Event

Opinion polls are treasured tools for tapping into public sentiments, but what is the relationship between poll results and public opinion in semi-authoritarian regimes? In Putin’s Russia, opinion polls proliferate and their results are frequently drawn upon to demonstrate the popularity of the current regime.

In this seminar, however, Kirill Rogov challenges the uncritical trust in such survey results. While he does not discard them, he reminds us about the importance of social, political and cultural factors that we should keep in mind when interpreting survey results from Russia as well as semi-authoritarian/authoritarian regimes more generally.

Watch the video from the seminar: