Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T15:25:36.810Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Authoritarian Rallying as Reputational Cascade? Evidence from Putin’s Popularity Surge after Crimea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2021

HENRY E. HALE Open the ORCID record for HENRY E. HALE [Opens in a new window]
HENRY E. HALE*
Affiliation:
George Washington University, United States
*
Henry E. Hale, Professor, Department of Political Science, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University, United States, [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When international conflict causes an authoritarian leader’s popularity to soar, extant theories lead us to treat such “rallying” as sincere preference change, the product of surging patriotism or cowed media. This study advances a theory of less-than-fully sincere rallying more appropriate for nondemocratic settings, characterizing it as at least partly reflecting cascading dissembling driven by social desirability concerns. The identification strategy combines a rare nationally representative rally-spanning panel survey with a list experiment and econometric analysis. This establishes that three quarters of those who rallied to Putin after Russia annexed Crimea were engaging in at least some form of dissembling and that this rallying developed as a rapid cascade, with social media joining television in fueling perceptions this was socially desirable.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 580 - 594
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexseev, Mikhail A., and Hale, Henry E.. 2016. “Rallying ‘Round the Leader More than the Flag: Changes in Russian Nationalist Public Opinion 2013-14.” In The New Russian Nationalism, 2000-2015: Imperialism, Ethnicity, Authoritarianism, eds. Kolstø, Pål and Blakkisrud, Helge, 192–220. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arutunyan, Anna. 2014. “Putin’s Move on Crimea Bolsters Popularity Back Home.” USA Today, March 18. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/18/crimea-ukraine-putin-russia/6564263/.Google Scholar
Baker, William D., and Oneal, John R.. 2001. “Patriotism or Opinion Leadership? The Nature and Origins of the ‘Rally’ Round the Flag’ Effect.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 45 (5): 661–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Balzer, Harley. 2014. “The Ukraine Invasion and Public Opinion.” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 15 (2): 1–14.Google Scholar
Berinsky, Adam J. 2009. In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion from World War II to Iraq. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bikhchandani, Sushil, Hirshleifer, David, and Welch, Ivo. 1992. “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades.” Journal of Political Economy 100 (5): 992–1026.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blair, Graeme, and Imai, Kosuke. 2012. “Statistical Analysis of List Experiments.” Political Analysis 20 (1): 47–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brody, Richard A., and Shapiro, Catherine R.. 1991. “The Rally Phenomenon in Public Opinion.” In Assessing the President: The Media, Elite Opinion, and Public Support, ed. Brody, Richard A., 45–77. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Rupert. 1988. Group Processes: Dynamics within and between Groups. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bursztyn, Leonardo, Egorov, Georgy, and Fiorin, Stefano. 2020. “From Extreme to Mainstream: The Erosion of Social Norms.” American Economic Review 110 (11): 3522–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cassiday, Julie A., and Johnson, Emily D.. 2013. “A Personality Cult for the Postmodern Age: Reading Vladimir Putin’s Public Persona.” In Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, ed. Goscilo, Helena, 37–64. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Colton, Timothy J., and Hale, Henry E.. 2014. “Putin’s Uneasy Return and Hybrid Regime Stability: The 2012 Russian Election Studies Survey.” Problems of Post-Communism 61 (2): 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Colton, Timothy J., and McFaul, Michael. 2003. Popular Choice and Managed Democracy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Google Scholar
Coser, Lewis A. 1956. Functions of Social Conflict. New York: Simon and Schuster.Google Scholar
Cottiero, Christina, Kucharski, Katherine, Olimpieva, Evgenia, and Orttung, Robert W.. 2015. “War of Words: The Impact of Russian State Television on the Russian Internet.” Nationalities Papers 43 (4): 533–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, Allen Louis. 1957. The Social Desirability Variable in Personality Assessment and Research. Oak Brook, IL: Dryden Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, George C., and Swenson, Tami. 1997. “Who Rallies? The Anatomy of a Rally Event.” The Journal of Politics 59 (1): 200–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enikolopov, Ruben, Makarin, Alexey, and Petrova, Maria. 2020. “Social Media and Protest Participation: Evidence from Russia.” Econometrica 88 (4): 1479–1514.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Enikolopov, Ruben, Petrova, Maria, and Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina. 2011. “Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia.” American Economic Review 101 (7): 3253–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goode, J. Paul. 2021. “Becoming Banal: Incentivizing and Monopolizing the Nation in Post-Soviet Russia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 44 (4): 679–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Granovetter, Mark. 1978. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.” American Journal of Sociology 83 (6): 1420–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Samuel, and Robertson, Graeme. 2017. “Agreeable Authoritarians: Personality and Politics in Contemporary Russia.” Comparative Political Studies 50 (13): 1802–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, Samuel A., and Robertson, Graeme B.. 2019. Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Gunitsky, Seva. 2015. “Corrupting the Cyber-Commons: Social Media as a Tool of Autocratic Stability.” Perspectives on Politics 13 (1): 42–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Henry E. 2021. “Replication Data for: Authoritarian Rallying as Reputational Cascade? Evidence from Putin’s Popularity Surge after Crimea.” Harvard Dataverse. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6XGUWQ.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Henry E., and Colton, Timothy J.. 2017. “Who Defects? Unpacking a Defection Cascade from Russia’s Dominant Party 2008–12.” American Political Science Review 111 (2): 322–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hanmer, Michael J., and Kalkan, Kerem Ozan. 2013. “Behind the Curve: Clarifying the Best Approach to Calculating Predicted Probabilities and Marginal Effects from Limited Dependent Variable Models.” American Journal of Political Science 57 (1): 263–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hetherington, Marc J., and Nelson, Michael. 2003. “Anatomy of a Rally Effect: George W. Bush and the War on Terrorism.” PS: Political Science and Politics 36 (1): 37–42.Google Scholar
Himmelweit, Hilde T., Biberian, Marianne Jaeger, and Stockdale, Janet. 1978. “Memory for Past Vote: Implications of a Study of Bias in Recall.” British Journal of Political Science 8 (3): 365–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hogg, Michael A., and Mullin, Barbara-A.. 1999. “Joining Groups to Reduce Uncertainty: Subjective Uncertainty Reduction and Group Identification.” In Social Identity and Social Cognition, eds. Abrams, Dominic and Hogg, Michael A., 249–79. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar
Hutchings, Stephen, and Tolz, Vera. 2016. “Ethnicity and Nationhood on Russian State-Aligned Television: Contextualising Geopolitical Crisis.” In The New Russian Nationalism, 2000-2015: Imperialism, Ethnicity, Authoritarianism, eds. Kolstø, Pål and Blakkisrud, Helge, 298–335. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
James, Patrick, and Oneal, John R.. 1991. “Influence of Domestic and International Politics on the Presidents Use of Force.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 35 (2): 307–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jung, Sung Chul. 2014. “Foreign Targets and Diversionary Conflict.” International Studies Quarterly 58 (3): 566–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kalinin, Kirill. 2016. “The Social Desirability Bias in Autocrat’s Electoral Ratings: Evidence from the 2012 Russian Presidential Elections.” Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties 26 (2): 191–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kam, Cindy D., and Ramos, Jennifer M.. 2008. “Joining and Leaving the Rally: Understanding the Surge and Decline in Presidential Approval Following 9/11.” Public Opinion Quarterly 72 (4): 619–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuran, Timur. 1991a. “The East European Revolution of 1989: Is it Surprising that We Were Surprised?” American Economic Review 81 (2): 121–5.Google Scholar
Kuran, Timur. 1991b. “Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989.” World Politics 44 (1): 7–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuran, Timur. 1995. Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, Timur, and Sunstein, Cass R.. 1999. “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation.” Stanford Law Review 51: 683–768.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levy, Jack S. 1998. “The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace.” Annual Review of Political Science 1: 139–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lohmann, Susanne. 1994. “The Dynamics of Informational Cascades: The Monday Demonstrations in Leipzig, East Germany, 1989-91.” World Politics 47 (1): 42–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maass, Anne, and Clark, Russell D.. 1983. “Internalization versus Compliance: Differential Processes Underlying Minority Influence and Conformity.” European Journal of Social Psychology 13 (3): 197–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Matovski, Aleksandar. 2018. “It’s the Stability, Stupid! How the Quest to Restore Order after the Soviet Collapse Shaped Russian Popular Opinion.” Comparative Politics 50 (3): 347–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCauley, Clark. 1989. “The Nature of Social Influence in Groupthink: Compliance and Internalization.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (2): 250–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mueller, John E. 1973. War, Presidents and Public Opinion. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Nail, Paul R., MacDonald, Geoff, and Levy, David A.. 2000. “Proposal of a Four-Dimensional Model of Social Response.” Psychological Bulletin 126 (3): 454–70.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Newman, Brian, and Forcehimes, Andrew. 2010. “‘Rally Round the Flag’ Events for Presidential Approval Research.” Electoral Studies 29 (1): 144–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oates, Sarah. 2013. Revolution Stalled: The Political Limits of the Internet in the Post-Soviet Sphere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parker, Suzanne L. 1995. “Toward an Understanding of ‘Rally’ Effects: Public Opinion in the Persian Gulf War.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 59 (4): 526–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patel, David Siddhartha. 2013. “Preference Falsification, Revolutionary Coordination, and the Tahrir Square Model.” Annual Proceedings of the Wealth and Well-Being of Nations 4: 61–71.Google Scholar
Reuter, Ora John, and Szakonyi, David. 2015. “Online Social Media and Political Awareness in Authoritarian Regimes.” British Journal of Political Science 45 (1): 29–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenfeld, Bryn, Imai, Kosuke, and Shapiro, Jacob N.. 2016. “An Empirical Validation Study of Popular Survey Methodologies for Sensitive Questions.” American Journal of Political Science 60 (3): 783–802.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, Jared. 2014. “Centralized Institutions and Cascades.” Journal of Comparative Economics 42 (2): 340–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schedler, Andreas. 2006. “The Logic of Electoral Authoritarianism.” In Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition, ed. Schedler, Andreas, 1–23. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Pub.Google Scholar
Schubert, James N., Stewart, Patrick A., and Curran, Margaret Ann. 2002. “A Defining Presidential Moment: 9/11 and the Rally Effect.” Political Psychology 23 (3): 559–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharafutdinova, Gulnaz. 2020. The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sherman, Steven J., Mackie, Diane M., and Driscoll, Denise M.. 1990. “Priming and the Differential Use of Dimensions in Evaluation.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 16 (3): 405–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snegovaya, Maria. 2020. “Guns to Butter: Sociotropic Concerns and Foreign Policy Preferences in Russia.” Post-Soviet Affairs 36 (3): 268–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taber, Charles S., and Lodge, Milton. 2016. “The Illusion of Choice in Democratic Politics: The Unconscious Impact of Motivated Political Reasoning.” Political Psychology 37: 61–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tetlock, Philip E. 1998. “‘Private Truths, Public Lies’ by Timur Kuran.” Critical Review 12 (4): 545–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Treisman, Daniel S. 2011. “Presidential Popularity in a Hybrid Regime: Russia under Yeltsin and Putin.” American Journal of Political Science 55 (3): 590–609.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Urman, Aleksandra. 2019. “News Consumption of Russian Vkontakte Users: Polarization and News Avoidance.” International Journal of Communication 13: 5158–82.Google Scholar
Volkov, Denis. 2012. “The Protesters and the Public.” Journal of Democracy 23 (3): 55–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Hale dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/6XGUWQ
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Hale supplementary material

Hale supplementary material

Download Hale supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 250 KB
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.