Surprising as it may be, the Kremlin cares a great deal about what Russians think.
The Federal Protective Service, or F.S.O., the Secret Service-like guard that protects President Vladimir V. Putin’s life, operates its own sociology division that polls Russians and delivers clandestine results to the Kremlin.
The sociologist at the helm of VTsIOM, the main state-run pollster, is so important in Mr. Putin’s system that on social media his wife shows off a collection of 24 Hermès bags, worth a total of $630,000, according to a recent report by an anti-corruption foundation.
And Sergei V. Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s chief “political technologist,” meticulously gathers and analyzes what people are saying online in towns and cities across the country.
They all have been working overtime ahead of this weekend’s parliamentary election, the first since Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
That controlled exercise in political theater is occupying the waking hours of thousands of Russian bureaucrats. Campaign teams are agitating for “opposition” parties that all conveniently support the war. Regional officials are organizing the nuts and bolts of ballots and turnout. Milquetoast candidates populate the airwaves of state television.
But hanging over the entire endeavor, from the government polling to the Potemkin politicking, is a gaping question: What is the point?
What do polling and public opinion matter to an autocrat? Whether in Russia or China, Egypt or Cameroon, they can jail their opponents, write their own rules and then bend them as they please. Why hold an election at all?
Gauging popular opinion and holding elections in autocratic nations like Russia may seem irrelevant, but political scientists have largely found the opposite to be true. For leaders like Mr. Putin, mastering public opinion and election mobilization does more than confer a patina of legitimacy. It can also prolong a regime’s survival by lending the appearance of popular support and by helping to identify new internal threats. Autocrats, then, ignore public opinion at their own risk.
This summer, for instance, the Russian authorities saw how the old-school liberal party Yabloko, long seen as irrelevant, began to gain ground in public opinion polls as the only group running on a platform opposing the war in Ukraine. In August, amid a pressure campaign against the party, Russia’s Supreme Court took Yabloko off the ballot, though some of its candidates are still running. It was a move that followed the oft-repeated maxim of political scientists that only amateurs rig elections on Election Day.
Even as Mr. Putin chooses from what the political scientist Andreas Schedler calls the “menu of manipulation,” elections can still carry risks for autocratic governments. The basic purpose of the ritual may be to project long-term legitimacy, but offering a ballot can also invite instability and doubt in the short term, particularly if the orchestration slips up.
“They face this general autocratic dilemma: If you cheat too much you reveal weakness, and if you don’t cheat enough you risk a result that could threaten your hold on power,” said Timothy Frye, a political science professor at Columbia University.
The aim, Mr. Frye said, is to craft “a result that is sufficiently large that you win, but not so large that the masses just don’t believe it.”
The Dictator’s Dilemma
In his 1998 treatise “The Political Economy of Dictatorship,” the political scientist Ronald Wintrobe called it the “dictator’s dilemma”: Because dictators rule through fear, they struggle to understand what their subjects really think and to assess their own popularity accurately. Misreading reality can lead them to lose power.
That doesn’t necessarily come in the form of a popular uprising. Political science studies have found that autocrats in the post-World War II era were far more likely to have been ousted in elite coups than in popular uprisings, though such revolts have increased in recent years.
The problem autocrats face in divining public opinion is what the political scientist Timur Kuran called “preference falsification,” or the tendency of people in repressive societies to avoid sharing their true views.
“Falsification increases as repression increases,” said Mr. Kuran, a professor at Duke University. That leaves seemingly stable autocratic regimes vulnerable to shocks that suddenly make them look shaky, with cascading effects once weakness is exposed.
The character of Mr. Putin’s autocratic rule has shifted considerably in his more than 25 years in power. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has morphed from a “spin dictatorship,” in which the government won and held power primarily by manipulating information, institutions and elections, into more of a “fear dictatorship” as Mr. Putin has begun turning increasingly to the hard tools of repression, according to a recent book by the academics Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman.
“He kind of shifted to open censorship, to open repression,” said Mr. Guriev, the dean of the London Business School, who is also involved in Russian opposition politics in exile. “Yet you have the remnants of the previous system.”
But the hard methods of maintaining control can be onerous. Tapping into popular opinion to cultivate genuine support reduces the security state’s load.
“There is oppression in autocracies, but they cannot govern solely by repressing the population,” said Martin Dimitrov, a political science professor at Tulane University. “Any autocrat would want to have some support from the population, because that means they have to use less of the cruder tool of repression.”
The Popular Autocrat
Mr. Putin, like any autocrat, understands the power of perceived popularity.
In the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of famous experiments about conformity. He showed participants a card with a line on it and a second card with three lines on it, and asked which of the lines on the second card was the same as the one on the first. It wasn’t a trick question; the answer was abundantly clear.
But Mr. Asch asked people to give their answers only after they had heard actors, whom they believed to be fellow participants, give deliberately incorrect answers. The results were remarkable. Influenced by those responses, 75 percent of participants gave the wrong answer at least once, even though it was obviously incorrect.
The experiments underscored why perceived popularity is critical for autocrats.
If people believe everyone else supports an autocratic leader, they are much more likely to fall in line. If elites believe a ruler is popular, they think twice about trying to seize power themselves.
Russians become genuinely less supportive of Mr. Putin when presented with information suggesting he is unpopular, according to a study published in 2024.
“Putin, at this stage, as long as he can produce polls that show he is popular, it gives him additional power versus his subordinates and his colleagues,” Mr. Guriev said. “He can say, ‘You need to support me because, if I am gone, there is nobody like me who actually has an external source of popularity from the Russian public.’ ”
How popular Mr. Putin really is, given the constraints of polling and the limited playing field, has long been a topic of research and debate.
Mr. Frye, the Columbia University professor, and three other political scientists have employed a strategy of indirect questioning to determine whether Russians genuinely support Mr. Putin (like having his name on a list of leaders to choose from). To a large extent, the researchers have found, Russians do support Mr. Putin. Their research has cast doubt on how many Russians really withhold their opinions out of fear.
But the bigger question is what approval of Mr. Putin means. For decades, the Russian state media, bureaucracy and security apparatus have systematically prevented any alternatives to Mr. Putin from gaining traction.
“Popularity is a tricky thing, because you don’t know how durable it is,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington. “People can profess support for Putin, because who else are you going to support?”
Mr. Putin’s approval ratings are higher now than in the years before the war, but they have been slipping in recent months. There are signs Moscow may be worried about that perception.
In April, the percentage of respondents who named Mr. Putin when asked by VTsIOM, the state pollster, which politicians they trust, fell to its lowest point of the war. After that, VTsIOM abruptly stopped publishing the answer to the open-ended question.
It also announced that after years of conducting mostly telephone surveys, it had started asking half its questions about Mr. Putin’s approval and other topics in person. Face-to-face interviews may drive up declared support for the Russian leader because people are less likely to voice opposition when someone from the government shows up at their door.
More broadly, the results found by state and independent pollsters — who have been branded foreign agents for their work — have increasingly diverged.
VTsIOM, for example, found between 51 and 53 percent support for Mr. Putin’s United Russia party among decided voters in the upcoming election. ExtremeScan, an independent pollster, found far lower support, about 36 percent.
Electoral Autocracy
Having shifted toward a more brutal form of rule, Mr. Putin increasingly faces the problems associated with the dictator’s dilemma.
The wartime chill on open debate and free media has probably made it more difficult for the Kremlin to figure out what Russians really think. The erasure of even a modicum of unpredictability in the political sphere risks rendering elections meaningless to the broader public.
But the show of the elections must go on.
Political science research has found that autocracies are more durable when they hold elections. Without them, the Russian political elite wouldn’t be tested in its ability to mobilize and deliver for Mr. Putin, allowing the ruling party to organize a pecking order within its ranks.
And because Mr. Putin’s government grew out of the democracy introduced in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, elections still underpin his claim to legitimacy.
Whereas monarchs might claim legitimacy through a hereditary line, or Marxist-Leninist leaders through an ideological struggle, Mr. Putin’s standing still comes from “the idea that Russians chose Putin and he is Russia’s choice,” said Ora John Reuter, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
“One of the main reasons they are still holding elections is they don’t have an alternative source of legitimacy,” Mr. Reuter said.
Mr. Putin himself has cast the vote in those terms, too.
“The source of power is the people,” Mr. Putin told the congress of the ruling United Russia party in August, five days after Yabloko was removed from the ballot. “Even under the most difficult conditions we aren’t retreating from the principle of the rule of the people.”
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