When a poll shows that Russians support the war, people are saying that Russians are bad. But when a poll shows that Russians don’t support the war, people are questioning the poll.
This is because if you watch the war closely, you’ll see that russkies are supporting the war. It started with ~140k troops. Now, after losing about 150k to 300k, there are 400k troops. And there’s no active draft, too much of them are collectors contractors volunteered to go and kill Ukrainians.
They volunteered because the monthly salary is more than most Russians earn in a year, especially in Southern/Eastern regions with no opportunities. Most sign up for the money, nothing more or less.
Well first you’ve gotta let neoliberals take power. Give that a couple decades to slide into fascism, then wages will plunge as corporate interests gain total control of the government. Wait a few more decades for these policies to come to bear. Only then can you take a slice of the pie of the overinflated budget of the imperial apparatus.
Not saying it’s valid or that we should excuse it etc. Simply pointing out that the fact that the majority of Russian soldiers currently in Ukraine are volunteers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all hyper-nationalists who love the war
Afaik Russia isn’t totalitarian yet. They’re “only” authoritarian. In the latter there’s still a lot of private life left that isn’t dictated by the state and therefore a lot of room to wiggle in a survey. That obviously doesn’t mean you can get surveys with a western standard, but you can indeed gauge public opinion. Real authoritarian regimes are actually quite rare. I can’t think of any examples besides North Korea and Afghanistan that clearly fit at the moment.
There’s actually a few different methods that can give you at least more accurate results if not 100% accurate (which polling never really is in the first place.)
Eg. list experiments are a potentially useful method. You start off with a list of statements like “I like candy” or whatever and you ask people how many of those they agree with (ie. not which ones, just the amount), which gives you an approximate baseline. Then you give another set of people the same list but with eg. “I support the war in Ukraine” added on (hypothetical example, nobody please get pedantic about the wording), and you then compare the total number of agreed-on statements with your baseline. Here’s an example from LSE last year that used this method: …lse.ac.uk/…/do-russians-tell-the-truth-when-they…
That’s also used in surveys in democratic countries. The example I heard in statistics class was the question “did you ever visit a prostitute”. It’s obvious that you need to anonymize that to get somewhat honest answers.
The overall result is probably not very accurate but if the methodology has not changed then you could try to gauge something based on change from poll to poll.
There was an interesting methodology I read about. Basically, they read 4 statements and asked how many (not which!) the interviewee agreed with.
Then they did the same thing with 5 statements, where the 5th was what they actually wanted to find out. With a large enough sample size on both and the power of math, they can essentially deduct test 1 from test 2 to find out how many people agree with the 5th statement without anybody outing themselves to the FSB.
It is called the “unmatched count technique” or “list experiment.” It has a wider error range, so you need to poll more people, but you get honest answers.
I saw some article about polling in the last week or two where a lot or maybe most of the people who now wanted peace still didn’t think they should give up Crimea.
Feels like a very have your cake and eat it too kinda stance. “We didn’t do anything wrong but the consequences of our actions suck so we should prob tone it down… but to reiterate, we weren’t in the wrong”
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