Check out my books on Amazon (paid link): https://amzn.to/2SiQjlp Public opinion polls in Russia suggest that Vladimir Putin's popularity as high as 81.6%. But Putin is an autocrat, and Russian citizens may be reluctant to voice disapproval for his regime. Can we trust that the polling figures are anywhere close to the truth? Political scientists have a solution to this kind of problem: the list experiment. It allows pollsters to infer support for a leader without asking directly about the leader. This results of list experiments in Russia are striking: true support appears to be only slightly smaller than what the standard polls indicate. Russians (probably) like Putin. 0:00 Putin's Poll Numbers in Russia 1:04 Preference Falsification 2:33 What Is a List Experiment? 4:44 List Experiment on Putin 6:04 More Preference Falsification in 2022? 6:56 Incentives to Lie in List Experiments 7:48 Framing Problems 8:42 Respondent Fatigue 10:00 An Updated Experiment 11:09 Putin Is (Probably) Still Popular For the original academic article on the polls, see here: https://scottgehlbach.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/FGMR-Putin.pdf There is also a blog post that summarizes the results and updates them for 2021: https://www.ponarseurasia.org/is-putins-popularity-still-real-a-cautionary-note-on-using-list-experiments-to-measure-popularity-in-authoritarian-regimes/ Photos licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): From Raimond Spekking https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Angela_Merkel_2019_cropped.jpg From Kremlin.ru http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/68016/ http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50329/ http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57071/ http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60490/ http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/63560/ http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49437 http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57071/ http://state.kremlin.ru/president/allbio http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/61177/ http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67118 http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67814 http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/49710/ From duma.gov.ru http://duma.gov.ru/multimedia/photo/28642/#slider-28642-28638 http://duma.gov.ru/multimedia/photo/71242/#slider-71242-71236 http://duma.gov.ru/duma/persons/99100142/ Photos licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/) From Gage Skidmore https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/49405314627/ From Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office https://www.flickr.com/photos/foreignoffice/41099455635/ From John Matthew Smith https://www.flickr.com/photos/kingkongphoto/5113183824/