Ideological Attitudes of Russian Elite: has Elite Polarization occurred in the late 2000s?

A report by Boris Sokolov at the LCSR regular seminar

On March, 21, Boris Sokolov (Junior Research Fellow at LCSR) presented the results of his collaborative research with William Zimmerman, Eduard Ponarin, Irina Vartanova, and Yegor Lazarev on “Ideological Attitudes of Russian Elite: has Elite Polarization occurred in the late 2000s?” at the regular seminar of LCSR.

Ideological polarization among elites is of interest in discourse of two topics. Theories of democratization presume that consensus among the elites is the most important assumption for consolidation of the political regime. Furthermore, several theories that focus on link between elites` polarization and public opinion expect that mass actions of protest which take place in 2011-2012 in Russia reflect on the rise of disagreement among elites.

The data was taken from 3 waves of William Zimmerman`s survey of Russian elites. 800 people took part in the survey in total, 320 during the first wave and 240 in each next wave.

 In order to estimate the level of polarization we used 10 indicators which were constructed using Likert scale. These indices reflect attitudes towards the following topics: priority of individual or social, opportunity of expression of different ideas, attitudes towards Stalin, importance of political and economic competition and market - based institutes.

The scholars used two major methods of estimation. Firstly, for each of indicators in each wave they estimated the meaning of l-squared indexes, which was proposed in the paper of Blair &Lacy [2000].  This index allows correct estimation measure of the variance of an ordinal variable. The results show that since 2004 polarization has risen by more than 10%. 3 issues have contributed to such results: importance of competition among political parties, existence of the only correct philosophical approach and also perspectives of starting a new business. An additional point is that some indicators show moderate growth of the polarization`s level in lag between 2008 and 2012.

An alternative method was factor analysis. With the help of exploratory factor analysis we attain two latent variables which proper to use as dimensions along an axes “liberalism-authoritarianism” and “capitalism-socialism”. But the next examination of measuring invariance showed that just one factor satisfies the requirements. This factor includes following indices: justification of Stalin, recognition of existence of single correct philosophy and the perspectives of starting a new business.

The authors made a conclusion that fractional polarization among the elites was observed in last decade. At the same time, the absence of measurement invariance means that ideological preferences of Russian elites are indeterminate. These consequences are also proved by the result of latent class analysis. Although the researchers managed to estimate a three-class model which permits to distinguish groups of individuals with similar ideological preferences, the structure of these groups varies in time.

by Sofia Lopatina