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Public Opinion and the 1996 Elections in Russia: Nostalgic and Statist, Yet Pro-Market and Pro-Yeltsin

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David S. Mason  and
Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson
David S. Mason
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Butler University
Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson
Affiliation:
All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, Moscow, and at the University of Essex
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Extract

Between 1991 and 1996 Russia underwent a precipitous economic and social decline with decreases in production, gross national product, and wages, and increases in inequality, crime, and corruption. Most people experienced a decline in their standard of living, and many fondly recalled the security and stability of the communist era. Nevertheless, in the two main cases when the Russian electorate was confronted with a choice of directions in economic policy–the referendum of 1993 and the presidential elections of 1996–the majority chose reform. Writing about Boris Yeltsin's surprising victory in the 1996 presidential elections, a Pravda commentator mused: “Logically, he should have lost, since he was unable to fully solve any of the problems that have piled up: the stagnation of production, the impoverishment of a majority of the people, growing unemployment, the chronic nonpayment of wages, the decline in science, culture and education, the continuing conflict in Chechnya, etc. Nevertheless, Yeltsin received a majority of the electorate's votes.”

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , Winter 1997 , pp. 698 - 717
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1997

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References

The authors would like to thank Matthew Wyman, James Kluegel, John Clark and the anonymous referees for the Slavic Review for their comments and suggestions for this paper, and Katherine Hardin Currie for her research assistance. This article stems from the collaborative work of the International Social Justice Project (see note 2), which was supported by funding from the National Council for Soviet and East European Research (now the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research) and by the Open Society Institute. Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson's research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.

1. Boris Slavin in Pravda, 9 July 1996, 1–2; translated in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 48, no. 27 (31 July 1996): 8–9.

2. The International Social Justice Project is an international collaborative project that conducted a common survey on attitudes concerning justice using nationally representative samples in thirteen countries in east and west in 1991, and then replicated that survey in 1996 in Russia, Estonia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, and the Czech Republic. An analysis of the 1991 survey can be found in Kluegel, James R., Mason, David S., and Wegener, Bernd, eds., Social Justice and Political Change: Public Opinion in Capitalist and Post-Communist States (New York, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Principal investigators in the 1996 replication project are Ludmila Khakhulina and Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson (Russia); Andrus Saar (Estonia); Antal Orkeny (Hungary); Alexander Stoyanov (Bulgaria); Bernd Wegener (Germany); Petr Mateju (Czech Republic); and David Mason and James Kluegel (United States). Funding for the project was provided by the National Council for Soviet and East European Research and by the Open Society Institute. Further information on the International Social Justice Project can be found at the project's website: www.Butler.edu/ISJP. The Russian surveys were conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research (VTsIOM), and the principal investigators were Ludmila Khakhulina and Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson. The 1996 survey was conducted from 3 to 15 June 1996 in face-to-face interviews of 1, 585 respondents selected by a three-stage regionalized stratified route sample of Russia's population 18 years and older. The 1991 survey, conducted from 20 October to 25 November 1991, employed a similar sample and had 1, 734 respondents.

3. President Boris Yeltsin was considered a centrist reformer; Gennadii Ziuganov was the leader of the Russian Communist Party and the candidate of a coalition of leftist parties', Grigorii Iavlinskii was a pro-market economist; the ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskii and his party, the Liberal Democratic Party, had done well in the 1993 elections; and retired General Aleksandr Lebed’ was a nationalist and a hero of the Afghan war.

4. See, for example, Kagarlitsky, Boris, “Russia Chooses—and Loses,” Current History 95, no. 603 (October 1996): 305–10Google Scholar; Depoy, Erik, “Boris Yeltsin and the 1996 Russian Presidential Election,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 1140–63Google Scholar; and Treisman, Daniel, “Why Yeltsin Won,” Foreign Affairs 75, no. 5 (September-October 1996): 64–77 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Transition: The Newsletter about Reforming Economies (World Bank), September-October 1995 and April 1997.

6. OMRI Daily Report, 19 February 1996 (distributed by email).

7. The income ratio between the richest 10 percent of the population and the poorest 10 percent jumped from 4.5 in 1992 to 13.4 in 1995. See N. K. Chandra, “Dimensions of Social and Economic Crisis in Russia Today,” Economic and Political Weekly, 11 May 1996, 1145.

8. In a January 1996 survey conducted in Russia by Richard Rose, over half of the population said that they had sometimes or often had to do without both food and clothing over the past twelve months. “The Views of Rank and File Russians,” American Enterprise 7, no. 4 (July-August 1996): 57.

9. This same phenomenon was true in Bulgaria, Estonia, and Hungary, other countries involved in the International Social Justice Project replication. See Mason, David, Orkeny, Antal, and Sidorenko-Stephenson, Svetlana, “Increasingly Fond Memories of a Grim Past,” Transition: Events and Issues in the Former Soviet Union and East-Central and Southeastern Europe (OMRI) 3, no. 5 (21 March 1997): 15–19.Google Scholar

10. See, for example, Batcho, Krystine Irene, “Nostalgia: A Psychological Perspective,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 80 (1995): 131–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and American Demographics 18, no. 4 (April 1996): 35.

11. Davis, Fred, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York, 1979), 34.Google Scholar

12. “The Views of Rank and File Russians,” 57.

13. High levels of support for a strong governmental role in social welfare have been found in many other surveys as well, including Gibson, James L., “Political and Economic Markets,” Journal of Politics 58, no. 4 (November 1996): 954–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Miller, Arthur H., Reisinger, William M., and Hesli, Vicki L., “Understanding Political Change in Post-Soviet Societies: A Further Commentary on Finifter and Mickiewicz, American Political Science Review 90, no. 1 (March 1996): 153–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Another study found “a massive shift away from individualism” (toward statism) in Russia between 1989 and 1995. Brym, Robert J., “Reevaluating Mass Support for Political and Economic Change in Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 5 (1996): 751–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. See, for example, James R. Kluegel and Masaru Miyano, “Justice Beliefs and Support for the Welfare State in Advanced Capitalism,” in Kluegel, Mason, and Wegener, eds., Social Justice and Political Change, 81–108.

15. A 1995 survey of elites and masses in Russia found much higher levels of support for state welfare policies among the masses than among the elites. Arthur H. Miller, Regan Checchio, William M. Reisinger, and Vicki L. Hesli, “Comparing Mass and Elite Conceptions of Social Justice in Post-Soviet Societies,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Boston, November 1996.

16. The chi square statistic shows a statistically significant relationship (at the .001 level) between the winners/losers question and each of the five attitudinal questions in table 5, though the chi square is much larger on the two ceilings questions (130 for “government should place an upper limit on earnings” and 222 for “all right if businessmen make good profits “) than for the two government provisions questions (97 for “government should guarantee a minimum standard of living” and 91 for “government should provide jobs “); 16 degrees of freedom for each.

17. When asked in another 1994 survey about their favored type of government and economy, the most frequent response from Russians (39.4 percent of the total) was “a government with a strong state sector and wide private opportunities for the citizen.” See Gorshkov, M. K., Chepurenko, A. Iu., and Sheregi, F. E., eds., Rossiia v zerkale reform: Khrestomatiia po sotsiologii sovremennogo rossiiskogo obshchestva (Moscow, 1995), 26.Google Scholar

18. Rose's 1996 Russia survey, mentioned above, also found more people supporting continuing market reforms (30 percent) than halting them, even though many more people expressed positive views of the communist-era economic system than of the current one. Another All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research survey in 1997 found similar results, with Russians one and a half times more likely to favor market reforms than oppose them, but by a similar ratio more dissatisfied than satisfied with the development of the market economy thus far. Aleksandr Golov, “Reputatsiya rinochnoi ekonomiki u rossiyan,” Economic and Social Change: The Monitoring of Public Opinion 3 (May-June 1997): 31–33. And an earlier survey found “broad support” for the liberalizing economic reforms of 1991. Nelson, Lynn D., Babaeva, Lilia V., and Babaev, Rufat O., “Perspectives on Entrepreneurship and Privatization in Russia: Policy and Public Opinion,” Slavic Review 51, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 271–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. The beta coefficients in this table indicate the relative weight of each independent variable (education, age, etc.) in explaining variance in the dependent variable (support for socialism versus the market) for each year.

20. Other surveys have shown mixed results on this issue of economic versus ideological determinants of support for reforms. In a 1992 survey in Russia, James Gibson ( “Political and Economic Markets,” 981) found that “commitment to market institutions was not so much ideological as a reflection of perceptions of current and future economic conditions.” On the other hand, Miller, Checchio, Reisinger, and Hesli ( “Comparing Mass and Elite Conceptions,” 14) argue, in their 1995 survey, that support for a market economy and a reduced role for the state depends more on “popular perceptions of distributive justice” than on “simple economic hardship.”

21. See David S. Mason, “Justice, Socialism and Participation in the Postcommunist States,” in Kluegel, Mason, and Wegener, eds., Social Justice and Political Change, 54–56; and James R. Kluegel and David S. Mason, “Political Involvement in Transition: Who Participated and Electoral Dynamics in Central and Eastern Europe,” Report of the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, February 1996.

22. Treisman, “Why Yeltsin Won,” 67.

23. The coefficients in table 10 are “odds multipliers,” indicating the multiplicative change in the odds of having voted for Yeltsin or Ziuganov for a one-unit change in a specific determinant, net of the influence of the other determinants in the regression equation. An odds multiplier of greater than one indicates that the odds of voting for that candidate increase with increases in the value of a given independent variable (determinant). An odds multiplier of less than one indicates that the odds of voting for that candidate decrease with increases in the value of the independent variable. For example, in table 10, in the Yeltsin column, a coefficient of 1.26 means that the odds of voting for Yeltsin increased, on average, by 26 percent for each unit change in the variable measuring satisfaction with standard of living, which was a seven-point scale from completely dissatisfied (1) to completely satisfied (7). Compounded across the seven-unit range of this variable, a 26 percent increase from unit to unit results in a large difference between the most dissatisfied and the most satisfied people in the predicted odds of intending to vote for Yeltsin. For further information on this method, see Demaris, Alfred, Logit Modeling: Practical Applications (Newbury Park, Calif., 1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. The “equality” index is the mean of the z scores of four questions (alpha = .60): “How much influence should the size of the family the employee supports have in determining the level of pay for an employee? “; “The fairest way of distributing wealth and income would be to give everyone equal shares “; “The most important thing is that people get what they need, even if this means allocating money from those who have earned more than they need “; “It is just luck if some people are more intelligent or skillful than others, so they don't deserve to earn more money.” The “functional inequality” index is the simple mean of two questions with a five-point agree-disagree scale: “There is an incentive for individual effort only if differences in income are large enough,” and “It is all right if businessmen make good profits because everyone benefits in the end.”

25. These results reinforce a similar comparison of attitudes by supporters of various political parties in the 1993 elections: while supporters of the communists differed substantially from those favoring Russia's Choice on their attitudes toward a market economy, supporters of all parties overwhelmingly favored state control of large industries and state responsibility for jobs, health care, and housing. Matthew Wyman, Bill Miller, Stephen White, and Paul Heywood, “Public Opinion, Parties and Voters in the December 1993 Russian Elections,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 4 (1995): 591–614.

26. Interview with Gaidar in Novoe vremia, July 1996, no. 28: 12–13; translated in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press 48, no. 29 (14 August 1996): 16–17.

27. For example, TimothyJ. Colton, “Economics and Voting in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 12, no. 4 (October-December 1996): 289–317; and White, Stephen, Rose, Richard, and McAllister, Ian, How Russia Votes (Chatham, N.J., 1997).Google Scholar