The social desirability bias in autocrat's electoral ratings: evidence from the 2012 Russian presidential elections

ABSTRACT

In authoritarian regimes, election polls can be vastly polluted by measurement error, namely the social desirability bias, which can contribute to substantial inflation in the publicized estimates of an autocrat's electoral support and voter turnout, seeming to validate falsified election outcomes that match the inflated estimates. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the magnitude of social desirability bias in polling estimates released before and after the 2012 Russian presidential elections by focusing on the implications of Noelle-Neumann's “spiral of silence” theory. The empirical data analysis is based on list experiments from four data samples collected during the Russian presidential campaign. The estimated magnitude of the social desirability bias in Putin's electoral support is statistically significant and reaches approximately 15%. For voter turnout, however, I find social desirability bias of the same order as in Western democracies. My main conclusions are further validated by an alternative urns experiment conducted by one of the national pollsters. The detection of significant social desirability bias in the Russian presidential campaign raises the issue of survey research quality in authoritarian regimes and its effect on election outcomes.

Acknowledgement

The author is thankful to Walter Mebane for his useful advice and suggestions, the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their important insights. He would also like to express his deepest gratitude to Henry Hale (George Washington University), Timothy Colton (Harvard University), Polina Kozyreva (Higher School of Economics), Alexei Grazhdankin (Levada-Center, Russia), Valery Fedorov and Julia Baskakova (VCIOM, Russia) who helped me with the data collection for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Kirill Kalinin is a doctoral candidate of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Before joining the program he was a Fulbright visiting scholar and Carnegie fellow at the Center of Political Studies (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan). He received his M.A. in Political Science from the European University in St Petersburg and a B.A. in Public Policy from the Volgograd Academy of Public Administration. His main research interests are in the politics of authoritarian regimes, Russian politics, political methodology, election forensics and survey methodology. He has been involved in multiple collaboration projects and methodological task forces for major Russia's polling organizations, focusing on survey experiments and survey quality analysis. He is also one of the creators of the Election Forensics Toolkit website, a prototype designed to implement fraud detection diagnostics for the use of policy-makers, practitioners, and scholars.

Additional information

Funding

The fieldwork stage of this project was funded by Department of Political Science (University of Michigan).