Questioning Putin’s Popularity

Abstract

Russia’s pre-eminent leader, Vladimir Putin, has always had very high approval ratings, as both president and prime minister. This article argues that Russia’s electoral authoritarian political system is an essential precondition of these ratings. The discussion begins by presenting comparative evidence suggesting that prolonged, very high approval ratings are only possible in authoritarian states. Then the article examines Putin’s record in office, which is the main explanation for his popularity. The analysis shows (by drawing on comparative evidence) that while there have been achievements, overall Putin’s record is not a sufficient explanation for such high ratings. Finally, the article examines ways in which Russia’s authoritarian political system works to bolster Putin’s approval rating. The article concludes that authoritarianism, while not the only explanation, is the sine qua non of Putin’s approval ratings.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors are grateful to Archie Brown, Paul Chaisty, Paul Goode, Minsu Jang, Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia, and Andrei Rogatchevski for their assistance with this article, and to Derek Hutcheson, Ian McAllister, and Stephen White for kindly making the Russian Research Surveys available to the authors.

The following Russian Research Surveys are used in this article. All surveys used nationally representative samples and are used by kind permission of the original compilers.

• Russian Research Survey (2008): Derek S. Hutcheson, Stephen White, and Ian McAllister, National Representative Survey dataset, co-funded by British Academy Small Research Grant BA-40918 (Derek Hutcheson) and UK ESRC grant RES-000-22-2532 (Ian McAllister and Stephen White), fieldwork conducted by Russian Research Ltd, 30 January–27 February 2008, N=2,000.

• Russian Research Survey (2012): Stephen White and Ian McAllister, National Representative Survey dataset, funded by UK ESRC grant ES/J004731/1, fieldwork conducted by Russian Research Ltd, 3–23 January 2012, N=1,600.

• Russian Research Survey (2014): Stephen White, Jane Duckett, Ian McAllister, and Neil Munro, National Representative Survey dataset, funded by UK ESRC grants ES/J012688/1 and ES/J004731/1, fieldwork conducted by Russian Research Ltd, 25 January–17 February 2014, N=1,601.

Notes

1. A classic statement of this kind was made by Stephen Sackur (2015), host of the BBC’s show Hardtalk. Putin, he said, has “approval ratings any western leader would dream of,” adding that these “are percentages that you just can’t argue with.”

2. This argument is often implicit; an explicit statement of this kind is made by Blot (2016).

3. Also, their discussions of authoritarianism principally concern control of the media; additional features of the regime are considered here.

4. This, we note, contradicts Treisman’s own earlier (2011) argument.

5. Treisman, “Presidential Popularity,” 592.

6. Approval ratings for U.S. presidents are taken, here and throughout, from the Gallup polls archived by the American Presidency Project.

7. No British prime minster has had an approval rating of over 60% since Tony Blair at the end of 2001. Barack Obama had ratings in the 60s only in the honeymoon period of his first year in office. Ratings for British Prime Ministers, here and throughout, are from Ipsos-Mori Satisfaction Ratings.

8. We also note that most of these states were more authoritarian than Russia for the period in question.

9. For further analysis of these leaders, see Huskey (2016).

10. The question asked is: “Do you approve or disapprove of the job performance of the leadership of this country?” As such this study does not specifically concern presidential approval ratings. See Guriev and Treisman (2016, 8).

11. Again, obviously, these data do not specifically concern presidential approval ratings.

12. One of the territories surveyed by the World Values Survey is Hong Kong. Freedom House does not provide data for Hong Kong.

13. And only four in the top twenty are “Free.”

14. It is notable that countries with the highest freedom score of 1 tend to score particularly poorly, with nearly all ranked in the bottom half.

15. Our article is specifically concerned with Putin’s approval rating. For this reason additional explanations for voting behavior, such as those identified by Colton and Hale (2009), who maintain that policy positions and leadership qualities are also important (although less so than performance), are not considered here.

16. Just one indicator of this recovery is that, as World Bank data show, Russian GDP per capita (PPP) increased from $5,900 in 1999 to $24,500 in 2015 (World Bank Open Data).

17. The Baltic states are excluded and no meaningful data were available for Turkmenistan.

18. Russia’s initial recovery was assisted by the sharp devaluation of the ruble that occurred following the 1998 crisis. Thereafter the energy sector was the main factor driving growth (Hanson 2010, 189).

19. Putin’s foreign military actions—in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria—have all been popular and have been associated with several of the peaks of his approval rating. Putin’s first war, a domestic affair in Chechnya, was also highly popular in 1999–2000.

20. Pew Research Center (2014, 2015) reports show that Russia and Putin were viewed increasingly unfavorably around the world in 2014 and 2015.

21. More is said specifically about the situation post-Crimea below.

22. The salience of these variables varies over time.

23. See, notably, Dawisha (2014).

24. All GDP figures in this section are from the World Bank (World Bank Open Data).

25. Putin’s approval rating dipped noticeably in the summer of 2018 following the announcement of a reform raising the retirement age. This is discussed below.

26. A key finding of the comparative literature on economic voting, for instance, finds that voters reward governments for economic success but punish them when the economy falters. There is, moreover, evidence of a “grievance asymmetry” whereby voters punish failure more than they reward success (Reidy, Suiter, and Breen 2018).

27. The only authoritarian influence that Treisman (2011) includes in his model is press freedom. Press freedom, moreover, is a poor measure of the influence of media bias on presidential approval.

28. For an illuminating discussion of the perils of applying methods used to study democracies to authoritarian states see Ahram and Goode (2016).

29. Freedom House rankings are not beyond criticism, concerning methodology or political bias, but they are widely used and respected. While there can be legitimate debate about the precise ranking, the overall authoritarian trend is beyond serious dispute. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index records a similar authoritarian turn in Russia under Putin.

30. An important early contribution was Wilson (2005); notable recent treatments include Gel’man (2015) and Gill (2015).

31. Levada polls for 2009–2016 show that 85–94% of respondents got their news most often from television. Television is also the most trusted source of news. “Doverie SMI” (Levada Center).

32. This is reflected in a Freedom House Freedom of the Press ranking that has declined from 60 (partly free) in 2002 to 83 (not free) in 2017 (where 0 = most free and 100 = least free).

33. Putin, for instance, often reprimands government ministers and regional governors on television for their failings. Problems are also often blamed on outside forces, principally of late the United States. See Pomerantsev, “The Kremlin’s Information War,” 40.

34. A recent monitoring study is “Messages of Russian TV” (EaP Civil Society Forum 2015.

35. The parties all supported the annexation of Crimea. They also did not participate in the 2011–2012 protests against the regime. (A few dissident members of A Just Russia did and were punished by their party for doing so.)

36. For a recent study see Gel’man (2016).

37. This includes, importantly, increased control and co-optation of civic organizations, and the colonization of civil society by state-backed groups.

38. For an argument along these lines (focusing on sanctions) see Kazun (2016).

39. The approval ratings of Prime Minister Medvedev and his government, by contrast, fell to lows of 28% and 33% respectively (according to Levada data).

40. The charges in the “cronyism and corruption” scandal that resulted in the impeachment of Park Geun Hye, the president of South Korea, for example, are trivial in comparison with the general level of malfeasance associated with Putin’s regime.

41. The first year of Putin’s career is a partial exception. On rare occasions when Putin was exposed to the public, notably following the sinking of the submarine the Kursk, he did not perform well.

42. The theoretical basis for this approach to moderated mediation is provided by Baron and Kenny (1986), Hayes (2013), and Preacher, Rucker, and Hayes (2007).

43. The work by Guriev and Treisman (2016) is an important start.