The putin vote: Presidential electorates in a hybrid regime

Slavic Review

Volumn 68, Issue 3, 2009, Pages

  Colton, Timothy J ^a   Hale, Henry E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70349631836     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0037677900019690     Document Type: Article

References (112)

1. Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Neil Munro, Russia Transformed: Developing Popular Support for a New Regime (Cambridge, Eng., 2006);
2. Daniel S. Treisman, "The Popularity of Russian Presidents" (draft paper presented at the international conference "Frontiers of Political Economics," Higher School of Economics and New Economic School, Moscow, 30-31 May 2008), at www.hse.ru/data/396/226/1237/paper%20-%20Treisman. pdf (last accessed 15 May 2009);
3. William Mishler and John P. Willerton, "The Dynamics of Presidential Popularity in Post-Communist Russia: Cultural Imperative versus NeoInstitutional Choice," Journal of Politics 65, no.1 (February 2003) : 111-141
4. In our article, the Kremlin is understood to refer to the president, those under his command, and his network of formal and informal allies.
5. See Jerry F. Hough, Evelyn Davidheiser, and Susan Goodrich Lehmann, The 1996 Russian Presidential Election (Washington, D.C., 1996).
6. Michael McFaul, Russia's 1996 Presidential Election: The End of Polarized Politics (Stanford, 1997).
7. Daniel S. Treisman, "Why Yeltsin Won," Foreign Affairs 75, no.5 (September-October 1996): 64-77.
8. Boris Kagarlitsky, "Russia Chooses - and Loses," Current History 95, no.603 (October 1996): 305-310
9. Christopher Marsh, Russia at the Polls: Voters, Elections, and Democratization (Washington, D.C., 2002), chap. 6.
10. Andrew Wilson, Virtual Politics: Faking Democracy in the Post-Soviet World (New Haven, 2005).
11. Timothy J. Colton, Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 2000);
12. Marsh, Russia at the Polls;
13. David S. Mason and Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson, "Public Opinion and the 1996 Elections in Russia: Nostalgic and Statist, Yet Pro-Market and Pro-Yeltsin," Slavic Review 56, no.4 (Winter 1997): 698-717;
14. Joshua A. Tucker, Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990-1999 (Cambridge, Eng., 2006).
15. Polling numbers from leading agencies and summary accounts of each month in the campaign can be found in Henry E. Hale, ed., Russian Election Watch (Cambridge, Mass.), issues from 1999-2000 available at hehale5.googlepages.com/ russianelectionwatch 1999-2000 (last accessed 15 May 2009).
16. Henry E. Hale, "The Origins of United Russia and the Putin Presidency: The Role of Contingency in Party-System Development," Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 12, no.2 (Spring 2004): 169-94;
17. Peter Rutland, "Putin's Path to Power," Post-Soviet Affairs 16, no. 4 (December 2000): 313-354
18. Wilson, Virtual Politics.
19. Vicki L. Hesli, "Parliamentary and Presidential Elections in Russia: The Political Landscape in 1999 and 2000," in Vicki L. Hesli and William M. Reisinger, eds., The 1999-2000 Elections in Russia: Their Impact and Legacy (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 3-25.
20. Vladimir Gel'man, "Political Opposition in Russia: A Dying Species?" Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no.3 (September 2005): 226-46;
21. Treisman, "Popularity of Russian Presidents."
22. Marsh, Russia at the Polls.
23. Timothy J. Colton and Michael McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy: The Russian Elections of 1999 and 2000 (Washington, D.C., 2003);
24. Richard Rose, Neil Munro, and Stephen White, "How Strong Is Vladimir Putin's Support?" Post-Soviet Affairs 16, no.4 (October-December 2000): 287-312;
25. Stephen White and Ian McAllister, "Putin and His Supporters," Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 3 (May 2003): 383-399
26. White and McAllister, "Putin and His Supporters," 392.
27. Similar findings are reported by Colton and McFaul, Popular Choice and Managed Democracy.
28. N. V. Anokhina and E. Iu. Meleshkina, "Itogi golosovaniia i elektoral'noe povedenie," in V Gel'man, G. Golosov, and E. Meleshkina, eds., Vtoroi elektoral'nyi tsikl v Rossii 1999-2000 gg. (Moscow, 2002), 158-85; Marsh, Russia at the Polls.
29. White and McAllister, "Putin and His Supporters."
30. Rose, Munro, and White, "How Strong Is Vladimir Putin's Support?";
31. Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections without Order: Russia's Challenge to Vladimir Putin (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 185.
32. R. F. Turovskii, "Federal'nye výbory 2003-2004 godov v regional'nom izmerenii," in Vladimir Gel'man, ed., Tretii elektoral'nyi tsikl v Rossii, 2003-2004 gody (St. Petersburg, 2007), 246-293 Turovskii also stressed the role of geography and administrative resources in his fine-grained, nonstatistical analysis.
33. There are many accounts of this process. One of the most authoritative is M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia (Cambridge, Eng., 2005).
34. M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia (2005). Ibid.;
35. Gel'man, "Political Opposition in Russia";
36. Michael McFaul and Nikolai Petrov, "What the Elections Tell Us," Journal of Democracy 15, no.3 (July 2004): 20-31;
37. Mikhail Myagkov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Dmitry Shakin, "Fraud or Fairytales? Russia and Ukraine's Electoral Experience," Post-Soviet Affairs 21, no. 2 (April-June 2005): 91-131 ;
38. Wilson, Virtual Politics.
39. E.g., Richard Sakwa, "The 2003-2004 Russian Elections and Prospects for Democracy," Europe-Asia Studies 57, no.3 (May 2005): 369-398
40. Christopher Marsh, Helen Albert, and James W. Warhola, "The Political Geography of Russia's 2004 Presidential Election," Eurasian Geography and Economics 45, no.4 (June 2004): 262-79;
41. Richard Pipes, "Flight from Freedom," Foreign Affairs 83, no. 3 (May-June 2004): 9-15. Marsh, Albert, and Warhola also note, however, that Putin has consistently performed strongly in the ethnic minority republics.
42. 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.
43. See Richard Rose, Neil Munro, and William Mishler, "Resigned Acceptance of an Incomplete Democracy: Russia's Political Equilibrium," Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no.3 (July-September 2004): 195-218;
44. and Rose, Mishler, and Munro, Russia Transformed.
45. Henry E. Hale, Michael McFaul, and Timothy J. Colton, "Putin and the 'Delegative Democracy' Trap: Evidence from Russia's 2003-2004 Elections," Post-Soviet Affairs 20, no.4 (October-December 2004): 285-319;
46. Richard Rose, New Russia Barometer XIII: Putin's Re-Election (Glasgow, Scotland, 2004), 52,
47. cited in Stephen White and Ian McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 24, no. 4 (December 2008): 627n59.
48. Iurii Levada, from Kommersant", 17 March 2004,
49. quoted in White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon," 615.
50. Levada-Tsentr, Obshchestvennoe mnenie 2004 (Moscow, 2005), chap. 8.
51. For example, Pierre Hassner, "Russia's Transition to Autocracy," Journal of Democracy 19, no.2 (April 2008): 5-15.
52. Ian McAllister and Stephen White, "'It's the Economy, Comrade!' Parties and Voters in the 2007 Russian Duma Election," Europe-Asia Studies 60, no.6 (August 2008): 931-57;
53. White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon," 604-628
54. Alexei V Zakharov, "Voting in 2007 Russian Legislative Elections: The Role of Putin's Approval and Ideology" (unpublished paper, 1 July 2008).
55. During the 1995-1996 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 the 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.
56. Their work underlies such publications as Donna Bahry, Mikhail Kosolapov, Polina Kozyreva, and Rick K. Wilson, "Ethnicity and Trust: Evidence from Russia," American Political Science Review 99, no.4 (November 2005): 521-32;
57. and James L. Gibson, "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): 671-684
58. Demoscope, led by Mikhail Kosolapov and Polina Kozyreva, employs a national multistage area probability sampling technique pioneered with respect to Russia in the 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 second-stage units within them, and, at the 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.
59. Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks, The New American Voter (Cambridge, Mass., 1996).
60. Michael S. Lewis-Beck, William G. Jacoby, Helmut Norpoth, and Herbert F. Weisberg, The American Voter Revisited (Ann Arbor, 2008).
61. E.g., Roberts. Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (Cambridge, Eng., 2002).
62. For the use and role of causal sequencing, see Miller and Shanks, New American Voter.
63. Miller and Shanks, New American Voter. Ibid.;
64. Colton, Transitional Citizens.
65. 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
66. J. Scott Long, Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (London, 1997).
67. See, for example, Rose, Mishler, and Munro, Russia Transformed, for the logic of "plebiscitarian autocracy," or
68. Aleksei Makarkin, "Vybory v ramkakh kontrakta," Pro et Contra 40, no.1 (January-February 2008): 36-45, for the logic of "social contract."
69. 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.
70. We use the software CLARIFY. See Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg, "Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation," American Journal of Political Science 44, no.2 (2000): 347-61;
71. 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).
72. In our "best estimate" specification of the multinomial logit regression equation.
73. 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.
74. An argument made strongly by McAllister and White, "'It's the Economy, Comrade!'" and
75. Makarkin, "Vybory v ramkakh kontrakta," among others.
76. 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.
77. 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.
78. 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."
79. 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.
80. Vedomosti, 24 March 2008, A2.
81. White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon"
82. McAllister and White, "'It's the Economy, Comrade!'"
83. Hale, McFaul, and Colton, "Putin and the 'Delegative Democracy' Trap";
84. White and McAllister, "Putin and His Supporters," 383-399 Some policies did receive early strong support, such as the introduction of jury trials, but were unlikely to have been driving approval ratings.
85. The four National Projects included programs targeted to improve housing, education, agriculture, and health care. On the protests,
86. see Graeme B. Robertson's article, "Managing Society: Protest, Civil Society, and Regime in Putin's Russia," in this issue of Slavic Review.
87. 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 still regarded the flat tax negatively and large majorities told survey interviewers that corruption and income inequality had either increased or remained unchanged.
88. Positive media coverage is distinct from media freedom, for which Treisman controls in his study, "Popularity of Russian Presidents."
89. 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.
90. 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, including Richard Rose, "New Russian Barometer XIII: Putin's Re-Election," CSPP 388 (Aberdeen, Scotland, 2004);
91. Rutland, "Putin's Path to Power";
92. 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.
93. See White and McAllister, "Putin and His Supporters," 394. 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.
94. See Evgenia V. Popova, "Programmnye strategii i modeli elektoral'nogo sorevnovaniia na dumskikh i prezidentskykh vyborakh," in Gel'man, ed., Tretii elektoral'nyi tsikl v Rossii, 2003-2004 gody, 156-195
95. That is vrag, sopernik, soiuznik, or drug.
96. 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.
97. The text of the entire speech is available through the Russian presidential Web site.
98. See "Zaiavleniia po vazhneishim voprosam: Vstupitel'noe slovo na soveshchanii s rukovodiashchim sostavom Vooruzhennykh Sil," 20 November 2007, at www.kremlin.ru/ appears/2007/11/20/1657-type63374type63378type82634- 151683.shtml (last accessed 15 May 2009). An example of western coverage can be found at RFE/RL Newsline, 21 November 2007.
99. Levada-Tsentr, Obshchestvennoe mnenie 2004.
100. 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.
101. 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).
102. 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., Ora John Reuter and Thomas F. Remington, "Dominant Party Regimes and the Commitment Problem: The Case of United Russia," Comparative Political Studies 42, no.4 (April 2009): 501-26;
103. Regina Smyth, Anna Lowry, and Brandon Wilkening, "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-Tune 2007): 118-137
104. White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon."
105. The term transitional partisans comes from Colton, Transitional Citizens.
106. The latter conclusion being one toward which White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon," and
107. McAllister and White, "'It's the Economy, Comrade!'" lean.
108. A quality that needs to be preserved for the sake of comparability over time.
109. White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon," esp. 607-620
110. White and McAllister, "The Putin Phenomenon, Ibid.
111. For example, American voters as documented in Miller and Shanks, New American Voter,
112. and Lewis-Beck, Jacoby, Norpoth, and Weisberg, American Voter Revisited.