Hello everyone! My name is Leonid Volkov, and I’m a little nervous because this is my first guest post on this blog. But yesterday my own blog was blocked by Roskomnadzor (Russia’s federal media and communications regulator) without a court order. All because of a detailed post about why federal relations are good and useful for Russia, and how federalism differs from separatism.
Still, I’m not writing this guest post because I no longer have a blog of my own. As early as Saturday, this blog had a preview announcing that ACF would present the results of its latest survey on federalism and local self-government. This was the largest and most complex telephone survey in the history of ACF’s sociological service: it lasted nearly two weeks and involved 2,400 respondents from 18 cities. I helped a little with preparing this study, drawing on my experience working in a representative local self-government body. So I’ve had the honor of presenting its results.
By the way, the images can be retweeted separately from the post.
What’s amusing is that Russians, on the whole, understand federalism perfectly well and are not at all inclined to agree with Roskomnadzor. Take a look:
As you can see, an overwhelming majority of respondents support federal relations and want Russia to be a federation not just on paper, but in reality. At this rate, they might as well block everyone.
Why is that, by the way? Because ordinary people understand one perfectly obvious thing: the officials sitting in Moscow offices simply don’t care about them:
(And notice the unanimity: in both major cities and very small ones, people are not prepared to hand Moscow the right to decide how they should live.)
But let’s take it step by step. The idea for this survey was prompted by recent initiatives from various pro-Kremlin pseudo-expert organizations, all essentially arguing that Russia supposedly has too many elections, and that it’s time to tighten the screws and stop electing city dumas in major cities. So naturally, we became very interested in testing whether our fellow citizens really are as indifferent to local self-government in all its forms as Kremlin policy memos claim. We were prepared for the worst, but… just look at this:
Still, the main focus of our survey was not federal-regional issues, but local self-government. (Which, under the Constitution, is autonomous and separate from state and regional власти). Do citizens make use of their opportunity to shape the life around them by electing local deputies and taking part in the work of local self-government bodies? And what does that depend on?
We decided to approach the issue thoroughly. Local self-government in Russia is regulated by Federal Law No. 131 (“On Local Self-Government”), and this law is the same for everyone—the same rules of the game for a city of over a million people and for a workers’ settlement alike. But in reality, they are very different! In a big city, the mayor is a political figure and the city duma is a political body; in a small town, where everyone knows everyone, local self-government is more a way of sorting out the most pressing day-to-day communal issues, and nothing more. You can’t lump them all together!
That’s why we conducted such a large survey. We selected three major cities in the Volga region—Nizhny Novgorod, Samara, and Perm—then, in those same regions, one medium-sized industrial city each (Arzamas, Syzran, and Berezniki respectively), and then randomly selected four more small towns in each region. Each group of cities accounted for 800 phone calls, for a total of 2,400 respondents in the survey. Within each group of cities, the sample was balanced by respondents’ gender and age.
What did we find? First of all, our hypothesis was broadly confirmed:
True, we expected big cities to differ sharply from medium-sized ones, and medium-sized ones from small towns, but it turned out instead that medium-sized and small towns are very similar, while big cities stand apart. But the fact remains: quite a few people know who their deputies are, and in smaller cities local self-government bodies are “closer to the people” than in large ones. And people’s attitude toward local deputies cannot be called bad. In the “medium-sized cities” category, positive assessments of local self-government bodies actually outweigh negative ones—which branch of government in Russia can boast of that?
What’s more, people are interested in the work of local self-government bodies—they do care about it, and here city size plays absolutely no role:
And here is my favorite chart. It shows just how foolish the policy of dismantling local self-government, depressing turnout in local elections, and so on really is:
It turns out that people who remember their deputies assess their work positively in the overwhelming majority of cases! In other words, from the authorities’ point of view, the right strategy for securing re-election should actually be to promote the work of local self-government bodies as actively as possible.
Now let’s look a little deeper. We ran several tests to build a clearer profile of active people who are interested in the work of local self-government bodies and want to take a greater part in it. It turned out that such people are relatively more common among local activists and, more generally, among people who care:
And here are a few amusing facts, just for good measure:
Thanks to our wonderful volunteers, without whom this survey would not have been possible: Ksenia, Sasha, Ekaterina, Sergei, Igor, Mikhail, Anastasia, Kolya, Olya, Andrei, Georgy, Nikita, Dmitry, Elena, Alexander, Maria, Katya, Ivan, Anya, Oleg, Irina, Seva, Oleg, Nikita, Irina, Sonya, Vika, Dmitry, Elena, Alyona, Anna, Evgenia, Anastasia, Dmitry, Misha, Ruslan, Anna, Anton, Vladislav, Anna, Nikita, Lidia, Olga, Nadezhda, Maxim, Lev, Tanya, Anya, Anya, Maria, Yulia, Maria, Alla, Liza, Daria, Marina, Tanya, Alexei, Mikhail, Natalia, Irina, Mark, Artyom, Elena, Maxim, Sergei, Anatoly, Ruslan, Kostya, Nikolai, Anna, Ruslan, Anna, Andrei, Alexander, Yulia, Gosha, Nikolai, Antonina. Special thanks to Galya Koposova.
You can always help us conduct surveys and sign up for ACF’s sociological service at http://team.fbk.info/#form/sociology