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21.02.08
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Suspiciously Accurate
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By Dmitry Babich
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An erroneous forecast is an embarrassment for every sociologist, but a prediction that is right to the point is a true nightmare. This is the impression one got during a roundtable at Moscow’s Union of Journalists, where representatives of Russia’s most prestigious think tanks specializing in public opinion research voiced their stance on a very peculiar problem, namely that of all their forecasts about the recent Duma election were suspiciously accurate.
Indeed, in the run up to the Duma elections of December 2, 2007, almost all research centers proved to be real clairvoyants, predicting the percentage of voters’ support for all parties so accurately that the margin of error did not exceed 0.5 percent.
All would be well for the pollsters if several disturbing facts didn’t cast a shadow over their accurate results. Firstly, all major polling canters made remarkably similar predictions, which, in turn, happened to coincide with the official results published by Russia’s Central Electoral Commission (CEC) following the election. Secondly, there were widespread reports of voting irregularities, especially in the so called autonomous republics, the ethnic homelands of Russia’s Moslem and Buddhist minority groups. These facts gave a number of skeptics ground to question the pollsters’ integrity and to suspect them of making a secret agreement with the CEC, ultimately legitimizing a rigged vote with correspondingly rigged polls.
The counter-argument, however, is that some of the public opinion research centers that made miraculously accurate predictions are strong critics of the government and of president Putin himself. For example, the Levada Center, named after the late liberal Russian sociologist Yuri Levada, often publishes research on controversial subjects such as the YUKOS affair, Chechnya, etc. Why it would chose to be in cahoots with the CEC, considering that rigging the vote is a very serious crime in Russia punishable by several years in jail, is unclear. Certainly, the temptation of accurate predictions attracting new influential or wealthy clients to the center could have gotten the upper hand. Yet during the roundtable, even the most liberal sociologists displayed remarkable corporate solidarity, defending the honor of the entire guild.
“The forecasts based on our polls were accurate because society stabilized itself, and its reactions, favorable or not, became more or less predictable,” said Boris Dubin, the Head of Levada Center’s department of socio-political research. “The three leading centers operating in the field, including ours, developed and perfected their technologies of polling, which also added to the accuracy of the results.”
But the question of how the pollsters could predict and estimate the effect of voting irregularities, recorded, for example, in Ingushetia, an autonomous republic in the North Caucuses where officially 99 percent of the population voted mostly for the pro-Kremlin party the United Russia remains. A similar situation was recorded in certain areas of neighboring Dagestan, another predominantly Moslem republic in the south of Russia. “There was an electoral commission in Dagestan, which had 15 voting booths and gave out 17 779 voting bulletins to voters. The same amount of votes was cast for United Russia. How could this be achieved in a fair way or predicted by fair pollsters?” wondered Dmitry Oreshkin, the Head of the Merkator think tank specializing in regional political research.
At the roundtable, however, the pollsters revealed that even this kind of “voting” is accounted for in their forecasts. The predictions of the elections’ results are not based solely on the interviews with representative groups of the population. The results of these interviews are then combined with several factors which are supposed to reflect a special “electoral culture,” typical for some of Russia’s regions.
“In several autonomous republics the local ethnic ‘patriarch’ tremendously influences the way people vote by telling them which party or which candidate they should vote for,” said Georgy Satarov, president of the Moscow-based InDem (Information for Democracy) foundation. “This sort of voting pattern can be viewed as part of the administrative resource, an edge that a party of power has over its competitors from the opposition.”
An example of this kind of electoral behavior can be found in historically Moslem Tatarstan, where local President Mintimer Shaymiyev’s disdain for the flamboyant nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky is well-known. The latter’s Liberal-Democratic party never received more than 2 percent of voter support.
Alexei Grazhdankin, Deputy Head of the Levada Center, claimed that pollsters usually interview voters after they have been influenced by the “patriarch,” so the “administrative resource” is already included in the pollsters’ calculations before the vote.
According to Dmitry Oreshkin’s estimate, regions with a “patriarchal” electoral culture accounted for 4 million additional votes for United Russia, which makes up about 3-5 percent of this party’s supporters.
“This is the figure we usually use when estimating the possible advantage the party of power can get at elections,” said Igor Zadorin from the Tsirkon public opinion research center.
Interestingly, while criticizing the electoral victories of Putin and United Russia, both Merkator’s Oreshkin and Levada’s Dubin did not question the majority of Russia’s voters support for both the ruling president and his party. At the same time, according to a poll conducted by the ROMIR research center, 79 percent of Russians do not believe that they live in a democracy and that their country is ruled according to the will of the people.
Levada’s Boris Dubin suggested an elegant solution to this seemingly inexplicable dilemma. “People do not believe they are really making a choice but the persona of Putin who made this choice for them suits the majority,” Dubin said. “This is the psyche of the people who are ready to adapt to their environment without having too much hope for improvement. This is the psyche of onlookers, not that of active people who hold their destiny in their hands.” |
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