Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing Views of Russians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Richard Rose, William Mishler, and Neil Munro. Popular Support for an Undemocratic Regime: The Changing Views of Russians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. vii, 206 pp. Index. $88.00, cloth; $30.99, paper.In this concise volume, the authors provide an engaging analysis of Russian society during the Putin era. The book's main purpose is to explain why Russians have chosen to support the Russian president, a man whose tenure at the helm has resulted in an increasingly centralized, corrupt, and undemocratic political system. Sifting through the results of nationwide surveys taken since early 1992, the authors present some startling findings- findings that may well inform the understanding of undemocratic regimes' longevity in other settings.The volume begins with an overview of various theoretical perspectives on regime support, be such regimes liberal democratic or authoritarian in nature. Thereafter, the authors thoughtfully include a succinct summary of Russian politics, from Stalin to Yeltsin, which serves as a nice addition to the volume, particularly for readers not well versed in Soviet-era politics. These first two chapters are then joined in a third, wherein the authors discuss the questionable methods used by Putin to construct an institutionalized noncompetitive party system, one that has seen the Russian president repatriate power to the Kremlin in other political arenas as well.The remainder of the text is devoted to testing in the Russian context a variety of hypotheses deduced from the theoretical frameworks discussed at the start. To do so, the authors draw from voluminous dataseis compiled from 18 nationwide, face-to-face interviews conducted between 1992 and 2009.The authors begin their explanation of the durability of Putin's regime with the realization that, although over 4/5 of Russians support in the abstract, as the political system has become less democratic over time, popular support for the regime has grown. Indeed, support for Putin's managed democracy is equivalent to that level found in previously communist-now fully democratic-states of Eastern Europe.Social distinctions are examined first in order to determine which Russians have tended to support the regime more. Among age, gender, educational level, social status, and other factors tested in their regression analysis, the authors find that only social status has an effect upon support, with those respondents from higher than average social backgrounds generally supporting the regime more than those at the other end of the social scale. If true, the fact that so many of the Russian protesters turning out in late 2011 were apparently educated professionals would appear to be a rather worrisome development for the present ruling authorities. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".