Thread by @samagreene

Do Russians support the war?

Short answer: We don't know.

Longer answer: What you think you know is probably wrong.

(A quick 🧵)

If you're following the news, you've probably seen polls suggesting that ~60% of Russians support the war. That's problematic, for a number of reasons, which I'll try to explain here.

First things first: there's an excellent piece on this in @meduzaproject by @abessudnv (in Russian).

meduza.io/feature/2022/0…

As @abessudnv notes, there are reasons to be skeptical of these polls. The first is the fact that the questions use the term "special military operation" rather than "war" or "invasion", as stipulated by the Russian government. Vocabulary matters.

The second is that the polls are already a few days old, conducted at a time when most Russians were getting very little information about the war, and when sanctions hadn't really started to bite yet.

Third, there are Russians, and then there are Russians. For one of the polls, @abessudnv usefully digs into the data and finds important differences: younger people, women, residents of Moscow & St.Pete and people who watch less TV are much less likely to support the war.

To @abessudnv's points I'd add two more: one about how polls work, and one about how people work.

Polls -- even polls conducted by Kremlin-friendly agencies -- try to be representative, but it's hard. Not all people are equally likely to agree to be surveyed. In normal times, pollsters can correct for this by adjusting the demographics and re-weighting the data.

These aren't normal times, though. The war will inevitably be affecting survey response rates in ways that are linked to people's opinions about the war. Adjusting for that right now is basically impossible.

Thus, even if we take the polls at face value, they don't mean that ~60% of Russians support the war. They mean that ~60% of those Russians who are willing to talk to a stranger about the war support the war. That's not the same thing.

That brings me to the point about people. Two points about people, actually. First, people have emotions -- and one of those emotions is fear.

Now, I've always been skeptical of the idea that fear has much of an impact on people's survey responses in Russia, and there's not much evidence for it in the data. But again, times have changed.

Russians who spread what the gov't considers "disinformation" about the war (including calling it a "war") now face up to 15 years in prison. Many Russians may not be eager to find out whether that law also applies to replying to a pollster.

People who are usually outspoken are clamming up, and for good reason. As I wrote earlier, Putin is fighting two wars: one in Ukraine, and one at home. Both will have casualties.

tldrussia.substack.com/p/home-to-roost

The second point about people is that they are social animals. One implication of that is that people tend to hold opinions similar to those held by their social circle, not because they're conformist, per se, but because there are powerful psychological incentives to get along.

In Russia, @gbrunc and I have shown how these social incentives helped galvanize support for Putin's social conservatism in 2012-13, and for Putin himself after the annexation of Crimea for years to follow. For the science, see here:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

And here:
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

What's happening now is very different. This is not a rally around the flag, as Crimea was. I'll write more about that later. But the social incentives haven't gone away.

I'm not saying that people are lying to pollsters. But I am saying that people are deriving their opinions at least in part from their sense of what the prevailing sentiment is in society. If that sense changes, so will their opinions.

So here's the TL;DR: polls right now are not measuring what people think about the war. Rather, they're measuring (1) how many people are willing to talk openly about the war, and (2) what those people think other people think about the war.