In the era of seemingly ubiquitous “fake news” and reportedly resurgent propaganda, the sociologist’s maxim that “perception is reality” gets a bad rap. Behind both civic and academic anxieties about the distortions caused by a combination of poorly understood communications technologies and increasingly malevolent communicators themselves lies a desire to prove that “reality is reality”, and thus somehow remove subjective perception from the cognitive process.
I’m afraid this issue of Russian Politics & Law won’t help with that particular task.
The idea that “perception is reality”—far from undermining the concept of reality itself—is meant to remind us of a simple truth: if we are interested in studying people’s behavior, then we need to recognize that behavior is driven by perception. It is not the fact of a bank balance that drives consumption decisions: it is the consumer’s perception of whether that balance is sufficient. It is not the fact of a president’s performance that drives his electoral chances: it is the voter’s perception of whether that performance is adequate.
For researchers, that idea has two implications, both of which are at the heart of the articles in this issue. The first implication is that, before we analyze the answers that our research subjects give to the questions we ask of them—whether in surveys, focus groups, interviews or simply through observation—we need to analyze our own questions. The second implication is that, once we have gathered our observations, we need to understand our research subjects in their own terms, before transposing them into ours.
Lev Gudkov begins the issue with a plea for researchers and readers to think more deeply about sociology itself. In his article, the director of the venerable Levada Center—Russia’s most well respected independent sociological research group—launches a powerful and passionate broadside against a growing tide of criticism of the data he and his colleagues publish. Frustrated by their inability to gain political traction, either with the elite or the masses, an increasing number of Russian liberals have begun railing at sociology as such, criticizing the mirror rather than the reality it reflects, in Gudkov’s view. This is rooted, he argues, in the dominance of rational choice approaches to analysis, combined with a general inability (or unwillingness) to separate moral and analytical categories. It is an argument with which many will disagree, but for students of Russia who rely on Levada Center data—and that would include virtually all students of Russia—Gudkov’s article provides an invaluable window into how those data are generated.
While Gudkov pushes us to reevaluate our sense of the individual, Emil’ Pain and Sergei Fediunin—professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics and a PhD student at the National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Paris), respectively—seek to “reboot” our understanding of the nation. Using the Russian case as a foundation but with much more wide-ranging implications, the authors propose a conceptual merger of institutionalist and constructionist approaches. This view, which they call “constructivist institutionalism,” allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which ideas and resources interact. From this, in turn, flows an argument that only a restored (and reconstructed) sense of national attachment can give rise to the kind of civic engagement that Russia would require in order to democratize.
Having revisited our analytical approaches and concepts, we move into analysis itself. Alexander Etkind starts us off with a bird’s-eye view of the various vectors of social, economic and political “de-modernization” created by Russia’s continued over-reliance on natural resources. Larisa Kosova picks up from there and delves deeper, delving into Levada Center data to analyze Russian citizens’ understandings of and demands for socio-economic mobility and redistribution. From there, Denis Volkov turns our attention ostensibly to foreign policy, reviewing nearly three decades of surveys on Russians’ attitudes towards the West and the United States in particular. In keeping with Gudkov’s admonitions, however, these views are revealed to be most informative about Russians’ ideas of themselves and their own state.
Finally, Maria Eismont focuses on a particular—and particularly important—subset of Russian citizens: journalists. Continuing on a theme we began with an article by Sergei Parkhomenko in Volume 55, Issues 4–5, Eismont—a journalist turned activist defense lawyer—reviews the challenges, opportunities and compromises faced by those who continue to produce independent journalism outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Here, too, seeing the story from the point of view of its subjects is instructional: no one Eismont interviewed knew how their media outlets would survive the next year, to say nothing of the next five years—and yet no one was giving up.