We examine why public support for democracy in Ukraine increased after Russia’s 2014 intervention and surged after Russia’s 2022 invasion—despite concerns that the wartime quest for security would diminish support for political freedoms. We statistically analyze original data generated as part of annual opinion surveys by the Institute of Sociology at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences in 2017 (N = 2,199), 2018 (N = 1,800), and a 2021–22 panel survey with the same respondents (N = 475) interviewed before and after Russia’s invasion. Our findings indicate that wartime support for democracy is in significant respects
Polling during wartime: Challenges and lessons from Ukraine
Collecting public opinion data is challenging in the shadow of war. And yet accurate
public opinion is crucial. Political elites rely on it and often attempt to influence it. Therefore, it is
incumbent on researchers to provide independent and reliable wartime polls. However, surveying
in wartime presents a distinctive set of challenges. We outline two challenges facing polling in war:
under-coverage and response bias. We highlight these challenges in the context of the Russia–
Ukraine war, drawing on original panel survey data tracing the attitudes of the same people prior
to and after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We conclude with some lessons for
those employing survey methods in wartime, and point to steps forward, in Ukraine and beyond.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1759645
- PAR ID:
- 10497790
- Publisher / Repository:
- UNU WIDER Working Papers 2023
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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geosocietal —arising from the mobilization of civic national identity conditioned by salient geopolitical threats. Civic pride, attribution of threat to an external authoritarian aggressor, and war onset were the strongest and most robust predictors of multiple democracy support indicators, overriding personal loss and stress. The findings call for more attention to the interaction of geopolitical and social contexts shaping political attitudes, with implications for democratic futures globally. -
Ukraine is a very large and diverse country, and the least we can do amidst the massive trauma of Russia’s invasion is to acknowledge and respect its socio-cultural and geographic complexity. While there is strong evidence that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shifted public opinion towards the West, researchers have an obligation to convey the difficulties in gathering sensitive survey data in war zones and, thus, temper how data are generalized and represented in public discourse. This requires nuance when discussing the preferences of Ukrainians from all areas, including those in exile or living under Russian control, and greater efforts to communicate uncertainty.more » « less
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How does targeting in armed conflict affect public opinion in conflict zones? Armed actors choose between targeting militaries and civilians, further choosing whether to target civilians discriminately or indiscriminately. Existing work suggests these choices have important implications for conflict dynamics, in part by influencing public opinion, yet the causal effects of these choices on individual attitudes have not been clearly established. We conduct a survey experiment in the Donbas region of Ukraine, an area that has witnessed years of protracted fighting. We find that reports of civilian targeting robustly reduce approval of both the government and separatist forces. However, we find that the effects of discriminate civilian targeting are not statistically distinguishable from those of indiscriminate civilian targeting. Finally, we find that our respondents generally preferred a restrained, rather than reciprocal, response from actors in this armed conflict. We explain the implications of our findings for theories of wartime violence.
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NLP research on public opinion manipulation campaigns has primarily focused on detecting overt strategies such as fake news and disinformation. However, information manipulation in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war exemplifies how governments and media also employ more nuanced strategies. We release a new dataset, VoynaSlov, containing 38M+ posts from Russian media outlets on Twitter and VKontakte, as well as public activity and responses, immediately preceding and during the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. We apply standard and recently-developed NLP models on VoynaSlov to examine agenda setting, framing, and priming, several strategies underlying information manipulation, and reveal variation across media outlet control, social media platform, and time. Our examination of these media effects and extensive discussion of current approaches’ limitations encourage further development of NLP models for understanding information manipulation in emerging crises, as well as other real-world and interdisciplinary tasks.more » « less
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Research shows that people’s perceptions of historical violence shape many present-day outcomes. Yet it is also plausible that people emphasize or downplay certain events of the past based on how these resonate with their beliefs and identities today. With a population of diverse orientations involving Russia and Europe, Ukraine in 2019 was an important case for exploring how people’s present geopolitical orientations shaped perceptions of victimization in World War II. Drawing on a survey experiment, we find evidence for “motivated reasoning” among Western-oriented respondents, who emphasized their family’s suffering in World War II when faced with information that attributed blame to the Soviet regime. We find no evidence for motivated reasoning among the Russian-oriented respondentsmore » « less
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