Authors

Henry Hale¹;  ¹ IERES, United States

Discussion

There are many ways in which authoritarian leaders use traditionalist values to try to legitimate their rule. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin used them in a novel way in 2020, attempting to mobilize support for a plebiscite on his escaping constitutional term limits by embedding (arguably even hiding) the term limit reset in a larger package of over 200 proposed constitutional amendments that included many traditionalist planks as well as socioeconomic promises. The traditionalist ones included defining marriage as “man plus woman” and explicit mention of God. Did this strategy actually work? This paper seeks an answer by analyzing results of the 2021 LegitRuss survey in Russia. Because they contain a large array of relevant questions and an embedded experiment, these data yield unique insight that contributes to answering three questions. First, were people who adhered to traditionalist values more likely to report having voted for the pro-authoritarian package of constitutional amendments? Second, were people who were more aware of the traditionalist amendments in this package more likely to report having voted for it? Third, did people become more likely to vote for the package when given an explicit reminder of one high-profile such amendment? The relative effects of the traditionalist parts of the package are weighed against the those of the socioeconomic amendments.