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The Putin Vote: Presidential Electorates in a Hybrid Regime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Timothy J. Colton  and
Henry E. Hale
Timothy J. Colton
Affiliation:
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
Henry E. Hale
Affiliation:
Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
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Abstract

What leads people to vote for incumbent presidents in hybrid regimes—political systems that allow at least some real opposition to compete in elections but that greatiy advantage the authorities? Here, the case of Russia is analyzed through survey research conducted as part of the Russian Election Studies (RES) series. The RES has queried nationally representative samples of Russia's population both before and shortly after every post-Soviet presidential election there to date, those in 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008. Since Vladimir Putin himself ran as head of the United Russia slate in the 2007 parliamentary election, voting in that election is also considered. The analysis reveals that Putin has consistently won votes based on personal appeal, opposition to socialism, and a guardedly pro-western foreign policy orientation, among other things. Economic considerations are also very important, though they operate in a way that is more complex than sometimes assumed. President Dmitrii Medvedev generally benefited from these same factors in his election to the presidency.

Type
Managing Political Society in Russia
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 3 , Fall 2009 , pp. 473 - 503
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

We are grateful for the feedback we received from Andrew Barnes, Regina Smyth, Alexei Zakharov, our anonymous reviewers, and participants in the conference “The Frontiers of Political Economics” organized by the Higher School of Economics and New Economic School, Moscow, 30-31 May 2008. This article was made possible in part by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) (under authority of a Title VIII grant from the U.S. Department of State), the Office of Research of the U.S. Department of State, and from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Some of the research reported here was conducted while one author (Hale) was on a Fulbright Scholarship in Russia. The statements made and views expressed within this text are solely the responsibility of the authors and not of the U.S. government, die NCEEER, the NSF, or the Carnegie Corporation. We diank all whose support made this project possible.

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22. There are many accounts of this process. One of the most authoritative is Fish, M. Steven, Democracy Derailed in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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26. For example, the most prominent scholarly publications generated by the Roseled surveys conducted shortly after the 2004 election have been devoted to explaining support for the Putin regime rather than to systematically explaining the actual vote for Putin. See Rose, Richard, Munro, Neil, and Mishler, William, “;Resigned Acceptance of an Incomplete Democracy: Russia's Political Equilibrium,” Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no. 3 (July- September 2004): 195-218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rose, Mishler, and Munro, Russia Transformed.

27. Hale, Henry E., McFaul, Michael, and Colton, Timothy J., “Putin and the ‘Delegative Democracy’ Trap: Evidence from Russia's 2003-04 Elections,” Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no. 4 (October-December 2004): 285–319 Google Scholar; Richard Rose, New Russia Barometer XIII: Putin's Re-Election (Glasgow, Scotland, 2004), 52, cited in White, Stephen and McAllister, Ian, “The Putin Phenomenon,” Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 24, no. 4 (December 2008): 627-59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Levada, Iurii, from Kommersant”, 17 March 2004 Google Scholar, quoted in White, and McAllister, , “The Putin Phenomenon,” 615 Google Scholar.

29. Levada-Tsentr, , Obshchestvennoe mnenie 2004 (Moscow, 2005), chap. 8 Google Scholar.

30. For example, Hassner, Pierre, “Russia's Transition to Autocracy,“ Journal of Democracy 19, no. 2 (April 2008): 5–15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. McAllister, Ian and White, Stephen, “'It's the Economy, Comrade!’ Parties and Voters in the 2007 Russian Duma Election,” Europe-Asia Studies 60, no. 6 (August 2008): 931-57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; White, and McAllister, , “The Putin Phenomenon,” 604-28Google Scholar.

32. Zakharov, Alexei V, “Voting in 2007 Russian Legislative Elections: The Role of Putin's Approval and Ideology” (unpublished paper, 1 July 2008)Google Scholar.

33. During the 1995-96 and 1999-2000 cycles, interviews were conducted in three waves, with respondents (adults only) being interviewed first in the fall before the Duma election, then reinterviewed between the Duma and presidential elections, and then interviewed a final time after die presidential contest. Due to funding constraints, the 2003-04 survey included only a post-Duma and post-presidential wave, while the 2008 survey had only a post-presidential wave that included questions about both the Duma and presidential voting. For 1995-96, the RES queried 2,841 adult Russian citizens from 19 November to 16 December 1995, and 2,776 of them again from 18 December 1995 to 20 January 1996. The third wave surveyed 2,456 from 4 July to 13 September 1996. For 1999-2000, 1,919 adult Russian citizens were interviewed from 13 November to 13 December 1999, and of these 1,842 were reinterviewed from 25 December 1999 to 25 January 2000, while the third wave interviewed 1,748 of them again from 9 April to 10 June 2000. For 2003-04, 1,648 adult Russian citizens were interviewed from 19 December 2003 to 15 February 2004, with 1,496 reinterviewed from 4 April to 11 May 2004. For 2008, 1,130 adult Russian citizens were interviewed from 18 March to 8 May.

34. Their work underlies such publications as Bahry, Donna, Kosolapov, Mikhail, Kozyreva, Polina, and Wilson, Rick K., “Ethnicity and Trust: Evidence from Russia,” American Political Science Review 99, no. 4 (November 2005): 521-32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gibson, James L., “Mass Opposition to the Soviet Putsch of August 1991: Collective Action, Rational Choice, and Democratic Values in the Former Soviet Union,” American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 (September 1997): 671-84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Demoscope, led by Mikhail Kosolapov and Polina Kozyreva, employs a national multistage area probability sampling technique pioneered with respect to Russia in die early 1990s by Kosolapov, Michael Swafford, and Steve Heeringa of the University of Michigan. They use no quotas, accept no substitutions for respondents selected, and check back with 10 percent of respondents for completion of the procedures. They delineate geographical macroregions; select strata within them using probability proportional to population size (with Moscow, Moscow province, and St. Petersburg selected with certainty); and choose one primary sampling unit (PSU) per stratum randomly. Within the PSUs, survey personnel delineate rural and urban substrata, systematically select secondstage units within them, and, at die final stage, do a random selection of households, using the Kish procedure to select one eligible adult from each household. Accordingly, we use the weighting procedures designed by Leslie Kish to generate our estimates concerning the share of the population adhering to a particular disposition.

36. Miller, Warren E. and Shanks, J. Merrill, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass., 1996)Google Scholar.

37. Lewis-Beck, Michael S., Jacoby, William G., Norpoth, Helmut, and Weisberg, Herbert F., The American Voter Revisited (Ann Arbor, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. E.g., Erikson, Roberts, MacKuen, Michael, and Stimson, James A., The Macro Polity (Cambridge, Eng., 2002)Google Scholar.

39. For the use and role of causal sequencing, see Miller and Shanks, New American Voter.

40. Ibid.; Colton, Transitional Citizens.

41. The regressions are conducted among those who reported casting a ballot in the given election, including those who reported voting “against all” (an option that was on the ballot in 1996, 2000, and 2004), deliberately casting an invalid ballot in protest (as our survey estimated 1 percent did in both 2007 and 2008), or refusing to say for whom they voted (as 3 and 7 percent did in 2007 and 2008, respectively). Multinomial logit heavily taxes the data and performs less well for candidates or parties receiving a very small share of the vote. Thus, for each election, we constructed the dependent variable to include distinct response categories for each of the top three finishers and a residual “other” category, adding distinct categories to this set for the LDPR representative (important substantively and for comparability across elections), for any other candidate or party with at least 5 percent of the vote, and for the leading liberal representative if he or she received at least 3 percent of the vote. Because Bogdanov got a negligible number of votes in 2008 despite being one of only four candidates, we place his votes in the “other“ category. On multinomial logit and its relationship to other models, including logit and multinomial probit, see J. Scott Long, Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (London, 1997).

42. See, for example, Rose, Mishler, and Munro, Russia Transformed, for die logic of “plebiscitarian autocracy,” or Makarkin, Aleksei, “Vybory v ramkakh kontrakta,” Pro el Contra 40, no. 1 (January-February 2008): 36–45 Google Scholar, for the logic of “social contract.“

43. Using (binomial) logit yields no significant revisions to the claims made here. Other than generating minor differences in estimated total effects, the main impact of using logit instead of multinomial logit is to bump a few total effects from insignificant to significant.

44. We use the software CLARIFY. See King, Gary, Tomz, Michael, and Wittenberg, Jason, “Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation,“ American Journal of Political Science 44, no. 2 (2000): 347-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, Version 2.1 (Stanford University, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University, January 2003), available at gking.harvard.edu (last accessed 15 May 2009).

45. In our “best estimate” specification of the multinomial logit regression equation.

46. This does not necessarily mean that the entire significance of this variable comes from the Medvedev-Ziuganov comparison. Multinomial logit estimates these pairwise comparisons using only those cases where people voted for either Medvedev or Ziuganov. When pairs involve candidates getting smaller numbers of votes, the individual pairwise estimates may not show up as statistically significant, whereas combining them (as do our total effects estimates) could reveal a statistically significant relationship.

47. An argument made strongly by McAllister and White, “'It's the Economy, Comrade!' ” and Makarkin, “Vybory v ramkakh kontrakta,” among others.

48. We use standard wording here: “Some people like Vladimir Putin's activity, and others do not. What about you, do you approve of Putin's activity in the post of President of Russia?” The supplied answer options are fully approve, approve, approve some, disapprove some, disapprove, and completely disapprove.

49. It is standard practice in voting studies (for example, on American elections) to include the performance indicator only of the incumbent. In this case, of course, Medvedev was not yet president and so could not have had a presidential job performance rating.

50. Mishler and Willerton address this question, but mostly for the El'tsin era. See Mishler and Willerton, “The Dynamics of Presidential Popularity in Post-Communist Russia.“

51. Treisman, “Popularity of Russian Presidents.” For net economic assessments, the question asked was whether “Russia's present economic situation” is very good, good, in between, bad, or very bad.

52. Vedomosti, 24 March 2008, A2.

53. White and McAllister, “The Putin Phenomenon“; McAllister and White, “'It's the Economy, Comrade!'“

54. Hale, McFaul, and Colton, “Putin and the ‘Delegative Democracy’ Trap“; White, and McAllister, , “Putin and His Supporters,” 383-99Google Scholar. Some policies did receive early strong support, such as die introduction of jury trials, but were unlikely to have been driving approval ratings.

55. The four National Projects included programs targeted to improve housing, education, agriculture, and health care. On the protests, see Graeme B. Robertson's article, “Managing Society: Protest, Civil Society, and Regime in Putin's Russia,” in this issue of Slavic Review.

56. Similar trends are found by White and McAllister, “The Putin Phenomenon.” Not everything Putin did was viewed positively in 2008, to be sure. For example, a plurality sull regarded the flat tax negatively and large majorities told survey interviewers that corruption and income inequality had either increased or remained unchanged.

57. Positive media coverage is distinct from media freedom, for which Treisman controls in his study, “Popularity of Russian Presidents.“

58. The left-right scale only barely misses the 5 percent level significant cutoff for 2004 and turns up as significant in some permutations of the model not reported here.

59. In 2000, the middle response was to retain elements of socialism for now. In 2004 and 2008, the middle response was to retain the status quo.These findings are generally consistent with other studies showing that Putin communicated relatively rightist views, intenincluding Richard Rose, “New Russian Barometer XIII: Putin's Re-Election,” CSPP 388 (Aberdeen, Scotland, 2004); Rutland, “Putin's Path to Power“; and the Levada-Tsentr, Obshchestvennoe mnenie 2004 finding cited above that people overwhelmingly expected continued market reform with Putin's 2004 reelection. Although they do not find a rightist placement of Putin on a left-right scale in a study conducted a little over a year after the 2000 election, White and McAllister note that he generally associated himself with rightist ideas and politicians during the actual campaign. See White, and McAllister, , “Putin and His Supporters,” 394 Google Scholar. One rigorous study finds that Putin's formal campaign platforms are relatively centrist, so these documents do not appear to be the source of his issue connections with voters. See Popova, Evgenia V, “Programmnye strategii í modeli elektoral'nogo sorevnovaniia na dumskikh i prezidentskykh vyborakh,” in Gel'man, , ed., Tretii ekktoral'nyi tsiklvRossii, 2003-2004 gody, 156-95Google Scholar.

60. That is vrag, sopernik, soiuznik, or drug.

61. The question used for the 1996 and 2000 elections is “Do you think that the policy of the U.S. represents a threat to Russian security?” Voters could answer yes or no. Voters answering yes were coded as 1 and those answering no as 0.

62. The text of the entire speech is available through the Russian presidential Web site. See “Zaiavleniia po vazhneishim voprosam: Vstupitel'noe slovo na soveshchanii s rukovodiashchim sostavom Vooruzhennykh Sil,” 20 November 2007, at www.kremlin.ru/appears/2007/ll/20/1657_type63374type63378type82634_151683.shtml (last accessed 15 May 2009). An example of western coverage can be found at RFE/RL Newsline, 21 November 2007.

63. Levada-Tsentr, Obshchestvennoe mnenie 2004.

64. The only major group of voters to stand out significantly from Putin's for greater pro-westernism (according to our multinomial logit analysis and indicated by the superscripted text in table 2) is the “other” group in 2008, which included people who voted for Andrei Bogdanov (the centerpiece of whose platform was that Russia should join the European Union) and people who cast invalid ballots, a response widely believed to have been deliberately taken by those who did not see Bogdanov as a genuine liberal yet who favored a more liberal orientation than they saw in Putin.

65. In fact, if we disaggregate this variable and create four dummy variables, one for people who favor treating the west as a friend, one for treating the west as an ally, and so on, there is a statistically significant negative correlation between wanting to treat the west as a rival (total effect -.30) or enemy (total effect -.43) and voting for the Putin-led United Russia ticket in December 2007. The total effect of wanting to treat the west as a rival on the 2008 Medvedev vote is also negative and absolutely huge (80 percentage points).

66. Most of the best works on the development of the party during the Putin era, therefore, do not focus on any connection it might have to the electorate independent of Putin, e.g., Reuter, Orajohn and Remington, Thomas F., “Dominant Party Regimes and the Commitment Problem: The Case of United Russia,” Comparative Political Studies 42, no. 4 (April 2009): 501-26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smyth, Regina, Lowry, Anna, and Wilkening, Brandon, “Engineering Victory: Institutional Reform, Informal Institutions, and the Formation of a Hegemonic Party Regime in the Russian Federation,” Post-Soviet Affairs 23, no. 2 (April-June 2007): 118-37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. White and McAllister, “The Putin Phenomenon.“

68. The term transitional partisans comes from Colton, Transitional Citizens.

69. The latter conclusion being one toward which White and McAllister, “The Putin Phenomenon,” and McAllister and White, “'It's the Economy, Comrade!'” lean.

70. A quality that needs to be preserved for the sake of comparability over time.

71. White, and McAllister, , “The Putin Phenomenon,” esp. 607-20Google Scholar.

72. Ibid.

73. For example, American voters as documented in Miller and Shanks, New American Voter, and Lewis-Beck, Jacoby, Norpodi, and Weisberg, American Voter Revisited