Piercing the Fog of War: Measuring Russian Public Opinion via Online Search Data

Abstract

In recent decades, public opinion researchers and policymakers have gained valuable insight into the attitudes and opinions of ordinary Russians thanks to regular tracking surveys conducted by polling organisations such as the Levada Center, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), and FOM. However, since the onset of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, it has become increasingly difficult to attain reliable measures of public opinion in Russia due to growing problems of survey response bias, self-censorship, and doubts concerning the methodology of official state survey organisations. To overcome these difficulties, this paper presents a novel measure using online search data from Google and Yandex to proxy for cognitive mental states in the general population. Comparing such measures to historical and recent surveys, our findings suggest that in reality Russia’s public mood is near its lowest level for a decade, while the legitimacy of its regime has been undermined by failure in war. Our results illustrate how political scientists can use online data to shine light on public opinion in difficult-to-survey contexts, and help to assess the dynamics of regime support in non-democratic countries.