Measuring public opinion under political repression.

• Author: Coffey, John
• Position: Report

Introduction

The recent wave of anti-regime protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa go far in dispelling the notion that politically repressed peoples lack substantive opinions about domestic politics in their own countries, though they lack the means of expressing these opinions through meaningful elections, accountable political representation, a free press or rights of public assembly. The question remains, however, as to whether these opinions are measurable by conventional methods. In places where dissenting opinions may be punished harshly, the reliability and validity of politically sensitive public surveys is far from self-evident. Yet, as discussed below, political opinion surveys have been used in a variety of repressive settings for many years and relatively little attention has been given to the trustworthiness of these instruments. As the current situation continues to unfold across the Arab world, and as survey research becomes increasingly common in such places, the accuracy of survey results as indicators of domestic opinion will become increasingly important to the Foreign Service community.

This paper proceeds as follows. First, I present a brief history of survey research under repression. Survey research has been surprisingly widespread across autocracies since at least the 1960s, used for a variety of legitimate and illegitimate ends. Second, I offer a set of recommendations for assessing the accuracy of surveys conducted in repressive environments. This 'checklist' for evaluating such surveys can be employed even without specialized training in survey research or statistical methods. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of alternatives to mass surveys for assessing public attitudes in repressive polities. These alternatives can be used as informal checks on the validity of surveys or, when surveys are absent, as alternative proxies for public attitudes about government and other areas of interest.

An Overview of Survey Research under Repression

Public opinion polling under conditions of political repression is not new. Within a decade of the birth of modern polling in Western democracies, state-sponsored survey research was underway with similar scientific rigor, in the Communist East (Kwiatkowski 1992). Public surveys subsequently spread to other autocratic settings. The bulk of opinion research in non-democracies has proceeded in one of three ways:

1) Surveys organized and controlled by the state for its own political purposes, especially public manipulation, which does not require valid survey results.

2) Surveys addressing politically sensitive questions under conditions of rapid liberalization, when individuals are less fearful of criticizing the government and its positions, and hence less likely to descend into a "spiral of silence" (Noelle-Neumann 1993).

3) Surveys avoiding politically sensitive questions in contexts where repression is more immediate or acute.

Only rarely has survey research broached a fourth category: independent surveys dealing with politically sensitive questions under genuinely repressive conditions. Much rarer--but perhaps of the greatest interest--are independent, politically sensitive surveys, conducted under conditions of growing repression.

Survey research by (and for) the state

Given the purposes of politically sensitive surveys under authoritarian rule, response bias is not always a concern, because information gathering may be irrelevant to the purpose of polling. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s, polling efforts were undertaken by Communist states during periods of crisis as a means of satiating public discontent. "However," one expert notes, "when periods of crisis passed and communist parties strengthened their power, the leaderships tended to restrain and control social research" (Kwiatkowski 1992, 359).

State-sponsored surveys were also used widely for propaganda purposes (Welsh 1981). In the aftermath of Poland's 1980-81 Solidarity Revolution, the Institute for Basic Problems of Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the Communist Party publicized its survey of Polish workers in Spring 1982, reporting high levels of satisfaction with the government (Mason 1985, 205ff).

Building on the logic of these earlier efforts, formalized state-run polling emerged as threats to the Communist system intensified. In 1982, following the Solidarity Revolution, Poland's General Wojciech Jaruzelski announced the planned formation of a state-run public opinion research institution. The result, the Public Opinion Research Center in Warsaw (CBOS), served "to carry out fast surveys on issues relevant to current political events. Politicians expected to be informed of changes in the social mood of the public, of the most important perceived problems, and of sources of possible protests and conflicts. ... the Center was conceived as a way of strengthening the Communist system" (Kwiatkowski 1992, 363; 1985). Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov made a similar announcement in 1983 and other Communist states began to follow suit. Toward the end of the Cold War the tables were turned when state-sponsored research became a tool of reform-minded leaders eager to use public opinion to enact policy change (Slider 1985). Here again the purposes of the state, and not the accuracy of the surveys, were in view.

Other politically sensitive survey research by authoritarian states appears to serve genuine information-gathering purposes. Sieger (1990) remarks on information gathering as an essential motivation for opinion research in Marxist-Leninist societies: "a policy tool employed to ensure the efficient control of society by the party elite. The information gathered may have been used in decision-making, in the evaluation of already implemented policies or in the manipulation and mobilization of the citizens" (ibid., 325). To this end East Germany had no less than four state-run institutions devoted to carrying out survey research (ibid., 327). In a similar vein, the Chinese government formed the China Social Survey System (CSSS) in 1984 to undertake polling on social, economic, and political issues of importance to the government (Mason 1989). Survey research to assess public mood, like polling to temper public mood, was common across the Soviet bloc (Welsh 1981).

It was never clear, however, to what extent these surveys provided the authorities useful information (Shlapentokh 1973). Sieger (1990, 328) notes the frequency of politically sensitive questions by the East Germans with no non-responses. Swafford (1992, 353) observes, under the Soviet system, "survey researchers had no basis for expecting candor on the broad range of topics that might arouse the ire of authorities. There was no public opinion." Non-Communist authoritarian systems exhibit similar patterns. Suleiman (1987, 63), for example, concludes that survey research in the Arab world is only possible if a survey question or theme is not "termed sensitive" by authorities.

Survey research in transitional states

In transitional countries, polling has been "a weapon in the struggle to build and sustain democracy under conditions in which the success of liberalization programs and the emergence of civil society were by no means assured" (Gollin 1992, 300). Perhaps the earliest and most comprehensive collection of such polling can be found in Cantril and Strunk's (1951) Public Opinion 1935-1946, which records surveys from a number of post-World War II transitional states: Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, and Italy among them. And by the late 1980s, as Albert E. Gollin noted in a 1992 special issue of the International Journal of Public Opinion Research devoted to public opinion research in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, "opinion research had become fully internationalized. Even in countries under authoritarian rule, little-publicized, modest attempts were sometimes made to conduct opinion surveys" (Gollin 1992, 299). As early as December 1989, the Soviet Sociological Association (SSA) was interacting openly...