CREES Noon Lecture. “Election Fraud and Preference Falsification in Russia’s 2012 Presidential Election.”

How accurately do election polls report individual voting preferences? Can election polls help us detect and possibly deter election fraud in authoritarian regimes? This talk will focus on theoretical aspects and effects of social desirability bias on election fraud in authoritarian regimes. Using data from survey experiments conducted before and after Russia’s 2012 presidential election and the results of alternative techniques used by a national pollster, Kalinin will demonstrate the presence of significant social desirability effects in Russian public opinion polls that inflated both electoral ratings of Vladimir Putin and voter turnout. In turn, these findings raise issues about the quality of survey research in authoritarian regimes and the possible interconnection of social desirability effects and election fraud.

Kirill Kalinin is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a student in the Program in Survey Methodology at the Institute for Social Research. Before enrolling at U-M in 2008, he was a Fulbright and Carnegie Visiting Scholar at ISR’s Center for Political Studies. In 2008-09, he was an Emerging Democracy Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies. While conducting fieldwork in Russia in 2012, he was a visiting instructor at the New Economic School in Moscow and European University at St. Petersburg. His major research interests are election forensic analysis and political methodology.

Sponsors: CREES, WCED

Part of the series Pluralism in Politics and Culture, an initiative jointly sponsored by CREES and WCED that examines the foundations of free and open societies. The project builds on the university’s rich legacy of study and support of the dissident culture in the former Soviet Union and on several existing efforts at U-M. The initiative focuses on cultural, legal, political, and economic manifestations of political pluralism, past and present.