (Goodin and Klingemann 1996, 10). The irrelevance of institutions (as constraints) and personalization of power and decision-making in Russia has grown over time. So much so that, today, many research questions that have motivated the field over the past few years have lost their relevance in the new political environment, while the field is left to scramble for alternative data sources, fresh analytical tools, and new research puzzles.

Similarly, the studies of political behavior in Russia have relied on survey research underpinned by individual-centered psychological models drawn from the US tradition of public behavior and opinion formation analysis. These models missed the potency of sociological influences and group-based identities in opinion formation and the role of social context in determining individual preference-ordering in Russia (Sharafutdinova 2022). New models and approaches to public opinion formation will need to pay more attention to these contextual factors and the effects of group identity activation, when relevant. Therefore, calls for more interdisciplinarity and engaging with insights from history and sociology – as Tomila Lankina argues in her essay in this special issue (Lankina 2023) – or anthropology, psychology, and cultural studies, are very timely. As a community, we need to welcome new questions, approaches, and analytical perspectives in political science.

To promote a conversation on the need for analytical innovation, in this essay I focus on the promise associated with social psychology and the potential analytical leverage from the import of recent approaches in social and political psychology into the study of politics in Russia. My core argument here is that social psychology offers suitable conceptual and analytical tools to explore the political phenomena that have come to the forefront of social and political processes in Russia. Social psychology is best at dealing with collective emotions and allows for integrating into the political analysis such affective issues as resentment, national humiliation, and collective victimhood. It also enables the appreciation and exploration of the phenomenon of political leadership from a collective perspective. Leadership issues are arguably central to political processes around the world. However, institutionalist approaches that have given much vibrancy to political science over the last three decades do not allow for a systematic analysis of leadership processes outside institutional frameworks and, as a result, leadership studies in the Russian context have been confined mostly to numerous biographies of Vladimir Putin or attempts to reconstruct different Russian elite networks (known as “the Kremlin towers”) engaged in an under-the-carpet competition and struggle for wealth and power (Baturo and Elkink 2021). Studies of mass political attitudes and behavior in Russia, on the other hand, can benefit tremendously from the innovation associated with bringing social and political psychology to the study of authoritarianism.

Collective emotions and Russian politics

The study of emotions and their role in political processes has been slowly but surely gaining momentum in the political science discipline and international relations over the last decade or so (Marcus et al. 2008; Lynggaard 2019). In Russian political studies, a systematic focus on emotions is still an exception, even if an increasing number of observers have brought attention to the relevance of such terms as resentment (ressentiment), national humiliation, and a desire for status and recognition when explaining Putinism, Russia’s foreign policy, and the patterns of mass attitudes in Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. It has now become a mainstream understanding that Russia’s foreign policy as well as the regime’s political legitimation strategies rely heavily on the collectively shared and actively propagated sense of ressentiment associated with the lost greatness of the Soviet Union as well as a sense of victimhood associated with the trauma of transition in the 1990s (Clunan 2009, 2014; Malinova 2014; Sharafutdinova 2020). Russian observers have, of course, noted the post-Crimea euphoria – a new momentum of transformed public sentiments – that has motivated new research on the role of emotions in Russian politics. Responding to that demand, Greene and Robertson (2022) have explored an increased positive emotional engagement in Russia following the Crimea annexation and its significance for propping the support for and popularity of the Russian president. Yet studies taking emotions seriously proved more of an exception than the rule. Systematic research on collective emotions in Russia and their role in politics beyond the post-Crimea environment is sorely missing. In the new context of war today such studies are needed more than ever.

Where can we look for an inspiration and direction in this new research orientation? Recent studies of ressentiment in political psychology offer the new tools needed to study the complex emotional mechanism of ressentiment in a more systematic fashion and in a comparative context. Mikko Salmela (University of Helsinki) and Tereza Capelos (University of Birmingham) have advanced a new theorizing of ressentiment as a compensatory psychological phenomenon that has been associated with reactionary politics in a democratic context, and this conceptualization could and should be translated into an authoritarian political context, too. Salmela and Capelos argue that ressentiment thrives among the powerless and dis-privileged; those who see their position to be precarious and vulnerable. It is associated with negative emotions of envy, shame, and anger as well as the feelings of inferiority and impotence. These emotions are the main emotional fodder and mechanism in grievance politics that are used by populist politicians around the world (Berman 2021; Marcus 2021).

Such insights from social and political psychology have already brought tremendous benefits to research on the drivers of populism in the West (Berman 2021; Marcus 2021). The focus on grievance-driven politics from a social psychological perspective allows us to account for its role in political mobilization, moral judgment in politics, and intergroup conflict (Ditto and Rodriguez 2021). The recognition of the importance of affective politics and research into the role of emotions in democracies have been growing. Enriching the study of Russian and authoritarian politics with these insights is also a challenge in need of greater attention.

Salmela and Capelos dive further into the psychological processes of how these emotions are validated and consolidated in social settings and how they play a compensatory role, displacing a sense of inferiority with the new “all-good self” and “all-bad other(s).” They argue that part of such transformation is the process of transvaluation, when the previously desired objects and values are rejected. They also suggest that ressentiment goes through four observable stages: triggering, initiating, advancing, and consolidation (Salmela and Capelos 2021, 196–199). And, in a social setting can produce other shared emotions such as group pride, feelings of togetherness, and solidarity – thereby serving as a group bond.

While focusing on the psychological mechanism of ressentiment at the individual level, these researchers acknowledge the role of social context and sharing, thereby allowing to bring into analysis such drivers of ressentiment-based politics as political communication and leadership. The recently articulated approach to political leadership that relies on social identity theory enables approaching this issue from the group perspective and links the micro-level understanding of individuals to macro-level processes and outcomes.

Taking political leadership and political communication seriously

Politics is a collective process and grievance, victimhood, and ressentiment-driven politics is a collective phenomenon as well. As such, it does not exist without group formation and groups do not form without group leaders. Finding a new synergy between social identity theory and leadership studies, Alexander Haslam, Stephen Reicher, and Michael Platow (2020) advanced a “new psychology of leadership” that speaks about power and influence in a social context. This approach is keenly relevant for political scientists who are interested in the processes of power acquisition and has been used to explain leadership patterns in countries such as the United States and Russia (Reicher and Haslam 2017; Sharafutdinova 2020). This fresh perspective accounts for the fundamental, individual-level psychological significance of the social self, constructed from an individual’s membership in and association with different groups (including national belonging).

Leadership processes and exerting social influence in this approach are intertwined with the construction of the salience of the group and with the promotion of group interests and group status. Leadership is effective when group members perceive the leader as someone who is “making sense of the group” and who “makes the group matter.” Effective leaders move the perception of group identity from its present reality to the place the group members want to see their group in the future. Effective leaders consolidate groups and make them more cohesive, generating collective enthusiasm about belonging to the group.

Such a more holistic and complex view of the individual in politics, that takes into account different elements of the self as well as the role of the social context in conditioning individual preferences, is – arguably – an important qualifier of some recent approaches to authoritarianism that focus on propaganda. Guriev and Treisman’s (2020) theory of “informational autocracy,” for example, builds on a groundbreaking observation that in the times of new communication technologies autocrats do not need to rely so much on repression and violence anymore. They possess new tools of mass persuasion and other opportunities to shape public opinion and to demonstrate leaders’ competence. However, a sole focus on propaganda and information manipulation does not allow for taking political communication in Russia seriously because it does not account for the complexity of individual perceptions formation. The focus on propaganda ends up with a view of brainwashed people zombified by television. The deeply held psychological needs of collective belonging and collective pride – which propaganda masters might effectively target – are not accorded significance, as a result.

Such simplistic views produce wrong policy conclusions, e.g. that removing the biased media and improving education will resolve the problems. The need for alternative political forces to articulate a vision of collective belonging in the present and in the future in positive and authentic terms is then downplayed or simply ignored. Ivan and Holmes (2020) suggested that it is this omission that might be behind the most fundamental failure of liberalism that resulted in the rise of illiberal forces in Eastern Europe and, indeed, other parts of the globe. Without its grounding in social psychology, this understanding is hard to come by.

Collective victimhood of the dominant group

The social psychology of collective victimhood – a branch of scholarship that has been expanding rapidly over the last few years – is another research trajectory that contains much promise for making sense of Russian politics in the twenty-first century (Vollhardt 2020). Reicher and Ulusahin (2020), for example, have brought attention to the victimhood processes within dominant groups, where the members of high-power groups fear loss or perceive that they have lost out already. It is such contexts that we should worry about the most, argue Reicher and Ulusahin (2020, 277): “It is when dominant groups position themselves as potential or actual victims that the most toxic consequences follow.” Their observations about the role of leaders and construction of such perceptions of loss, the extent to which collective resentment is bound up with the sense of entitlement, and the promise of the recovery of what is lost appear prescient for explaining the social and political context leading up to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, public reaction after the annexation, and Russia’s more recent military invasion of Ukraine. The analysis of Russia’s insecure identity, collective victimhood, and the sense of entitlement associated with the lost Soviet exceptionalism – are all illuminated through the social psychological approach that combines the concept of collective victimhood with the issue of a formerly dominant group that is struggling to regain what is lost.

Conclusion

The above-described concepts and approaches developed in social psychology are powerful because they are applicable universally and account for fundamental psychological processes at the group and individual levels in any country. Incorporating them into the study of Russian politics and society – and authoritarian politics, more generally – would not mean departing from generalizable knowledge sought out by social scientists trained with expectations of constructing knowledge that could be verified through robust methodologies and analysis. To the contrary, they enable original comparisons – such as comparisons across different political regimes – that are rarely attempted by political scientists. Such comparisons seem ever more relevant with the global rise of populism and political challenges in countries long perceived to be stable democracies. They also allow for developing smarter survey questions and survey experiments that could account for a more complex understanding of an individual. These social psychological perspectives also carry a noble idea that individuals are by nature equal. The post-Crimea debates about Homo sovieticus and the renewed global pessimism in the Russian citizenry allowing (and even at times supporting) the war against Ukraine lead observers in a different direction of thinking and perceiving. Social and political psychology could be leveraged to bring together individual and social-level perspectives and account for political processes and leadership, giving the elites and the masses their credit and their due in a given social and historical context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).