WHO DEFECTS?
Defection Cascades from a Ruling Party and the Case of United Russia 2008-121
Henry E. Hale, George Washington University, hhale@gwu.edu
Timothy J. Colton, Harvard University, tcolton@fas.harvard.edu
Draft with Colton comments: December 29, 2013
Word Count: 12,309
What factors govern mass support for the dominant party in a hybrid political regime
that combines elements of authoritarianism and democracy? In particular, what causes individual
citizens to cease supporting the ruling party? A burgeoning literature broadly agrees that political
parties are the linchpin of non-democratic regimes’ survival (Brownlee 2007; Geddes 1999;
Huntington 1968; Svolik 2012; Way 2005). Other work has found that public support can be
crucial to the ruling party’s ability to stabilize the regime (Magaloni 2006; McFaul 2005).2 The
support we have in mind involves not only a heartfelt preference for this regime over all
alternatives but also what Kuran (1991, 1995) has called “preference falsification.” The
preference falsifier is someone who secretly dislikes a dominant party but out of concern for
personal safety or career prospects refrains from openly opposing it and sometimes even
champions it in social situations where one is not sure everyone shares the critical attitude.
Systematic preference falsification is widely believed to be central to the survival chances of
non-democratic ruling parties. But research has also shown that it can rapidly come unraveled as
people withdraw this form of support in a cascading process, bringing down whole regimes with
stunning speed and finality (Kuran 1995; Lohmann 1994; Wedeen 2002; Yurchak 2006). If
anyone doubts the power of such dynamics, they need only look to the stunning collapse of
Eastern Europe’s communist party governments in 1989 or the unexpected downfall of regime
after regime in the 2011 Arab Spring (Brown 2013; Kuran 1991; 2011; Patel 2011). We use the
term defection to refer to such withdrawals of support--be it heartfelt or preference falsification-from a nondemocratic regime or its ruling party.
The process of cascading defections--including whether it will go far enough to bring
down a regime--hinges on individuals’ preferences and thresholds. But we know remarkably
little about what drives variation in these preferences and thresholds. Why would some people
who once supported a ruling party shift to opposing it, and why would some be quicker to do so
than others? Work focusing on preference falsification have concentrated on the larger dynamic
and its theoretical underpinnings, leaving underdeveloped theory on who precisely gets swept up
in these regime defection cascades and how (Kuran 1991, 1995; Lohmann 1994; Pfaff 2006).3 A
1
The surveys on which this article is based were funded principally by the National Council for Eurasian and East
European Research (NCEEER) under authority of two Title VIII grants from the U.S. government and supplemental
funding by the latter. The views expressed here are solely those of the authors and are not the responsibility of the
U.S. government, the NCEEER, or any other person or entity. The authors thank Ellen Carnaghan, Thomas
Remington, and participants in the Political Economy Seminar of the Higher School of Economics and New
Economic School in Moscow for comments on earlier drafts.
2
Most research on non-democratic regime survival emphasizes the elite sources of these parties’ strength (e.g.,
Levitsky and Way 2010; Reuter and Remington 2009; Smyth, Wilkening, & Urasova 2007),
3
As one recent example, many early accounts have argued that regime defection cascades were key to bringing
down Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and his ruling National Democratic Party, but they say almost nothing about the
1
host of theories explain the defection of elites (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005; Hale 2005;
Slater 2010; Svolik 2012), but these do not afford us much leverage on the vast bulk of regime
supporters, who do not control major economic or political assets. Some important work tracks
macro-level trends in public opinion leading up to a ruling party’s downfall (Magaloni 2006).
But without being able to observe the dispositions of the same individuals both before and after,
such studies cannot tell us which specific people at the micro level are actually doing the
defecting and why. Other scholarship examines what kinds of individuals participate in uprisings
or anti-regime protests (Beissinger 2011, 2013; Javeline 2003; Smyth 2013). This is not the
question at hand for us. We are interested not in who protests, but in who goes from a situation
of supporting a regime to withdrawing that support, whether or not they turn out in the streets.
And in any case, it is not enough to ask people after a regime defection cascade whether they
were long-time opposition activists or recent converts to the cause. Research into preference
falsification dynamics finds that some people can be expected to misrepresent their own prior
positions after the fact, with erstwhile regime supporters now associating themselves with the
winning side and denying that they had ever sincerely or insincerely backed the old authorities
(Kuran 1991; Kuran and Sunstein 1999).
In the present paper, we introduce several theoretical propositions on how defection from
ruling parties is likely to occur and spread at the individual level, and then present an empirical
strategy capable of overcoming many of the difficulties just described. The strategy--to our
knowledge unique in the literature--is to employ an original panel survey that measures the same
individuals’ support for one hybrid regime’s dominant party first at the peak of its dominance
and then again just after the party suffered its most severe political crisis since its founding, one
where a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that somewhat of a cascade of defections took
place among regime supporters in the broader population. The context is Russia, where Vladimir
Putin’s United Russia Party went from almost unquestioned dominance in 2008 to a major drop
in support and an unprecedented tsunami of protest that shook the regime and forced it into a
series of concessions in late 2011 and early 2012.4
On this basis, we find that--contrary to a popular wisdom--defection from dominant
parties tends to spread more by geographic community than virtual community and tends to be
driven more by cynicism about democracy than faith in it. In addition, such waves first tend to
sweep up party supporters based on their individual psychological mobility, low confidence in
their own party’s future, and a host of contingent personal reactions to regime actions and
changes in personal fortune that may have little to do with the authorities. We also find that the
regime’s creation of “virtual parties” can be a significant buttress to the stability of nondemocratic regimes. Many Russiandefectors opted to go to one of these rather than to the most
unwavering opposition parties, though the true opposition parties picked up those defectors who
had deep-down been most dissatisfied with Putin prior to their defection. Thus while spreading
Internet access and democratic values may be important for other reasons, faith in their ability to
bring down sophisticated nondemocratic regimes may be misplaced at the same time that the
power of demography, geography, and contingency may be underestimated.
Defection from a Dominant Party: Theory and Expectations
micro-level patterns that brought some citizens into open opposition to the regime and not others, or about what
structure this spread might have had apart from taking the form of a cascade (Kuran 2011; Patel 2012).
4
Many of the concessions proved to be temporary or were later scaled down, but this rollback occurred mainly after
our survey was conducted.
2
In this section, we address the need for theory on precisely how defection spreads across
a dominant party’s supporters in the broader population, developing a set of theoretical
propositions with testable implications. Since support can take two forms, heartfelt support and
preference falsification, we proceed by examining each, beginning with the latter. Since some of
the relevant literature does not distinguish between ruling party and regime, and since ruling
parties are tightly connected to the regimes they support, we sometimes use the term regime
defection cascades with the understanding that defection from a ruling party is typically part of
such a cascade.
The classic example of someone falsifying their preferences for a dominant party in a
non-democratic regime is the greengrocer in Havel’s famous 1978 essay “The Power of the
Powerless.” He displays a communist propaganda sign in his shop window despite not believing
in it, thereby contributing to the overall sense of permanence of the regime, which in a selffulfilling prophesy then actually makes the regime more stable since others sense that
challenging it is futile (Havel 1992). As Kuran (1989, 1991, 1995) shows formally in a series of
seminal publications, however, this same logic also explains how such support can disappear
suddenly and rapidly once enough people learn how enough other people feel. This preference
de-falsification tends to occur in what Lohmann (1994) dubbed “informational cascades”: The
first individuals’ expressions of their opposition embolden others to do the same by providing
information that others share their actual preferences, with this emboldening effect becoming
more powerful the more people join in. Kuran (1991, 1995) also makes the important
observation that such cascades involve not only the revelation of preferences that were
previously held privately, but the transformation of preferences and a new kind of preference
falsification: Some people who were actually ambivalent under the old regime are likely after its
demise to present themselves as its die-hard opponents under the influence of the exciting and
dramatic cascade process and the disgracing of the previous authorities.5
These theories of regime defection cascades generally concur that patterns of individual
dispositions in a society are absolutely crucial to how far such cascades will go and whether they
will ultimately bring down a ruling party or regime. Everything depends on individuals’
thresholds for defection. As Granovetter (1978, 1424-5) points out in a seminal paper, if one
person’s defection triggers a second, and a third requires that two others defect first, and so on
and so on, then the initial person’s defection triggers a chain reaction that can bring everyone out
onto the streets. But just raise the third person’s threshold by one, and the cascade of defections
never gets beyond the first two people. For this reason, an implication of preference falsification
theory is that it is very important for scholars to study what dispositions tend to give people
higher or lower thresholds for defection from ruling parties, and it is arguably most important to
understand thresholds up until the point where defections become considered a threat to a
regime. Curiously, these theorists have not yet seriously attempted to build a theory of individual
thresholds. Kuran (1991, pp.21-22) goes the furthest, noting that individual characteristics are at
least as important as major structural changes in determining whether an availability cascade
takes place and how far it goes. When it comes to what individual characteristics these are,
however, he is rather agnostic other than pointing out the obvious: disapproval of the regime. He
implies that other individual-level dispositions that drive the unraveling of preference
falsification may be peculiar to each case and not generalizable.
5
On this phenomenon more generally in a context other than regimes, see Kuran and Sunstein 1999.
3
What we can propose here is a somewhat bolder effort in the direction that Kuran has
pioneered. In fact, these theories of regime defection cascades do lead to several testable
propositions that we label as follows.

Expectations. Individuals who have less faith in the future of their own dominant party can
be expected to have lower thresholds for defection. They will thus likely be among the earlier
rather than the later participants in the cascade.

Community. Since it is information that this theory holds is causing the cascade, we would
expect individuals who are more connected than others to be more susceptible to the cascade.
Here we might single out geographic community (in particular, living in large, densely
populated cities) and virtual community (connections through access to specific media that
can be expected to convey the information). The Internet, and in particular social media, are
frequently singled out as vital sources of information independent of non-democratic
regimes, so we should expect those who have the most access to it to be among the earlier
defectors from a dominant party.

Disgruntlement. If people are falsifying their preferences, then we can also follow Kuran in
assuming that those who harbor the deepest “real” dissatisfaction are likely to have the
lowest thresholds for defection. Since we cannot know from talking to such people who they
are (by definition, they falsify their preferences), we can nevertheless examine other factors
that are typically sources of discontent with a regime. In particular, we would expect people
who have long been suffering economically to have the lowest thresholds for defecting
(Treisman 2011). Likewise, those who have long harbored positions on major issues that are
at odds with positions they think the ruling party holds are also likely to have lower
thresholds for defection.

Investment. Since preference de-falsification is a product of expected cost-benefit
calculations, it should also be subject to influence by variation in other potential costs and
benefits. Thus we would expect those individuals who are likely to have the least personal
psychological (or other) investment in the existing regime to have the lowest thresholds for
withdrawing that support. While this can vary by context, this would provide grounds for
expecting that youth are likely to be among the earlier defectors since they should be most
cognitively mobile. In addition, members of social groups favored by the old regime are
likely, ceteris paribus, to be among the later rather than earlier defectors. Of course, partisan
attachments are also an important form of cognitive investment in a ruling party, so we
would expect a ruling party’s partisans to defect later or never rather than earlier.

Democracy. Much of the literature on regime defection cascades treats them as democratic
episodes, processes by which underlying “real” mass preferences make themselves felt on a
regime, producing a change that can be thought of largely as an expression of the popular
will. Surely the association of regime defection cascades with democracy is influenced by the
fact that this theory gained particular prominence with the fall of communism, which did in
some instances result in democracy (Kuran 1991; Lohmann 1994; Pfaff 2006). By these
lights, we would expect that ruling party supporters who also harbor more democratic
attitudes would tend to have lower thresholds for defection.
4
Of course, not all defection can be expected to reflect preference de-falsification. Instead,
another proposition we advance is that regime defection cascades should also reflect some
measure of actual change in those views that had previously underpinned support for the ruling
party. At least two forms of this phenomenon are likely to be significant.

Contingent Regime Gaffes. We cannot treat the regime as static. A ruling party is perfectly
capable of taking contingent actions that attract or repel supporters. It would thus make sense
if observed defection cascades came after concrete actions to which supporters happened to
react negatively.

Pocketbook Deterioration. It is also possible that regardless of regime actions, third variables
could change that tend to generate support for the ruling party. Perhaps most noteworthy here
is the economy. Individuals whose personal economic fortunes have deteriorated might be
expected to subsequently downgrade their level of support for the rulers.
Thus we also offer one general proposition emerging out of the preceding:

Combination of Defection Processes. Waves of defection from a ruling party can typically be
expected to feature the withdrawal of heartfelt support and the cascading reversal of
preference falsification, in some complex combination, except in the harshest regimes where
heartfelt support is almost entirely nonexistent even before defections begin (expected to be
quite rare). We leave for further research theory into when each element will likely dominate
the other as this is beyond the scope of what we can test here.
The Case of United Russia’s Crisis 2011-12: A Panel Survey
A panel survey can be a unique tool for empirically testing theories of defection from
ruling parties. By interviewing the very same individuals both before a defection cascade and
after it, we gain true measures of levels of support (in the sense discussed above) at each point in
time that can be compared. Their attitudes and behavior at the two points in time can be
systematically compared, allowing us to identify precisely who has defected, who has not, and
who might have actually gone against the grain and joined the ruling party in its hour of
weakness--a process we cannot rule out entirely. It is justified to argue that these are “true”
measures of support because the act of telling a survey researcher who appears at one’s door that
one supports the ruling party is itself a form of support. While we cannot tell if this support is
heartfelt or preference falsification, either way it is precisely what we are interested in studying.
A panel survey thus provides quite direct measures of whether individuals support a ruling party
or not both before and after a cascade, enabling us to tell who defects and to test theories as to
which individual traits influence defection.6
Russia between 2008 and 2012 presents a strong context for such analysis because: (a) it
is widely agreed to be a nondemocratic regime featuring a dominant party, Vladimir Putin’s
United Russia Party; (b) this party went from a high water mark of support to a much lower level
in precisely this period; (c) observer accounts provide masses of anecdotal evidence there was a
6
Of course, ideally we would have a running measure that could pinpoint exactly when the changes occurred, but
since regime defection cascades are widely argued to be highly unpredictable by their very nature and since such
surveys are by their nature expensive to conduct, such data are unlikely to be widely available.
5
strong cascading aspects of these defections. United Russia was arguably at the peak of its
dominance after winning an outright two-thirds majority (enough to amend the constitution on its
own) in the December 2007 Duma elections and then claiming victory in the presidential contest,
as its nominee Dmitry Medvedev handily dispatched of all rivals in the March 2008 election (his
patron Putin had made room for him by shifting to become prime minister). By fall 2011,
however, the party’s standing in the polls had noticeably declined. A crystallizing moment, by
some accounts, was Medvedev’s announcement on September 24, 2011, that he was sacrificing
his own political ambitions to allow Putin to return to the presidency and the accompanying
statement that this had in fact been planned long ago--seemingly casting much of Medvedev’s
own presidency as a charade and voters as dupes (Hale 2011b).7 The pre-election decline in
support translated into a stunning drop of even its official vote count to below 50 percent in the
December 2011 Duma election, revealing the regime either to have been unable or unwilling to
“save” the party from its poor result by fraud. Nevertheless, there was considerable public
evidence that fraud had kept United Russia’s result from being even worse.
In this context, initially small efforts at protest shocked almost all observers (even their
organizers8) when they resulted in tens of thousands of people turning up in Moscow’s streets in
two major rallies and accompanying events in other cities--the largest such manifestations since
the early 1990s. Reports from the scene related euphoria in what seemed to be a sudden public
revelation of widespread dissatisfaction with United Russia (and even the regime itself), with a
large number of former preference falsifiers now joining the opposition.9 This included many
media personalities and other public figures who had before been content to hide any
dissatisfaction with the regime in order to make their careers but who now suddenly decided to
take a stand. For example, the well-known writer Grigorii Chkhartishvili (pen name Boris
Akunin) said in a 2012 interview that he had been somewhat dissatisfied with the regime since
Putin was elected to office but had generally stayed out of politics until these events began. He
then described his defection from a form of preference falsification to the protest movement in
terms that Kuran himself could hardly have improved upon:
I considered my “rebelliousness” like a strictly personal gesticulation, not having any social significance.
But in December (2011), I saw that around me there had suddenly appeared very many who thought like
me. And this was already something serious. Serious enough to make possible putting aside all personal
projects. 10
The authorities were stunned as Moscow protests reached over 100,000 people by some
accounts. Showing signs of panic, the authorities felt they could not repress such large crowds in
this moment of weakness and responded instead with some makeshift liberalizing reforms
designed to placate the protesters. This included relaxing the media environment, even allowing
on the main television stations some opposition voices that had long been absent except where
portrayed in a negative light. The Kremlin then remobilized, conducting a massive campaign to
rebuild support for Vladimir Putin and his return to the presidency in the March 2012 election, a
campaign that included downplaying the United Russia Party, though he still accepted its
nomination. These actions, which still left the fundamental controls on the election process intact
7
Though this event was not obviously reflected in the polls that immediately followed (Sonin 2012).
The New Times, December 12, 2011, pp.2-7.
9
See coverage by The New Times and Vedomosti, for example.
10
Boris Akunin (Grigorii Chkhartishvili), interview, “Putinskii period vkhodit v final’nuiu fazu,” The New Times,
February 20, 2012, p.6.
8
6
, indeed let the protest movement’s steam largely blow out and allowed Putin to recover his
support. By the time of his reelection victory, United Russia’s ratings had recovered somewhat
too, far behind its 2008 levels but still comfortably ahead of all rival parties even by the most
independent surveys. Nevertheless, many were still predicting the party’s continued decline at
this time (e.g., Kommersant 2012).
What apparently happened in 2011-12, then, is at a minimum a significant wave of
defection from United Russia and, by many anecdotal accounts, a cascading process of
preference de-falsification that the regime was ultimately able to staunch through limited tactical
concessions and a countermobilization that built on strong genuine support that the regime had
long been believed to hold among certain large segments of the population. This case, then,
would seem to provide an excellent chance to study who among a party’s supporters at the peak
of its dominance were the first to abandon it and to have maintained their withdrawal of support.
We were able to measure the “before” and “after” levels of support (broadly defined as
above) through the Russian Election Studies (RES) series of surveys of voting-age subjects that
the present authors regularly conduct right after Russian federal election cycles with the
Moscow-based Demoscope survey research organization. Crucially, the spring 2008 and spring
2012 surveys included a panel component, asking the same set of voters each time many
questions pertinent to both the parliamentary elections (held in December 2007 and 2011) and
the presidential elections (held in March 2008 and 2012).11 This survey thus captured the high
water mark of the United Russia Party’s dominance in March-May 2008 and spanned the party’s
2011-12 nadir, with the second wave coming in April-May 2012, just after Putin’s and United
Russia’s ratings had begun to recover.
Our panel consists of 661 people whom we were able to reinterview in 2012 from the
original 2008 sample of 1,130. Naturally, the set of successfully reinterviewed people cannot be
considered nationally representative of the adult population in 2012. For one thing, it will
exclude people who were too young to be polled in 2008 but who were adults by 2012. Some
older people will likely have passed away during the four intervening years, though others will
have aged. It may be that other variables of interest are also under- or overrepresented in the
sample. To get a better sense of how severe this issue is, we test whether any of the factors that
interest us as possible correlates of dominant party defection are indeed correlated with selection
into the sample. Table 1 reports the findings using a logit model, with the dependent variable
being whether a respondent drops out of the sample and coefficients reported as odds ratios to
give a basic sense of how strong any such relationships are.
While a discussion of what the different variables included are will be presented below
when we discuss our model and findings, here it is sufficient to note that only two variables of
11
The surveys, as with all RES surveys, are based on a multistage area probability sample designed to be nationally
representative for Russia by Mikhail Kosolapov of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Sociology and
Michael Swafford of the George Washington University in consultation with Steve Heeringa of the University of
Michigan. The first wave discussed in the present paper included 1,130 respondents and was taken March 18 - May
8, 2008. Of these respondents, 661 were successfully reinterviewed in 2012 during the period April 1 - May 18,
2012. These 661 were supplemented during the same period by another 1,021 respondents to compose a nationally
representative sample for 2012 consisting of 1,682 respondents. Demoscope is highly reputable and oriented to
academic studies, conducting each of the RES surveys since 1995 as well as surveys for noted scholars such as
Donna Bahry and James Gibson, whose findings have been published in the field’s leading journals. All RES
surveys have been co-led by Timothy Colton, with Hale co-leading the effort for the three most recent election
cycles (2003-04, 2008, and 2012). These data, which will enable replication and other studies, are being prepared for
general release to scholars in the near future.
7
primary interest are statistically significantly (using 95 percent confidence intervals) correlated
with dropping out of the sample between 2008 and 2012. Those living in larger urban
communities and men are more likely to drop out. Presumably, this is because they are more
mobile populations in the Russian context. While we will provide reason to expect both variables
to be related to defection from a ruling party, the concept of mobility is not part of this logic.
Thus we do not expect this slightly patterned sample attrition to significantly impact our findings
even for these two variables other than potentially to reduce the chances we find them significant
since we have fewer datapoints on them to analyze. To confirm, we ran the main regression
analysis reported below with a Heckman probit selection model, which models the attrition
process as well as the equation of primary interest. This exercise resulted in no substantial
change in our findings, including the significance of community size and gender.12
Table 1. Correlates of Dropping Out of the Panel 2008-12 (N/S = not significant)
Odds
95% Conf.
More/Less
Variable Ratio
Interval
Likely to Drop Out
Larger size of community (quintiles) 2008 1.56*
1.01 - 2.40
More Likely
Education 2008 0.91
0.80 - 1.04
N/S
Russian 2008 0.99
0.47 - 2.11
N/S
Age 2008 0.99
0.98 - 1.00
N/S
Orthodox 2008 1.11
0.67 - 1.85
N/S
Woman 2008 0.68**
0.51 - 0.90
Less Likely
Gained materially from 2000s 2008 0.93
0.76 - 1.13
N/S
On the political right 2008 0.97
0.85 - 1.11
N/S
“Democracy” good for Russia 2008 1.05
0.78 - 1.43
N/S
Left-right stance differs from United Russia’s 2008 0.99
0.90 - 1.09
N/S
United Russia Partisan 2008 0.92
0.60 - 1.41
N/S
Approval of Putin Performance 2008 0.88
0.71 - 1.10
N/S
Internet user 2008 1.33
0.90 - 1.99
N/S
Internet most important news source 2008 0.92
0.21 - 4.12
N/S
REN-TV news viewer 2008 0.75
0.50 - 1.13
N/S
Radio news listener 2008 0.66
0.39 - 1.10
N/S
N=1,130. * Statistically significant at the 5% level. ** Statistically significant at the 1% level
Defecting from United Russia
We adopt as our chief measure of support whether a respondent said that they voted for
United Russia in a given election. Readers are reminded that we are not interested here in
whether respondents who said they cast a ballot for the party actually did so; instead, we are
interested in broadly defined support that includes both heartfelt support and preference
falsification. A statement to an interviewer that one voted for United Russia even when one did
not actually do so is nevertheless a form of support for the party, albeit of the preference
12
The more data-taxing Heckman probit results are not presented here, but are available upon request, and instead
we report the more easily interpretable logit findings. The variables we included for the estimation of selection were
community size, gender, and whether a respondent reported having children living with them at home, which is
likely to be strongly correlated with mobility but not with defection. The estimated value of rho is -.57, where a
value of 1 indicates no selection effects on the results whatsoever. Nevertheless, only the variable capturing
education levels (not one of primary interest) drops out of the 95-percent confidence range when the switch is made
from logit to Heckman probit, but the drop is slight, moving just to 94.1 percent confidence from a level of 97.6
percent not using the Heckman probit technique.
8
falsification variety. Reading the results in this light, our survey registers a net decline in United
Russia support amongst the population between 2008 and 2012. As Table 2 illustrates, such
dominant party supporters constituted 45 percent of the population in 2008 and just 40 in 2012.
This change gets reduced somewhat when we move from the whole survey population to the set
of respondents in the panel, those who were successfully reinterviewed. In the panel, 51 percent
claimed to have voted for United Russia in 2008 and 49 percent in 2012. Of course, the figures
here for 2012 reflect not only United Russia’s losses relative to 2008, which anecdotal evidence
suggests were significant, but also new supporters that the party managed to bring in on the
coattails of Putin’s “comeback” presidential election campaign in the first part of 2012. Since the
2008 United Russia supporters in our panel are our population of interest, Table 3 provides more
information about their dispositions as of 2008.
Table 2. Percentage of United Russia Supporters in 2008 and 2012 (Shares Saying They Voted for
United Russia in 2007 and 2011)
In Whole Survey
In Panel
45
51
In 2008 Survey
40
49
In 2012 Survey
Table 3. Profile of United Russia’s 2008 Supporters in the Panel
From Moscow and St. Petersburg
Specialized secondary or higher education
Ethnic Russian
Orthodox
Female
Average age
Reported their family’s personally gaining from 2000s reforms
Mean position on left-right scale (0=left, 5=center, 10=right)
Mean position attributed to United Russia Party on same left-right scale
Supported continuing, deepening market reform
Thought democracy is at least a fairly good fit for Russia
Transitional partisans of United Russia (Colton 2000)
Approved of Putin’s performance as president
Used the Internet
Considered the Internet their primary news source
Watched news on state-controlled First Channel
Watched news on the more independent REN-TV
Listened to news on radio
5%
75%
79%
78%
62%
46
34%
6.1
7.8
66%
64%
48%
77%
24%
2%
87%
21%
23%
We the panel down into four categories with respect to whether respondents claim to
have voted for United Russia in 2007 and/or 2011. These are summarized in Table 4. We dub
loyalists those individuals, comprising about a third of our panel, who both times claim to have
cast their ballots for Russia’s dominant party. We call oppositionists those who would not say in
either wave of the survey that they voted for it, a category making up another third of the panel
respondents. The category that interests us most here is the defectors: those who claimed in 2008
to have voted for United Russia in 2007, but told survey researchers in 2012 that they had not
done so in 2011. About 17 percent of our panel falls into this category. This is slightly more than
the 15 percent turning up in the category of joiners, those who did not support United Russia in
2008 but wound up supporting it in our 2012 survey.
9
Table 4. Patterns of Self-Reported Voting for United Russia (percentage of panel, n=661)
Defectors (support 2008, no support 2012)
17
Loyalists (support in 2008 & 2012)
34
Joiners (no support 2008, support 2012)
15
Oppositionists (no support 2008 & 2012)
34
Where did the defectors say they went in 2012 and where did the joiners come from?
Tables 5 and 6 indicate that in both cases, a plurality moved in or out of the category of selfdeclared nonvoters. Some 44 percent of defectors said that they did not vote at all in 2011, while
39 percent of joiners had said in 2008 that they did not cast a ballot in the 2007 Duma election. A
tenth of defectors and a fifth of joiners moved in and out (respectively) of the category of those
unable or unwilling to venture a response, which Carnaghan (1996) finds can indicate a form of
apathy or withdrawal. When defectors did say they went to the polls in 2011, they tended most
often to support A Just Russia, which observers typically consider a loyal opposition party
(March 2009) but which did take a sharply critical line against the Kremlin and United Russia in
2011 (Hale 2011b). The LDPR, which captured 8 percent of our defectors’ self-reported votes, is
also widely regarded as a loyal opposition party, though one interpreted as regularly capturing
protest votes due to its leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s fiery rhetoric. The more clearly opposition
Communist Party and Yabloko Party got 14 percent and 3 percent of defectors’ self-reported
votes, respectively, and another 1 percent claimed to have spoiled their ballots. About two-fifths
of joiners came from other parties, mostly A Just Russia and the KPRF.
Table 5. For Which Parties Did Defectors Say They Voted in 2012?
Party
Percent of Defectors (n=108)
A Just Russia
19
LDPR
8
Communist Party
14
Yabloko
3
Right Cause
1
Spoiled ballot
1
Did not vote
44
Hard to say/refuse
10
Table 6. For Which Parties Did Joiners Say They Voted in 2008?
Party
Percent of Joiners (n=97)
Agrarian Party
2
Civic Force
0.1
Democratic Party
1
Communist Party
18
LDPR
4
A Just Russia
11
Patriots of Russia
1
Yabloko
1
Spoiled ballot
3
Did not vote
39
Hard to say/refuse
19
10
Analysis
As noted above, the data tell us that about a third of respondents in our panel switched
either to or from supporting United Russia, with the share of defectors being a bit larger than the
share of joiners. One possibility is that this movement reflects standard measurement error that is
typical of any survey: surveys are imperfect measures of true dispositions that can be thrown off
by t imperfect question wording, interviewer effects, and respondents’ own awareness or mood
on a given day (Green, Palmquist, & Schickler 2002). Because such factors are random with
respect to the important variables in our study, if this were the only explanation for the difference
between the two waves in our panel survey, we should not find theoretically interesting variables
to be systematically correlated with defection from (or joining) United Russia. As the tables
below make clear, this is not the case; instead, we seem to be dealing with nonrandom changes in
support for United Russia between 2008 and 2012.
To study patterns of defection, we start with the entire set of 516 respondents in our 2008
survey who originally said that year they had cast a ballot for United Russia in the December
2007 Duma elections. Of these, 334 were successfully reinterviewed in the 2012 wave of the
RES. Among this set, we created a dummy variable coded 1 for those who defected in 2012 and
0 for those who did not. This is our primary dependent variable, and since it is binary, it is
appropriate to use the well-established logit model. Following Miller and Shanks (1996) and
Colton (2000), we report the magnitude of the “effects” as total effects since these are highly
intuitive.13 A total effect is the change in likelihood of defection that would be generated by an
otherwise average individual (someone who has the median score on all other relevant variables)
moving from the lowest value of a given factor to the highest value.
The analysis proceeds in four main steps. First, we consider the overall pattern of
defection we find in the data using only predictors from 2008, where we have the most
confidence that we are free of endogeneity concerns. Second, we test those parts of the theory
elaborated above that can only be evaluated with data gathered in 2012. Third, we explore the
determinants of different patterns of defection, considering why some defect by moving to true
opposition parties while others simply decide not to vote. And fourth, we present an analysis of
patterns among those who began in 2008 as non-supporters of United Russia but in 2012 joined
it, going against the overall flow overall but likely responding to state authorities’ comeback
effort in early 2012. For the sake of presentation, we discuss the specific measures we use for the
different propositions as we present the results, referring readers to an appendix for the specific
wording of the survey questions utilized.
Predicting Defection in 2012 with Only 2008 Measures
Table 7 presents the findings and a summary interpretation of the correlates of mass
defection from United Russia between 2008 and 2012. We begin by considering only those
theories we can test with independent variables measured in 2008 so as to minimize problems of
endogeneity. That is, since the defection occurred only after the 2008 survey was taken but all
independent variables come from 2008 survey, it cannot be the case that the act of defection
influenced any of the values of the independent variables. These findings are presented in the
Regression 1 column of Table 7.
13
We calculate them using the software CLARIFY with Stata. CLARIFY generates estimates of total effects from
highly opaque logit (and multinomial logit) coefficients through a stochastic simulation technique (King, Tomz, and
Wittenberg 2000; and Tomz, Wittenberg, and King 2003).
11
Table 7. Correlates of Defecting from United Russia 2008-2012 (among panel respondents who
reported voting for United Russia in 2008, logit model, total effects [percent] with 95-percent
confidence interval, N=334)
1.
2.
Total Effect
Total Effect
Interpretation*
Variable (95% conf.)
(95% conf.)
(N/S = not significant)
Larger community size (quintiles) 2008
41
36
Defection more likely
(23, 58)
(18, 54)
Education 2008
-16
-10
N/S
(-36, 4)
(-32, 10)
Russian 2008
13
12
Defection more likely
(5, 22)
(4, 21)
Age 2008
-27
-22
Defection less likely
(-46, -8)
(-41, -2)
Orthodox 2008
3
1
N/S
(-10, 13)
(-13, 11)
Woman
-14
-12
Defection less likely
(-25, -4)
(-23, -1)
Gained from 2000s 2008
0
-3
N/S
(-18, 19)
(-20, 14)
On the political right 2008
-11
13
N/S
(-12, 31)
(-11, 34)
Democracy good for Russia 2008
-33
-31
Defection less likely
(-58, -10)
(-57, -7)
Diverges from United Russia on left-right
46
51
Defection more likely
(14, 72)
(18, 75)
United Russia partisan 2008
0
0
N/S
(-9, 8)
(-9, 10)
Approves Putin 2008
-26
-18
(Defection less likely) t
(-56, -1)
(-48, 6)
Internet user 2008
-4
-6
N/S
(-14, 7)
(-15, 4)
Internet is main news source 2008
16
5
N/S
(-14, 57)
(-18, 49)
REN-TV news watcher 2008
4
2
N/S
(-7, 16)
(-8, 14)
Radio news listener 2008
6
9
N/S
(-4, 20)
(-2, 23)
Negative reaction to September 24
41
Defection more likely
(18, 64)
Other party has chance to win in 10 years
11
Defection more likely v
(0, 24)
Own family’s situation better in last year
-32
Defection less likely
(-56, -7)
* Statistical significance threshold: 5% level.
t
Statistically significant at the 5.1% level in the logit analysis in regression analysis 1, but the CLARIFY stochastic
simulation estimate of the total effects rules out a null effect with 95 percent confidence. Not significant in equation
2 by either measure.
v
Comfortably statistically significant at the 4.4% level in the logit analysis, but the CLARIFY stochastic simulation
estimations of the total effects just barely do not rule out a null effect with 95 percent confidence.
12
One of the most striking findings concerns community effects: Defection appears to
spread far more by physical geography than by virtual society despite the attention frequently
given to the Internet by analysts. Not a single pattern of media usage in 2008 is correlated with
defection in 2012: United Russia supporters who watched more independent television news, got
news from the radio, or relied primarily on the Internet for news in 2008 were no more or less
likely to abandon their party four years later than anyone else. On the other hand, we find a very
large effect for community size: United Russia supporters who lived in the largest cities were 41
percent more likely than those living in the smallest communities to jump party ship. This
supports the analysis of Russian geographers and sociologists who have argued that there is a
large divide politically between Russia’s largest cities and the rest of the country (Gudkov 2012;
Zubarevich 2011). That said, contrary to some accounts, we found nothing special about
Moscow and St. Petersburg in this regard; this wave of defection was more about larger urban
areas generally.14
We also find strong confirmation for the argument that defection cascades are likely first
to sweep up people whose underlying views had been in disagreement with the ruling party but
who had been its supporters nevertheless. We tested this in several ways. Initially, we asked
them in 2008 simply whether they approved of the activity of Vladimir Putin as president, Putin
having headed United Russia’s party list in the 2011 parliamentary election. As Regression 1 in
Table 7 reveals, people who had approved of his performance in 2008 were 26 percent less likely
to defect when 2012 rolled around, though this effect was on the verge of our 5-percent statistical
significance threshold. More impressive is the finding from a second measure we constructed
more directly for this purpose: By asking respondents in 2008 where they placed themselves on
an 11-point scale ranging from the far political left (0) to the far political right (10) and then
asking them where they placed thought the United Russia Party stood on this same scale, we
were able to construct an index capturing the distance between their self-positioning and the
ruling party’s perceived position.15 This disagreement in political orientation turns out to be a
very strong predictor of defection: Those whose policy views diverged completely from the
ruling party’s on this scale in 2008 were an impressive 46 percentage points more likely to defect
in 2012 than were those who had been in agreement with it. And what mattered is precisely
disagreement with the ruling party rather than left-right self-placement itself; one’s own left-right
positioning in 2008 does not afford us significant leverage on predicting who will defect in 2012.
This pattern of underlying disgruntlement-driven defection did not appear to extend to selfreported “pocketbook” considerations, however: Individuals who reported in 2008 having done
more poorly in material economic terms as a result of the Putin-era reforms were no more likely
to defect in 2012 than others.
The panel study also finds that personal investment in a ruling party influences who
defects first, though in some counterintuitive ways. Consistent with expectations is that younger
people, who are expected to have less psychological investment in party-supportive behavior, are
more likely to defect and, conversely, older people, more dependent on the regime economically,
are less likely to defect: The oldest were 27 percent less likely to defect than the youngest.
14
That is, when we included a variable coding whether a respondent lived in Moscow or St. Petersburg, it had no
significant effect if the community size variable was also included. This result is robust and available upon request.
15
We coded as 0 (reflecting no distance) individuals who could not place either themselves or United Russia on this
scale because we are interested in people who definitely declared in 2008 a difference in policy positioning between
themselves and the party they supported.
13
Two other findings on personal investments might at first seem surprising. One is that
self-identified ethnic Russians turn out to be 13 percent more likely to defect than ethnic
minorities, which should be unexpected for those seeing Russian nationalism as a key source of
Putin’s support. Careful prior survey research, however, has found that such a view is misguided,
and that Putin and United Russia have in fact not tended to draw significantly on Russian
nationalism (Colton and Hale 2009, 486). Moreover, the finding that ethnic Russians are actually
more likely to defect makes perfect sense keeping in mind that many ethnic minorities in Russia
have long been found to be a core source of official votes and support for United Russia.
Importantly, this support is to a significant degree institutionalized and enforced by strong
political machines based in autonomous ethnic republics that are often highly dependent on the
central authorities (Hale 2003, 2006; Zimmerman 2009; Zubarevich 2011). This finding thus
indicates that these sorts of personal investments in a ruling party tend to slow defection. Also
remarkable is a negative finding, the robust insignificance of partisan identification in retarding
defection. Those 48 percent of 2008 United Russia supporters who displayed the strongest
personal attachments to it turned out to be no more loyal than the others in 2012 when the party
hit a crisis.16 Thus while United Russia has been building up partisans since its founding in the
early 2000s, this would appear to be providing it with cold comfort at best.
Perhaps most surprising for those who interpret regime defection cascades in the
framework of democratization (which would appear to be most) is the following sturdy result:
Those United Russia supporters who averred in 2008 that a “democratic system” is a “very
good” fit for Russia were 33 percent less likely to defect from the party in 2012 than were those
who had thought it was a “very bad” fit. This finding is robust to many different combinations of
other variables in the equation, and so cannot easily be dismissed as an artifact of the uncertainty
that all regression analyses involve. As it turns out, the RES allows us to rule out a number of
different possibilities and check consistency with various attempts to explain the result away. For
one thing, the 2008 survey asked respondents to state in their own words what they meant by
democracy, and a coding of the responses found that the United Russia loyalists in our sample
did not have any more non-standard definitions of democracy than did others--in fact, they were
more likely than others to define democracy much as Western researchers do.17 We also
considered whether this result reflected the fact that we were coding “don’t know” and “refuse”
answers as average responses (see Carnaghan 1996), but dropping them changed neither the
significance nor the sign of the coefficient.
Instead, this finding appears to reflect that at least part of United Russia’s fall in support
involved the departure of anti-democratic people from its ranks in greater measure than that of
the democrats who had been in its ranks as of 2008. Nearly a fifth of United Russia supporters in
2008 who supported democracy did defect, but a much greater proportion of “authoritarians”
bolted the party in its moment of crisis, mostly moving to other parties with dubious democratic
credentials (like the Communists, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR, and A Just Russia) or to the
ranks of self-reported non-voters. And among United Russia supporters in 2008 who said
The measure reported in Tables 7 is Colton’s (2000) standard “transitional partisanship,” which records as a
party’s “partisan” anyone who names that party (without being given a list) when asked if there is any party they
would call “my party” or if there is at least one that “more than the others reflects your interests, views, and
concerns.” This negative finding holds even when other measures of partisanship are used, including what Hale
(2006) has called “hard core transitional partisanship” and a very different measure of partisanship drawing from
social psychology and used productively by Green, Palmquist, and Schickler (2002) in Western contexts.
17
On how Russian understandings of “democracy” sometimes differ from Western ones, see Carnaghan 2007; Hale
2011a; Levada Center 2006; Rose, Mishler, & Munro 2006. See also Smyth (forthcoming)..
16
14
unequivocally that democracy was a good fit for Russia, only 4 percent said at the same time that
they would prioritize democracy over economic growth and only a quarter would privilege it
over a strong state, with these figures being even lower for those less confident in their support
for democracy. In short, it would appear that United Russia’s 2008 democracy supporters were
not systematically driven by any personal democratic awakening. Instead, the party’s more antidemocratic backers were among those quickest to leave the apparently sinking ship. Perhaps,
somewhat ironically, they were concerned that United Russia was weakening as a nondemocratic force as pro-democracy protests and sentiments appeared to be in ascendancy.
Defection cascades from a dominant party, therefore, appear not to be about democratic
awakening--at least, when it comes to those who can be expected to cut bait first.
Expectations, Contingency, and Pocketbooks: 2012 Measures
Some of the theoretical expectations discussed above can only be studied with measures
included in our survey solely in the 2012 wave, so in a second model we added a set of such
variables. While we now must wrestle with questions about whether the act of defection might
have caused (instead of be caused by) the dispositions we find associated it, the fact that we are
only looking here for correlations that are derived from theory adds confidence that significant
relationships, when found, actually do reflect at least some cause and not just effect.
These findings are reported as Regression 2 in Table 7. At the outset, we observe that
addition of these new variables does not substantially change any of the main findings from the
2008 variables discussed above except the significance of approving Putin’s performance.
Turning to hypotheses that have not yet been tested, Regression 2 allows us to confirm that
United Russia supporters who calculated that another party registered at the time had a chance of
coming to power in the next ten years were 11 percent more likely than others to have defected.18
This is firmly in line with theories of preference de-falsification, since the informational cascades
they describe hinge on beliefs about whether individuals’ actions are likely to be punished or
rewarded in the future. The 2012 RES also confirms that people who reported their family’s
economic fortunes had gotten much worse over the preceding dozen months were an impressive
32 percent more likely to defect than were those who reported doing much better. Finally, we
find confirmation that contingent regime gaffes can promote defection, alienating former
supporters. In particular, we test here whether negative reactions to the September 24, 2011,
“switcheroo” announcement gaffe is associated with defection from United Russia. It turns out
that 2008-vintage United Russia supporters who reported in 2012 being “offended” by the
announcement were 41 percent more likely to have defected by 2012 than are those who
expressed “satisfaction” with the announcement.
Since some readers are likely to find the negative results on the Internet’s influence
surprising and wonder whether 2008 was too early to capture the most politically important
Internet usage patterns for 2011-12, we also tried adding to Regression 2 several Internet-related
variables created from 2012 survey responses. In particular, we tested whether defection was
correlated with self-reported internet use for any purpose, use of the Internet as one’s primary
source of news, and engagement with social networks like Facebook or the popular Russian
Odnoklassniki (“Classmates”) or vKontakte (inContact). The results are in each case
The importance of expectations as to the future prospects of the ruling party and other parties’ could in principle
have been tested with 2008 data if we had asked the right question in the survey that year, but even if we had,
expectations are not expected to be stable like most of the other dispositions discussed above, thus in practice they
need to be measured much closer to the actual act of defection.
18
15
insignificant, not even close.19 These negative findings hold even when we employ finer-grained
measures, detecting no statistically significant evidence that those who reported using various
social media (either lumped together or separated into Facebook, Odnoklassniki, and vKontakte)
in 2012 were any more likely to defect than anyone else. Defection from a ruling party, whether
or not this is unlike street protest, does not appear to be about the Internet.
Explaining Different Kinds of Defection
While the main story is that summarized in Table 7, our study also finds some important
nuances in the precise form defection took. As summarized in Table 5, some defectors said they
voted for another party, while others declared that they did not vote at all. Table 8 thus goes a
step beyond Regression 2 in Table 7, reporting results from a multinomial logit analysis that tells
us what variables are correlated with different sorts of defection. We divide defection up into
three categories.20 The first is a shift to supporting the two Russian parties on the ballot in 2011
that were widely regarded as true opposition parties, the Communist Party and the Yabloko
Party. The second category consists of supporting parties other than United Russia that were on
the ballot but that are widely regarded as “virtual parties,” either having been created with
Kremlin assistance or working in relatively close concert with the authorities, even though some
were in quite sharp opposition to United Russia during the 2011 campaign (Hale 2011b; March
2009; Wilson 2005).21 We include in the third category everyone who does not report that they
voted for a party, which Table 5 indicates is mainly people who said they did not vote.22 The
fourth category, used as the baseline in the multinomial logit analysis, is the set of people who
did not defect, sticking with United Russia through its time of crisis.
For ease of interpretation, only effects estimated with at least 95-percent statistical
confidence are reported in Table 8. Even though the multinomial logit approach is more taxing
on the data, it is worth noting that the variables found to be significant in Table 7 generally
remain significant here, testifying to their robustness. What is of primary interest here, though, is
the set of factors that distinguish different forms of defection rather than those that make
defection generally more or less likely, so we focus on this set here. One noteworthy finding
confirms that expectations about other parties’ future prospects matter: Those 2008 United
Russia supporters who thought in 2012 that a party other than the ruling party had a chance to
come to power in the next decade tended not to drop out of politics but instead to defect to one of
these alternative parties, with a 3 percent greater chance of moving to a real opposition party and
a 12 percent greater probability of shifting to a virtual opposition party, compared with otherwise
typical individuals.
19
These findings are not reported here due to the insignificance, but are available upon request.
Since multinomial logit is taxing on data, we do not have enough observations to allow for a finer-grained
analysis, with more than three categories.
21
These include A Just Russia, the LDPR, Pravoe Delo (Right Cause), and Patriots of Russia.
22
This also includes people who spoiled their ballots, found it hard to say, or declared support for a nonexistent
party (a very rare volunteered response) which for our purposes also constitute forms of defection but not to any
particular party registered at the time.
20
16
Table 8. Correlates of Different forms of Defecting from United Russia 2008-2012 (reporting only
effects estimated with at least 95-percent confidence, multinomial logit model, total effects
[percent], N=334)
‘Real’
‘Virtual’
Opposition Opposition Non-Voting
No
Variable
Party
Party
Defection
Larger community size (quintiles) 2008
32
-37
(13, 53)
(-57, -17)
Education 2008
Russian 2008
3
(1, 7)
*
(-)
Age 2008
-19
(-36, -4)
23
(4, 44)
Orthodox 2008
Woman
*
(-)
*
(+)
-16
(-45, -1)
33
(8, 62)
-55
(-80, -19)
Gained from 2000s 2008
On the political right 2008
8
(1, 28)
Democracy good for Russia 2008
Diverges from United Russia on left-right
United Russia partisan 2008
Approves Putin 2008
-21
(-65, -1)
Internet user 2008
Internet is main news source 2008
REN-TV news watcher 2008
Radio news listener 2008
Negative reaction to September 24
Other party has chance to win in 10 years
3
(0.45, 12)
Own family’s situation better in last year
14
(1, 42)
12
(3, 29)
-12
(-33, -1)
26
(4, 53)
-44
(-68, -18)
30
(6, 56)
* Statistically significant at the 5-percent level in a regression with only the variables measured in 2008. (-) =
negative correlation, (+) = positive correlation.
Of special interest are variables associated with defection to a true opposition party since
this is arguably the strongest form of defection. Table 8 shows that only a handful of factors
tended to drive 2008 United Russia supporters to such lengths. One is ideology: people who
17
consider themselves to be on the far political right were 8 percent more likely to defect to a real
opposition party than typical individuals who happened to be on the far political left. A stronger
factor, however, was their attitude toward Putin’s performance in presidential office as of 2008:
those who most disapproved tended with a total effect of 21 percent to defect to the Communists
or Yabloko but did not stand out for any other form of defection. This also indicates that other
forms of defection were preferred by people who were a bit softer in their attitude toward Putin.
United Russia supporters who defected to a virtual opposition party tended to stand out
for being ethnically Russian (3 percent total effect), having a negative reaction to the September
24 “switcheroo” announcement (14 percent total effect), and having suffered a decline in
material fortunes during the twelve months prior to being interviewed. This is quite in keeping
with the common view that such parties, especially the LDPR and A Just Russia, tend to pick up
protest votes and also emphasize Russian nationalist themes (Hale 2006; Laruelle **). It is also
interesting that precisely these parties tended to attract United Russia defectors who had the least
democratic attitudes, not the most; the other categories of defection do not stand out on the
democracy variable. Since parties in this category have some of the most dubious democratic
credentials--especially the LDPR, which has perhaps most openly flirted with advocating a
dictatorial style of rule under the charismatic Zhirinovsky--this tends to confirm the
interpretation given above that regime defection cascades are not actually about democratic
views, but can actually reflect the most authoritarian members abandoning political ship. There
is somewhat weaker evidence that younger and male United Russia supporters from 2008 tended
to defect to these parties, though youth also stood out for declaring themselves alienated from the
political process. A “non-voting” option also tended to be preferred by those who lived in larger
communities as opposed to smaller ones (a total effect of 32 percent) and those who reacted most
negatively to the “switcheroo” announcement.
Patterns among United Russia Joiners
Just to make sure that defectors from United Russia are not being replaced by virtually
identical joiners, a pattern that might suggest we are only witnessing some kind of structured
fluctuation in and out of party support instead of patterned defection, we also conducted an
analysis of the 327 people in our panel who were not United Russia supporters in 2008 to see
who had joined United Russia by 2012. Remarkably, our central finding is the statistical
insignificance of almost all of the variables considered in our analysis of defection presented
above. The only variable observed in 2008 that turns out to have been a good predictor of which
non-supporters of United Russia would become its supporters in 2012 was whether respondents
approved of Putin’s performance in office as president. People who fully approved of Putin but
were not United Russia supporters in 2008 were 40 percent more likely than others to be pulled
into the ruling party’s orbit by 2012.
This strongly suggests that while defection is highly patterned in the ways anticipated by
theory, the people that the party was able to regain were drawn primarily by personal
attachments to Putin himself. This makes a great deal of sense in the context of Russian events.
As was discussed above, after suffering a large wave of defection reflected in official voting
results and tracking polls, the party’s recovery came on the heels of Putin’s comeback in the
2012 presidential campaign where his personal status as father of the nation was emphasized and
United Russia’s qualities as a party deemphasized, though he did still run as the party’s nominee.
This conclusion is reinforced when we include the 2012 variables in the equation just as we did
in our study of defection. Approval of Putin remains the only significant variable from 2008, and
18
among the 2012 variables, we find only that non-supporters of United Russia who reacted
negatively to the September 24 “switcheroo” announcement were 59 percent less likely to be
joiners than others while those who thought another party had a chance to come to power in the
next ten years were 11 percent less likely to fall into this category. Thus while the party’s net
support in spring 2012 looked on the surface not too dissimilar to spring 2008, the losses from
the defection wave were being compensated for by attracting a different sort of person, primarily
those drawn to Putin’s personality but who had not earlier been party supporters.23
Conclusion
Our unique panel survey data spanning a limited but significant cascade in defection from
the ruling United Russia Party between 2008 and 2012 provides significant leverage in starting to
develop theory as to the behavioral micro-foundations of how non-democratic regimes lose
support. Understanding such defection is essential for understanding authoritarian endurance,
revolution, and regime dynamics because ruling parties are widely considered a critical source of
regime stability and since the withdrawal of support for them (particularly in the form of
unraveling preference falsification) has been widely linked to their regimes’ collapse. Our study
finds that such defections, while often linked in the public imagination to social media and the
emergence of democratic values, in fact has little to do with either. Ruling party defectors in
Russia did not stand out for any particular kind of media use, and actually turned out to be
among the more authoritarian elements of the party’s initial support base. This suggests that
defection is more about hard-headed, rational calculations of political futures and that these
calculations are much more influenced by what people see and hear in their physical
environments than what they read or watch online. Indeed, defection was far more likely among
those who lived in the largest cities and thought that opposition parties had a real chance of
coming to power in the coming decade. Disgruntlement with the regime was also a powerful
predictor of defection: United Russia supporters who nevertheless in 2008 reported liking Putin
less and being in disagreement on policy issues with their party were much more likely to defect
when the party hit a crisis in 2011-12, as where those who reported that their families had
suffered materially over the past year and who were most put off by a major regime gaffe in
autumn 2011.
The regime certainly had its defenses, on which our analysis also sheds light. For one
thing, both Putin and his party retained substantial approval ratings despite the unexpected sharp
drop in support, and this mattered in the end: the primary factor driving defectors into the most
die-hard opposition camp was underlying dissatisfaction with Putin’s performance as president,
so the fact that most were in fact satisfied provided a sort of backstop for the regime. And the
regime’s creation of a set of virtual parties, entities that trumpeted opposition rhetoric but
retained close ties with (and potentially being in subordination to) the rulers, also helped ease the
impact of the defection wave: Most defectors who chose an alternative party actually went over
to these parties rather than to the true opposition, probably representing a more psychologically
comfortable move for those who our survey revealed were not entirely dissatisfied with Putin
themselves. We thus gain insight not only into how defection cascades spread, but also into how
23
As the vast majority of variables are insignificant, tables for these regressions are not reported here due to space
considerations, though they are available upon request from the authors. In one version of the analysis, we find that
people who relied on the Internet as their primary news source in 2008 were significantly less likely to join than
otherwise median respondents, but this effect was unstable, and in any case, only about 2 percent of the population
fell into this category so even if it were significant, it could explain at best only a small share of joiners.
19
regimes might be able to stop them. Those party supporters with significant investments in the
regime were also slow to defect, especially the old and ethnic minorities, though one of our most
surprising findings was that the party loyalties United Russia had been building up over the past
decade proved no barrier for the defection cascade. Partisanship may still matter, but at a
minimum this finding suggests that it may take more time to gel before it can truly shore up a
regime’s support.
While our findings contribute support for a set of theoretical propositions that should be
tested in other environments where possible, they also do constitute something of a warning sign
to the subject of our case study, Russia’s regime. While some of the regime’s defenses were
working, the ineffectiveness of partisanship bodes ill for its future prospects. Moreover, we
found that while United Russia was apparently successful in replacing most of its defectors with
new “recruits” by late spring 2012 on the coattails of Putin’s all-out campaign for election to a
third presidential term, the new joiners were of a different quality from those that were lost. The
newcomers were drawn nearly randomly from the population, not reflecting any of the deep or
patterned connections with the electorate that has previously been found to be correlated with
support for both the ruling party and its leadership in the past. Instead, they were attracted mainly
by approval of Putin’s performance in office. And since performance evaluations are fragile, our
study may also have picked up a crucial episode in the deterioration of one of the world’s
hitherto most successful non-democratic regimes.
Defection from a ruling party in a non-democratic regime, then, appears to be primarily
about geographic community rather than virtual community, about rational career-oriented
calculations of the future rather than democratic values, and about attitudes toward the party and
regime that are subject to fluctuation based on contingent regime gaffes, perceived policy shifts,
and the vicissitudes of the economy. While regimes can take some defensive actions, such as the
creation of virtual parties and appeal to a charismatic leader, ultimately these are likely to be
effective only when the regime itself retains substantial public support through performance.
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