Citizens’ Bureaucratic Interactions and Voting Behavior in Russia

• In Event: Electoral Politics in Putin’s Russia

Abstract

In autocracies with semi-competitive elections, the presence of challengers on the ballot, even when they have no realistic chance of winning, means citizens who abstain or vote for the opposition illuminate the political support for the regime. We will analyze Russia’s recent national elections with data from a nationally representative survey of Russian citizens conducted 2018. We will assess the impact of evaluations of the national economy and the performance of political institutions and leaders. In addition, we hypothesize that negative interactions with bureaucrats in the public sector will cause citizens to modify their judgments about the leadership’s performance accordingly. Our survey includes a unique set of questions about the nature of citizens’ interactions with bureaucrats in different spheres. We are able, therefore, to examine how bureaucratic experiences interact with economic evaluations and other influences on voting behavior, thus augmenting the existing understanding of voting in autocracies.

Authors

• William M. Reisinger, University of Iowa

• Marina Zaloznaya, The University of Iowa

• Haofeng Ma, The University of Iowa