Why Do Russians Love Putin, or Do They Really?

What explains the surge in President Vladimir Putin’s popular support that followed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea? To shed light on this question, Dr. Henry E. Hale (George Washington University) will discuss public opinion surveys that interviewed a nationally representative sample of the Russian population in 2012, when support for Putin was much lower, and then reinterviewed the same people in 2015, when Putin’s popularity remained as high as ever after Crimea. This method, which includes the use of an experimental design, tells us what kinds of people rallied to Putin’s side, who remained in opposition, and who simply professed to have started supporting Putin but actually didn’t not like him.

Henry E. Hale is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University (GW) and the author of Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015). Specializing in political regimes, ethnic politics, and post-Soviet politics, his previous work has won two awards from the American Political Science Association, one for his book Why Not Parties in Russia (Cambridge, 2006) and the other for his article “Divided We Stand” (World Politics, 2005). During 2009-12, he served as director of Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs, and he is currently editorial board chair of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization.