Legitimacy is a very tricky thing: there is no way to measure it, yet so much depends on it.
As Wikipedia puts it, “legitimacy is the people’s consent to authority, their voluntary recognition of its right to make binding decisions.” Where does it come from? From elections. Or rather, not even from elections themselves, but from how people perceive them. “Why do we obey a minister or a governor when we don’t know them at all, and if we do know them, we quite rightly consider them crooks and thieves? Because Putin appointed them. And whatever you say, people did vote for Putin.” That was roughly the kind of internal dialogue typical of an opposition-minded ordinary citizen over the past several years. And to a large extent, it was fair. If, for example, you look at Shpilkin’s famous graphs for the 2016 State Duma elections and the 2018 presidential election, you can see massive fraud (10–12 million votes stuffed in favor of United Russia and Putin), but you can also see something else: even without all that fraud, United Russia and Putin still would have won. Their victories would not have looked so crushing and impressive, which would have been worse from a propaganda standpoint, but the fact remains that most of the voters who came to the polls and cast ballots were supporting the authorities at the time.
That is no longer true—and that is the main political outcome of the 2021 State Duma elections. The scale of the fraud increased, but not all that dramatically (14 million stuffed ballots is horrifying, if you stop to think about it, but not vastly worse than three or five years earlier). What did grow immeasurably was its importance. Because this time, without fraud, United Russia would have crashed badly, winning less than a third of the party-list vote and losing around 70–80 single-member districts, which means it would have lost even its simple majority—not just its constitutional supermajority—in the State Duma. Smart Voting scored a major political victory in September 2021.
Did we understand that there would be fraud? Of course—we didn’t fall from Mars. But we expected that, thanks to Smart Voting, the Kremlin would have to resort to such large-scale and visible falsifications that this would significantly undermine the authorities’ legitimacy. That stealing the election would not go unnoticed. Did we succeed? To understand how Russian society actually perceives the State Duma election results, we conducted another telephone survey of Russian voters immediately afterward, while events were still fresh (using a representative sample of 1,000 people). Let’s take a look at the results together.
The first slide contains nothing surprising. Or perhaps everything about it is surprising, depending on how you look at it. We asked the simplest possible question: “Dear voter, how did you vote?” The question was asked 1–2 weeks after that very election in which, according to the official figures from the Central Election Commission, United Russia won comfortably with 49.8% of the vote. But here’s the problem: in the phone survey, only 31% of respondents confirmed that they had voted for United Russia. A striking discrepancy with the official CEC figures—and a striking match with the results of mathematical models that strip out the fraud. At the same time, according to those same Shpilkin estimates, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) actually received almost as many votes as United Russia, whereas on our slide there is a large gap: the CPRF is in second place with 19%. Why? Read on, and you see that a full 22% of respondents who took part in the election refused to say over the phone how they voted. In other words, they were afraid.
This is big news: we have been conducting post-election surveys for years in order to check the official results and get a real picture of what happened, but we are seeing this for the first time. Fear. One in five voters—among those who had already agreed to speak to a pollster by phone and had said they took part in the election—still did not dare say what choice they made. We have never seen anything like this before.
And there can be only one explanation here: people are afraid. They are afraid because they expect reprisals for giving the “wrong” answer. And of course, that means these 22% contain protest votes: it is safe to assume that almost all of these people voted for someone other than United Russia, though it is hardly possible to say with confidence how the votes of these “refusing respondents” were actually distributed among the other parties. One thing is clear: the real results of the CPRF, the LDPR, A Just Russia — For Truth, and New People were higher than what is shown on our slide. And by the way, note this: New People probably actually came in third(!). That was the case almost everywhere in those regions of the Russian Far East and Siberia that have traditionally been least affected by fraud—and our survey showed that this was apparently true across Russia as a whole.
As a cross-check, we also asked about voting in single-member districts: the overall picture there is much the same, and United Russia’s result is even lower.
Now to the main point: the legitimacy of the authorities after this election, and how voters perceive it.
A quarter of those surveyed say they are “dissatisfied” with the election results, and overall 37% of Russians are “rather dissatisfied or dissatisfied,” while 47% are “satisfied or rather satisfied.” There is no sign here of nationwide unity and jubilation. What is more, the overall share of people satisfied with the election results is lower than the official vote total received by United Russia. So apparently, many people voted for United Russia (according to the CEC), yet are not happy that their party won... Strange!
But we get an even clearer picture of what happened when we ask our respondents a direct question about how they assess the fairness of the election:
And we have been asking this question after every major election for many years now. We have never seen anything like this. In short, Ella Aleksandrovna (Pamfilova, head of Russia’s Central Election Commission), this is a fiasco. You failed at everything; Kiriyenko and Putin will throw you out without severance pay. You poured in billions of rubles, along with endless propaganda tricks and contortions, to convince Russians that we have the fairest, most democratic, most wonderful elections in the world—and Russians did not believe you. You failed. Half of Russian voters believe that the official election results do not reflect the real views of the public, and only one-third believe in the fairness of the election and the vote count. The answer “do not reflect,” which won by a huge margin with 39% of responses, represents those people who understand that the election was completely fabricated. And there are twice as many of them as the 18% who believe in the fairness of the election without the slightest doubt.
The mockery made of the election, the fight against Smart Voting, the determination to produce a pretty result for United Russia at any cost—all of this has cost Putin too much. A serious blow has been dealt to the legitimacy of the Russian authorities; after September 19, 2021, most Russians know that they are ruled by a parliament they did not elect, that the deputies are thieves who stole their mandates. This is an important, watershed shift in public opinion, one that will have long-term consequences. They may not become visible immediately, but sooner or later they will.
As long as nothing especially dramatic is happening in the country’s political life, the situation may appear stable. But sooner or later, every government in every country faces crises in which it has to make unpopular decisions—and that is when legitimacy begins to matter enormously. A government that has lost its legitimacy becomes a colossus with feet of clay: people simply refuse to accept unpopular decisions from such a government. And that is why any crisis can become a turning point.