Effects of a coup attempt on public attitudes under autocracy: quasi-experimental evidence from Russia

ABSTRACT

Elite schisms are known to destabilize autocracies, but there is little scholarship that examines how such splits affect regime support or perceptions of regime stability. We utilize a unique survey that was in the field during a June 2023 coup attempt in Russia to examine this question. By comparing the responses of respondents interviewed before the coup with those interviewed after the coup, we estimate the effect of the coup on a number of attitudes. We find that the coup had no effect on regime support and only a limited (negative) effect on perceptions of regime stability. By contrast, we find that the coup caused a precipitous drop in support for the coup’s leader and that this effect is larger among those who watch state television. The findings suggest that the regime used its control of the information space to swiftly demonize the coup leader and avoid public fallout.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• autocracy
• authoritarian regimes
• coups
• Wagner Group
• Prigozhin Rebellion

Data Availability

The data will be made available upon request by contacting the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2024.2359311.

Notes

1. For example, in a May 2023 open-ended survey question, 4% of respondents named Mr. Prigozhin among the people they could trust—a result exceeded only by four figures, including Mr. Putin himself (Levada 2023a).

2. Some have argued that the coup was not a real coup, because Prigozhin may not have intended to depose the president. Prigozhin himself gave conflicting accounts of his attentions. The primary target of his vitriol was the Ministry of Defense, not Putin, but after Putin called Wagner traitors, Prigozhin stated: “the president is mistaken and soon we’ll have a new president.” Our interest is in the effect of the mutiny on public opinion, and state media on 24 June was clearly portraying the march as seditious.

3. The only exception is support for Defense Minister Shoigu, which decreased by six percent after the coup attempt (see online Appendix Table OA12) Shoigu was the main target of Prigozhin’s ire, so Prigozhin’s supporters might naturally have withdrawn support from Shoigu (Shoigu’s popularity could also have declined among regime supporters, if the mutiny made Shoigu appear weak)

4. The results are also robust if unweighted OLS is used instead (not reported here).

5. In the online Appendix Table OA5 we show that neither TV viewership nor Putin approval were themselves affected by the coup. In particular, we also regress these dependent variables on the treatment dummy, the pretreatment covariates, and the interaction terms between the treatment and each of the covariates; the F-test statistic for the joint significance of the interaction terms is reported in Table OA5 and is not significant.

6. Another plausible story is that preference falsification could have increased after the rebellion was defeated (after 24 June), just as it became clear that Prigozhin and his allies would be marginalized and that the regime was not on the verge of collapse. However, we find that the effect of the coup on support for Prigozhin was the same on 24 June 24 as it was for 25–28 June, when the rebellion had already failed.