Foreign agents and pollsters: Research held hostage?

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan & Kristen Blyth – May 27, 2013) Life as a pollster is hard enough. For the Levada Center, considered Russia’s only independent polling organization, life just got harder.

“Imagine if someone comes to you and says, ‘I’m a foreign agent, please answer some questions,'” Levada Center Director Lev Gudkov told The Moscow News.

Two major Moscow polling offices, the Levada Center and VTsIOM, have received official warnings from authorities to cease conducting politically-focused public opinion surveys using foreign grant money. The alternative: to register their organizations as “foreign agents” – a word Russians strongly associate with subversion and espionage, and a label Gudkov calls a “humiliation.”

He has recently warned that the government’s order may lead to Levada’s closure. But even if it stays afloat – as Gudkov said he intends it to – government pressure will undermine the objectivity of the polls.

“If we’re widely accepted as ‘foreign agents,’ then people will simply stop answering our questions. Primarily, these will be people who depend on the government – like teachers and doctors, but also state officials,” Gudkov said. “These are very important categories of the population.”

Finding funding, framing objective questions, and compiling results databases can all be delicate and tedious tasks. Getting a respondent to say the truth was never easy – but now many of them, particularly officials and those respondents who rely on the state for their income, are even less willing to participate in polls.

If respondents were always reluctant to answer political surveys out of a latent fear of the consequences, the mere association with “foreign agent” is already having a deleterious effect: people don’t want to talk. “That fear is alive,” Gudkov said.

‘Foreign agents’

The law in question, which requires all NGOs receiving funding from abroad to register as foreign agents and comply with extensive inspections and periodic audits, came into force in November. The new regulation came just two months after American humanitarian organization USAID, which helped finance several Russian NGOs, was accused of attempting to influence Russian politics and expelled from the country.

So far, the government has performed surprise raids on some 700 NGO offices around Russia under the so-called “foreign agents” law. The Justice Ministry has filed administrative complaints against five groups, ordered at least 14 others to register or face administrative charges, and warned at least another 33 (including the Levada Center) to register as foreign agents if they plan to carry out political activities while continuing to receive international funding, according to a list compiled by Human Rights Watch.

Though some of these NGOs play a clear role in Russian politics and society, the inclusion of polling organizations was a surprise to many.

Yevgeny Fyodorov, a United Russia Duma deputy, argued that survey centers influence public opinion by the way they frame questions, and that conducting polls therefore qualifies as political activity.

“If someone orders a study, and pays money, then he is ordering a certain kind of research and sets a definite statement of the question,” he explained in a Kommersant radio interview last week. “All this is important not only in itself, but as an aggregate …in fact, external control of the country.”

Acceptance of foreign contracts – and money – allows the contractor to frame poll results to their own advantage, supporters of the law say.

“If I love red caviar, and I perform a study underlining how wonderful it is, the objective results are harmed by my own personal interests,” Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist and former senior member of the pro-Putin United Russia party, told The Moscow News. “Every fund has a certain kind of motive, and finances only things they consider important…they influence public opinion especially on these views.”

Money talks…or does it?

Unsurprisingly, pollsters interpret their work differently, placing a premium value on impartiality.

“Our reputation and our authority depend on the objectivity of our polls,” Gudkov said. “We cannot cater to the questions of a single client.”

He added that the center has never come under pressure in the past in terms of how they formulate their questions.

Gudkov raised alarm last week when he announced that the Levada Center may close, citing the organization’s potential inability to properly conduct political polls under the “foreign agent” stigma. His warning presumed that the organization would continue to accept international funding. Foreign grants comprise 1.5-3 percent of the Levada Center’s total budget, according to its website.

The decision to decline money from abroad, however, should be only a negligible complication, said head of VTsIOM polling center Valery Fyodorov. VTsIOM, whose main client is the government, also received a warning from authorities about accepting foreign money.

“I personally don’t see any difficulty in our fund continuing its work without receiving any kind of foreign money for political research,” Fyodorov told Moskovskiye Novosti last week. “Foreign grants for political research constitute an insignificant portion of the fund’s income structure.”

‘Hostages of a political battle’

Russia’s opinion surveys may be untrustworthy not as a result of foreign funding, but because of the nature of Russian politics.

“Almost all sociological centers have become hostages of a political battle,” said Kryshtanovskaya. “They are involuntary participants in the [government] process.”

Public opinion polls have become inextricably politicized, she explained – to the point that practically all Russian survey centers have taken on personal agendas, and opposing political parties scramble for numbers that serve their individual purposes.

President Vladimir Putin’s personal rating is one example.

Kremlin-supported pollsters VTsIOM and FOM generally find high levels of public trust in Putin. FOM’s most current trust index for Putin stands at 52.2 percent; VTsIOM puts it at 49 percent. These numbers are the ones usually cited by the government when discussing public sentiment towards Putin.

The Levada Center’s numbers, by contrast, are the ones most often used by government critics and opposition activists who wish to display a more dismal social image. Its “approval index” for Putin – which marks the difference between the percentage of respondents who approve of him (63 percent) and those who do not (37 percent) – currently stands at just 26 percent.

Subtle manipulation of statistics by those citing them has led to increasing distrust in truly independent social science, Kryshtanovskaya said.

But according to Gudkov, high approval ratings in themselves reflect lack of choice in the way people see their government.

“We’re not in a free democracy, where an approval rating would reflect actual approval. It’s a paternalistic culture,” Gudkov said. “When you start to analyze how people actually feel about Putin, a lot of the approval is actually coming from indifference and lack of a political alternative.”

The pressing psychological effect the government wields in Russian society is another factor in declining veracity of opinion polls, said Vladimir Shlapentokh, one of the founders of sociological polling in the Soviet Union and a professor of sociology at Michigan State University.

“Respondents who see what kind of pressure these pollsters are coming under will not want to cooperate or give an honest answer,” Shlapentokh told The Moscow News. “The fear of an ordinary person to say the truth about the government, as well as his reluctance to [come into] conflict with the government, creates such confusion that it leaves a sociologist unable to process the material.”

“There is no longer any point in trusting opinion polls coming out of Russia,” Shlapentokh said.

Yet Gudkov believes that distrust in “independent” public opinion surveys, which is an unfortunate reality in Russia today, must be corrected.

“It’s not just the sociologists who need this; it’s society as a whole,” Gudkov said. “What is at stake is the freedom of research.”