Polling Wars: How Deep and Wide is Putin’s Popular Support?

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: About the lecture: Following Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, the Kremlin adopted a raft of repressive measures aimed at stifling criticism of the government and opposition to the war. Within days, the context for publicly expressing political opinion, and consequently for survey research in Russia, changed dramatically. These changes raise new questions about the interpretation and reliability of data on public opinion in Russia. What is the nature of public support for Putin and his war? How deep is it? How wide? With results from a new panel survey, the first to track political attitudes in Russia before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Professor of Government at Cornell University Bryn Rosenfeld will discuss domestic public opinion toward Putin and the war and what can (and cannot) be reliably inferred from available evidence.

About the speaker: Bryn Rosenfeld is assistant professor of government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the NSF. Her research interests include political behavior, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology. Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), won a Best Book award from the American Political Science Association’s Democracy & Autocracy section and an Ed A. Hewett Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and Sociological Methods & Research, among others. From 2016-2019, she was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California. Previously, she was also an editor at The Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” blog, a Prize Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College Oxford, and an analyst in the State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.