Citizens as Political Analysts

At least since Philip Converse, political scientists have wondered whether ordinary citizens are competent analysts of the political system in which they live. Converse (1964) concluded that much of the American public does not hold ideas about political life that are coherent or stable enough to be called beliefs, and survey researchers since have been trying to explain the apparent instability of popular attitudes. Some have argued that ordinary citizens know quite a bit about some issues even if they lack true opinions on others (Elkins 1993), that people hold a variety of partially consistent ideas and answer survey questions according to which aspect is most salient at the time the question is asked (Zaller and Feldman 1992), or that respondents have potentially conflicting value predispositions that may sometimes make it difficult to answer specific policy-related questions (Alvarez and Brehm 2002). In any event, there is considerable consensus that ordinary citizens do not interpret their political world with the clarity and precision of political scientists.

Yet, in mass surveys, researchers often ask them questions as though they do. Even in Russia, strong majorities favor democracy when asked straightforward questions about whether government officials should serve the interests of the majority, or individuals should enjoy personal freedoms, or elections should give citizens the opportunity to choose among competing candidates. Consequently, survey researchers tend to ask harder questions. In recent surveys, Russians faced choices between a “society with strict order” or “so much freedom that [people] may destroy society” (Colton 2000, 248). They were asked whether political parties that aim to overthrow democracy should be allowed to take part in elections or whether voices they consider dangerous to the common good should nonetheless be heard (Whitefield and Evans 1996, 237; Gibson 2001, 126). It may be true that citizens in long-established democratic systems can navigate their way around such questions. Such citizens are usually well socialized in democratic debates and at least some are probably sensitive to the implications of the various choices. But it is less obvious that people in new and imperfect democracies have those particular abilities.

In an effort to give ordinary Russians a chance to explain their thinking about a variety of political institutions and the nature of the transformations they had experienced, I conducted over 60 intensive interviews with Russian citizens between 1998 and 2003.¹

Through a Glass Darkly

One thing that became clear as I spoke with Russians is that they did not always use the same categories that I used to understand their political world. In particular, many of my respondents were not particularly careful about distinguishing actions or institutions that might be called democratic from those that could not. Certainly, the respondents varied in this regard, and the more highly educated, more politically informed part of the sample spoke quite knowledgeably about countervailing powers or constitutional limitations. But many other respondents tended to muddle together things political scientists try to keep analytically separate.

For instance, many respondents considered a president just a tsar by another name, and they thought mayors were essentially equivalent to chairmen of the communist-era city ispolkom. That elected officials' power was constrained in ways that obtained neither under the tsars or the commissars was not an important distinction to many of my respondents. As one collective farm worker commented, “We need a president. We're used to it, because we used to have the tsar. We're used to being under someone's authority. We were brought up that way in the spirit of patriotism. What do they say here in Russia? ‘Here comes the master. The master will settle our disputes.’ We can't get by without a master.” Along the same lines, many of the Russians with whom I spoke also had difficulty figuring out the role and proper behavior of the legislature. Respondents interviewed during the Yeltsin years were concerned that there was too much conflict between the State Duma and the president and wished that the leaders of the Duma would more readily recognize their proper role of “helping” the president. Surveys indicate that the belief that the job of the opposition is to help the president continued under Putin (Tikhonova 2005, 39).

These comments are interesting because they show a surprising lack of sensitivity to the differences between autocratic and democratic institutions and a limited perception of how democratic institutions are supposed to function. No doubt, part of the difficulty for Russians in this regard lies in the overwhelming power of the Russian presidency and the relative ineffectiveness of both the Supreme Soviet, Russia's legislature until Yeltsin closed it down by force in 1993, or the State Duma that followed. But the comments cited here were made before Putin was elected, so they cannot be attributed solely to his efforts to strengthen executive power. And the Russian presidency, despite its “hyperpresidential” character, remains an elected office, constrained to some degree by constitutional provisions and an elected legislature.

To better understand patterns in my respondents' answers, I categorized the respondents according to their support for democracy and their political sophistication.³

But even these politically sophisticated democrats did not always grasp the role of a legislature very profoundly. One retired economist commented, “It seems to me that the Duma has not yet learned how to act…. It needs to create a base of laws. That's all very undeveloped in Russia. It's necessary to create all that and not to occupy themselves with any political things.” A well-educated young man who had spent time studying and working in the United States and who claimed to believe in the democratic project argued, “I consider that laws should be made in the interests of the whole society, of all people, and not in the interests of a particular group or some kind of oligarchic formation.” Both of these respondents viewed law making as a neutral, non-political act. Neither seemed to think that the interests of “the whole society, of all people” may be hard to identify, never mind satisfy all at once.

That Russians do not always show great sensitivity to the intricacies of democratic practice may not be surprising. After all, they have not had much experience with democracy. And Americans show similar hostility to Congress and political conflict (Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995; 2002). The danger is that people whose understanding of democracy is somewhat blunted may not immediately recognize actions that threaten democratic institutions. For instance, Putin has taken some moves political scientists argue will undermine Russia's electoral system: appointing regional governors, consolidating parties (with the result that the most liberal parties are in danger of disappearing), and shifting toward a party-list system at a point in time when the party that supports him is likely to sweep upcoming elections. But politicians (never mind political scientists) are not always correct about the consequences of changes in election rules (Moraski 2005). There is little reason to think ordinary citizens, especially citizens who conflate presidents and tsars, will figure it all out.

Law and Disorder

Specifically, some observers worry that Russians' preferences for “order” may lead them, perhaps inadvertently, to embrace a new dictatorship. Surveys of Russians show an abiding popular preference for a “strong hand” that will keep a disorderly society in line (Byzov 2006; Dubin 2000; Kliamkin, Petrenko, and Blekher 1993, 10). My respondents often expressed this concern in the language of law enforcement: they wanted the guilty charged and criminals behind bars. Of course, observing the law does not run counter to democracy. Democracy rests on law, both to enumerate the powers of institutions and office-holders and to protect the personal and political rights on which individual freedom depends. The potential danger to democracy rests in how laws are enforced: whether judges are free from political influence, whether defendants get a fair trial, whether the police shoot or ask questions first. To get a better idea of the way law played into the order my respondents desired, I compared how more- and less-democratically oriented respondents articulated its role.

More-democratic respondents tended to put their preference for order within an overtly democratic context, stressing the fact that laws were made by elected representatives or that freedom could not be unfettered if people were to live together in communities rather than, as one noted, “alone on the taiga.” One member of the Moscow intelligentsia commented, “Oy, we lived the whole time under strong central power, and it didn't help us much. We need not just central power, but power based on a collection of working laws, and a system in which laws are executed and not interpreted for the benefit of a narrow circle of people. Probably, if we had that kind of system, then strong power would not be necessary.” For democratic respondents, enforcement of laws made by elected legislatures was an alternative to the disorder of arbitrary government power.

Less-democratic respondents, by contrast, viewed law enforcement more as retribution for misdeeds, sometimes with the implication of a strict ruler able to keep wayward subjects in line, occasionally with a favorable reference to Joseph Stalin, who if nothing else knew how to scare people. One of the less-democratic respondents observed, “We Russians can be accustomed to order because we were enslaved our whole lives; therefore we are used to living with strictness. Therefore order is more important. The Russian Ivan is already used to being under the whip.” Others, though, only hoped that all crimes would be punished, regardless of the social position of the criminal.

For all of my respondents, the “order” that law would enhance was juxtaposed not to freedom or democracy, but to chaos. Asked to choose between strict order and an excess of freedom, one young democrat responded, “If you look at both extremes, in my view the lesser evil is strict order because, all the same, order supports the majority of spheres. But nothing will come of anarchy, which is what you get without order, especially in such a big country.” Many respondents, both strong and weak supporters of democracy, thought that law enforcement would advance the cause of freedom, since ordinary citizens could hardly enjoy their freedom in an environment where criminals and other social predators roamed free.⁴

Only a very few of the most thoughtful and democratically oriented respondents explicitly considered that the strict enforcement of law might contain elements that could harm innocent—as well as guilty—people.⁵

Unpopular Democrats

Westerners may retain a heroic image of Boris Yeltsin resisting the attempted coup by Communist Party hardliners in August 1991 from atop a tank. But his constituents, even many of his defenders, saw Yeltsin by the end of his reign as an inarticulate and barely competent gasbag who was the guiding hand behind an economic transformation that devastated the majority of Russians.

Almost all of my respondents agreed that the way government property had been privatized under Yeltsin was a travesty. Even people who looked favorably on democracy and market reforms used terms like “plunder,” “grabbing,” and “theft” to describe the process by which large state assets had been transferred to a very few private hands at very low prices. Studies of Russian public opinion consistently have shown that a significant portion of Russia's democrats does not completely support markets (e.g., Miller, Hesli, and Reisinger 1997; Kullberg and Zimmerman 1999; Byzov 2006). To better understand these people, I divided the democrats in my sample into liberal democrats, who supported both democracy and markets, and “market-skeptical” democrats. It turned out that in many respects the two groups were not very different. Both liberal democrats and market-skeptical democrats found much to criticize in the way capitalism worked in Russia. Both thought Russian markets produced outcomes that were manifestly unfair, benefiting a well-connected few while providing limited opportunities for the majority. Both groups considered Russia's successful capitalists people who were willing to break laws and maybe heads to make their millions (see also Volkov 2002). The difference was that the liberal democrats supported markets even so. The market-skeptical democrats were willing to accept an unequal society in Russia, but not one where wealth was the product of criminal behavior and government favors.

For a sizable contingent of the people I interviewed, the reforms conducted during the Yeltsin regime had produced societal collapse of nearly apocalyptic terms (see also Sergeyev 2001). In their view, economic reforms had left them without money or jobs, facing closed factories and the dismal prospect of supporting children on a paycheck that was half the government's estimated survival minimum. Some thought the Yeltsin government was under the control of criminal figures, the police were afraid of the dark, and there was little they could do because, as one said, “It's our own government that is fleecing us.” A Siberian office worker summed up the sense of a world on edge. She said, “We common people sometimes think that spies have been sent in specially. They entreat us to kneel in order to literally enslave us, turn us into zombies.”

The people in my sample who were most concerned about the disordered and unpredictable nature of their lives tended also to be weak supporters of democracy. To them, democracy threatened to deepen, not solve, their predicament. Elections put criminals in office; divided power made responsibility hard to trace and blame difficult to assign. One struggling worker said of democracy: “Oy, I don't know what democracy is, but I understand that we got what we wanted. We want to read books, watch movies, go abroad. We got all that. It is possible to say more now on television, in newspapers, and on the radio. You can say everything. Only there's no work, no money, and soon there won't be anything. Therefore, the word democracy—that's when everything is possible, but in the end it turns out you can't do anything.”

For a portion of my respondents, then, what they understood as democracy in Russia had only deepened the disorder of their lives. They wanted safe streets, a secure paycheck, and hope for the future. When they went to the ballot box, neither the promise of deepening democracy nor the prospect of further market reforms—the identifying feature of Russia's liberal democratic parties—would be likely to hold much allure. Instead, one younger Muscovite averred, “You know, at the present moment, I would want that some kind of criminal structure was in power, so that people would be afraid of it. I would even prefer Stalin in this period, only without the gulags, of course. But a strong hand, because everything is too unrestrained, starting from the criminal element and ending even with leaders who don't lead…. Chaos in a country is criminality. And criminality isn't life, not for yourself, not for your family, not for the future.”

Putin's “Dictatorship of Law”

In a disordered society, the appeal of order is obvious (see also Rose and Munro 2002). And order is one thing Putin's “dictatorship of law” seems to promise. People in my sample most distraught about the chaos of their lives urged Putin to have “the steadfastness of Stalin” to rebuild social order. Sensing themselves to have little freedom, they felt they had little to lose. But even more democratically oriented, less intensely worried respondents saw many of Putin's actions as promoting the law-governed state that represented the democracy they desired.

By the time I conducted the last of my interviews, Putin had begun reigning in Russia's “oligarchs,” men so wealthy they aimed to control the state. In the Western press these actions were presented as an assault on democracy, but to nearly all of my respondents they looked like law enforcement. After all, even the liberal democrats in the sample considered that great wealth acquired in a very short period was likely an indication of illegal acts. Rather than threatening progress toward capitalism and democracy, my respondents interpreted the legal prosecution of the oligarchs as advancing a political and economic system where many people, not just a ruthless few, could enjoy property and political access.

By 2003, Putin was also advancing his control over local elected officials, a process that later accelerated. In Smolensk, one of the cities where I conducted interviews in 2003, one of Putin's protégés had won the governorship in 2002 and later apparently strong-armed the deputies in the Smolensk city soviet into selecting his preferred candidate as mayor (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline 2003). But respondents in Smolensk showed little remorse for their previous elected officials. One pensioner in a sparsely furnished apartment in a dreary housing project complained about Smolensk's mayors, “One left, the second left, the third left. One stuffed his pockets, then left. The second stuffed his pockets, then left. Everyone says it.” In earlier years, respondents in Siberia and the Volga region had thought that some governors ran their territories like little fiefdoms, manipulating elections, disregarding federal law, and, in non-Russian areas, riding roughshod over the rights of ethnic Russians (see also Stoner-Weiss 2004, 135–40). In this context, asserting federal control over local and regional officials looks less like presidential power run amok and more like an effort to hold the country together and promote the equal application of law. As one particularly thoughtful and well-educated young man remarked, as long as social organizations remained underdeveloped and unable to exert control over local government, “then it is evident that the functions of control should be taken by the federal government so as not to permit direct misappropriation, misuse, especially of local powers.”

My respondents were also attracted by Putin's personal qualities. They lauded all the traits that they thought Yeltsin had lacked: intelligence, sobriety, youth, thoughtfulness, and dedication to the interests of his country instead of the wealth of his cronies. They also praised Putin's effectiveness (see also Rose, Munro, and Mishler 2004; Shevtsova 2003). The Russian economy grew steadily after 1999, leaving most Russians better off. Where paychecks and pensions were delayed for months during Yeltsin's reign, under Putin they arrived on time. One comfortable member of the scientific intelligentsia—a liberal democrat—said, “I like that Putin is modest in life. I feel that he doesn't steal, that he is honest. I like how he talks. I understand all his views, positions. That's what appeals to me. A serious consideration for our country has begun.”

One of the people I interviewed late in Yeltsin's administration complained that he did not see many people in government “who have turned their faces toward me.” In Putin, many of my respondents felt they had finally found a leader with his face turned toward them, who meant to help them improve their lives. They did not see Putin returning the country to its autocratic past. As one former Communist Party member said about the reconstitution of the Soviet era, “That train has left.”

Since my last interviews were conducted in 2003, Russian attitudes do not seem to have changed dramatically. In 2005, Putin remained much more popular than the rest of the Russian government (Reutov 2006, 87). Between 1998 and 2005, Russians became more convinced that they could improve their material circumstances through hard work, and they were less troubled about crime or delayed wages. But they still considered their society to be in crisis and most government authorities to be uninterested in the concerns of ordinary citizens (Levashov 2006, 7–19). Nonetheless, popular support for individual freedoms remained high (Tikhonova 2005, 39).

Whither Democracy?

Based on the evidence of my admittedly small but also quite diverse sample of Russian citizens, it seems that popular disdain for Russia's democrats stems from the mess they left behind in many of the lives of Russia's citizens. Popular support for Putin, on the other hand, seems to rest in part on faith in the power of law to bring a disordered society back into order. As one young economist, himself not very satisfied with Putin, remarked, “If you compare [Putin] with his predecessor, then of course, it's like heaven and earth. Then the situation was simply catastrophic.” But support for Putin may also be based on a somewhat blunted appreciation of the potential costs to democracy of granting government a great deal of power. People who are not terribly attentive to the niceties of democratic practice do not think they are supporting a man poised to become dictator.

They may be wrong. In that case, their incomplete appreciation of the intricacies of democratic practice and their desire for law-based predictability and order will have undercut democracy. If so, many of my respondents will be disappointed. Very few of them opposed competitive elections, representative legislatures, constitutional limitations on presidential power, and protections for individual liberties. Even people who spoke longingly of the Stalin period liked many aspects of the freer present. For most of my respondents, democratic government, along with steady jobs and a secure old age, were the trappings of the civilized future they wanted for themselves and their children. If they do not achieve this future, it will be evidence that emerging democracies are vulnerable, not because unprepared citizens do not like democracy as they understand it, but because many average citizens do not understand the intricacies of democratic practice well enough.

Even if my respondents are right that Putin's actions can be understood as perhaps overly enthusiastic efforts to strengthen the state's ability to enforce democratically produced laws, there is still reason to worry about the future of democracy in Russia. The institutions of civil society remain underdeveloped in Russia (Gill and Markwick 2000). Whatever my respondents might want and prefer, they were not politically organized and had little confidence in their ability to affect the actions of those who rule them. Asked whether she trusted the Duma deputies, one older woman replied, “And what else can I do? Only trust them. I can't do anything to change them.” Her feeling of powerlessness was the norm for my respondents and, based on surveys conducted between 1994 and 2005, has also been the norm for most Russians over the past decade or so (Levashov 2006, 11). My respondents did not seem like citizens ready to defend democracy from threats that might exist, however much they might like democracy in general terms and in the abstract.

The fate of democracy in Russia remains vulnerable, then, in part as the result of actions by people in power who do not seem to value democratic institutions, but also because citizens may not sufficiently appreciate the opportunities that democracy provides to protect the future they want.