One peculiarity of the political process in Russia is that you can’t make heads or tails of any of it. Well, that is, we understand what Putin and his group are doing: 1) stealing, 2) usurping power so they can steal even more, 3) eating shashlik in Sochi while wearing tracksuits with fur collars. Each of us has our own attitude toward what’s happening and our own set of political views. What we do not have, however, is a clear picture of how Russian citizens actually assess what is going on over time. How many citizens really support Putin, and why? What is the actual level of support for United Russia in major cities, and what is it in cities of around 100,000 people? What do people think about the Olympics? About the Russian Orthodox Church? About gay pride parades? What do they think about Serdyukov, and how will that change once he is fully let off the hook? Sociologists are supposed to provide at least somewhat accurate answers to all these questions, but unfortunately they do not. We ran into this head-on during the Moscow mayoral election, which perfectly demonstrated the complete degradation of Russian sociology:
More details here. Our campaign’s polling operation, set up in a rush and built on volunteer work, produced forecasts that were an order of magnitude more accurate than the so-called “big three”: VTsIOM, FOM, and Levada. Naturally, during the election no one believed us—who would trust polling done by a candidate’s own campaign? But we knew our data reflected reality. The existing polling organizations, whether because they were corrupt or simply incompetent, did us a great deal of harm at the time. The only outfit producing professional, sensible measurements that one could actually rely on was Comcon, but unfortunately they do very little public and political research; we were simply lucky that they happened to have that data. Then there are the various “closed studies.” There are always rumors and scraps of paper floating around about supposedly ultra-reliable polls conducted by the FSO, the FSB, the Kremlin, city hall, and so on. It’s all complete garbage. You understand how this works: if the Kremlin, city hall, or the FSB wants a “secret poll,” they commission it from some crooked PR people they know, those people go to the same FOM, and FOM just plugs the numbers from its usual fake poll into the “secret poll,” quite reasonably assuming there’s no difference anyway. Of course, one could imagine the FSB conducting a poll itself and putting 50 lieutenants on the phones. The quality of those polls would be about the same as the quality of security in our country. In short, we could go on criticizing the state of sociology for a long time, but let’s move on to something more “constructive” and “positive.” So: we all need high-quality polling data for sound planning of political and anti-corruption work. We want to know what residents of small towns think, and what needs to be said to them so that they grab their pitchforks and rush the local United Russia office. What do residents of big cities think, and what would they need to be thinking about to start burning tires in the streets? Have people in Vladivostok heard about the summer houses of United Russia members? Do people in Syzran know about the fur storage scandal? What kinds of investigations do people in St. Petersburg and Perm want: searches for officials’ villas in Spain, or exposés of thieves at VTB? Take that crook Yakunin, for example. I had an idea I kept pushing: let’s write a report laying out all his corrupt schemes and send it to every division of Russian Railways. Several thousand copies. Bored railway office workers would read it all and spread it across the country—after all, everyone likes gossiping about the bosses. That way, I said, within two months three million people (Russian Railways employees and their families) would know everything about the secrets of the fur storage scandal. And if three million people know, then in six months the whole country will know. It’s a good thing we didn’t go ahead with my plan and instead brought in sociologists to study who Russian Railways employees actually are and how their horizontal ties work. We conducted a series of so-called in-depth interviews with all kinds of Russian Railways employees, from laborers to management. We found that they already all considered Yakunin corrupt. Everyone who was asked the provocative question “Is Yakunin a thief?” answered, “Yes, he is.” At the same time, almost all of them had voted for Putin, believed that bosses are supposed to steal, and said they would not discuss our report at work because the company is deeply nepotistic (“I went to study/work at Russian Railways because my parents worked there and there was nowhere else to go”), and everyone is afraid colleagues will inform on them through family connections to the “proper authorities.” So my idea was judged not brilliant but idiotic, and we developed other ways of spreading information about Yakunin. That is why sociology matters: we spent a little money on it, but saved a huge amount of time, effort, and resources that might otherwise have been wasted on an ineffective project. And there are plenty of examples like that. For all these reasons, we launched our own polling service. Today, Vedomosti writes about it in detail:
Navalny to take up opinion polling The successful experience of public opinion polling ahead of the Moscow mayoral election will be expanded nationwide. Read the full article
It is already up and running and is conducting its first poll related to the Novosibirsk mayoral election. We chose Novosibirsk to start for a very simple reason: the election is coming up soon, many candidates are asking for support, and we want to make that decision based above all on ideology and reliable polling data. The service is headed by Anna Biryukova, the same person who “ran” the polling operation during the election.
The thing is, sociology is not some kind of sacred knowledge. Everything that needs to be done is described in detail and to a high standard in both Russian and foreign literature. All the most advanced methods are available to anyone who reads English. You just have to do everything properly and by the book. You know the saying: “Do it as if you were doing it for yourself, not for some boss.” That was the secret of our campaign polling—it was done by volunteers, and they were doing it for themselves. For now, we are conducting telephone polls. Why telephone polling is good: because it allows for a genuinely random sample. We (unlike some others) do not call from phone databases or “numbers that answer well”; we call randomly generated numbers within a given region or city. Yes, that means you end up dialing nonexistent numbers or office lines, so it takes longer and costs more, but the results are the best possible. What is especially great is that we can set the proportion of landline and mobile numbers in the calling list, because polling only landlines is obviously last century. What we can do now: we can now conduct excellent polls in any city, region, federal district, or across all of Russia. A properly run telephone poll that follows all the methodological rules produces the best results. Exactly what we need.
Who is conducting the polling right now: to launch and test the system, we hired professional callers, but we will replace them with volunteers as they come in and are trained. Why volunteers can be the best interviewers: because they feel responsible. Of course they have clear political views and affiliations, but they keep that to themselves in order to get objective results. After all, we are doing this polling for ourselves. How you can and should help us: we have set up 7 workstations, and 6 days a week, 8 hours a day, those stations need to be occupied. So come, come—it’s convenient: an office, warmth, comfort, great software, no one has to dial numbers by hand, the interviewer just presses a magic button on the screen:
(it literally looks like this) Then they sit there in headsets and wait for the system to connect them to a live number—no unnecessary clicks or movements. The questionnaire, specially designed for telephone polling, is convenient and excellent. We promise to teach you everything: training sessions and manuals, coffee, tea, cookies, work in the ACF office, and the feeling of being part of an important common cause. Please join us. Help us build the best polling service in the country. We will be doing not only telephone polls, but also street surveys, which we got very good at during the election. Of course, you can do politics without high-quality sociological research, but that is really last century. If we can adjust our strategy in a way that makes us more effective, then let’s do it. If you are ready to work with us (and polling is fairly difficult and tedious work), then go upset old man Putin: sign up here right away.