To be the president of France is to be hated. Among the eight men elected to the office since the establishment of the Fifth Republic only Charles de Gaulle, war hero and designer of its constitution, has managed above 50% net approval. The current president, Emanuel Macron is sitting at a lowly 26%. This is ultimately unsurprising; as the head of the executive branch, a president is simultaneously the most powerful and visible arm of the government. To do anything, effective or necessary, is to anger many. In a liberal democracy, popular opinion, or rather the ability of the public to have and exercise opinions at the ballot box, is the cornerstone of the necessary transfer of power. It should follow that an unpopular official will ultimately be replaced by one the voters deem more fit. And yet the public opinion-propagated transition of power is far from universal. According to Democracy Index, a research outfit specializing in measuring democratic intuitions, the globe only averages a score of 5.5/10 as of 2023. This begs the question of how leaders and outsiders can truly gauge public opinion in countries where civil liberties are far from guaranteed.
The Autocrat
One might assume that a government that does not derive its mandate from the public’s consent would care little about that public’s opinion; nothing could be further from the truth. Autocracies, or at least the successful ones, typically exude a near pathological need to gauge how their people view them. Herein lies the problem for the autocrat in taking/publishing polling data; a happy public is a docile public, and yet knowledge that others oppose the regime often only further galvanizes those who wish to fight against it.
The simplest, if not most resource consuming method in the autocrats toolbox is mass surveillance. Rather than asking or publishing the people’s opinions, there’s always the option to collect that information without them even knowing. Probably the most infamous perpetrator of this method would be the GDR (East Germany), spearheaded by the Stasi (the secret police) and its legion of informants. By some estimates, 1 in every 6.5 Germans worked for or with the Stasi, though this figure includes part time informants as well. Eerily similar to their Gestapo predecessors, extensive records, largely taken from intercepting mail, were recorded to determine the mood of the public and quash potential opposition in its nascent form as mere discontent. With the fall of the Berlin wall, these resource intensive methods of ‘polling’, so to speak, fell out of fashion for a time.
With the transition of public discourse onto the digital sphere, mass surveillance has seen a resurgence. In the niche of highly authoritarian countries, with largely digitally involved citizens, the PRC (China) stands out in the cutting edge of these Stasi-esque methods. Party officials regularly examine personal emails and internet usage to gauge public opinion. Although the famously extensive ‘Great Firewall’ of China, the system of internet censorship and control enforced by the party, primarily serves to keep outside information out, it also serves the role of keeping public opinion in, so as not to embarrass the party by exposing dissonance. In a twist of unintended authoritarian homage, the firewall finds itself a mirror of the famous Antifaschistischer Schutzwall or Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (colloquially known as the Berlin wall), which primarily served to keep ‘outside’ people out and ‘inside’ people in.
In contrast to the tendencies of outright authoritarian or one-party states, those who fall somewhere closer to the democratic side of the spectrum have their own tools to ascertain and learn from public opinion. In this middle ground lay countries like Singapore. With a Democracy Index Score of 5.9, nearly double that of China, Singapore is far from the police states of the Warsaw Pact. Yet in its nearly 60 years of full independence, the People’s Action Party (PAP) has been the only party to form a government. Until 1981, not a single non-PAP legislature had ever been elected. Although never going as far as rolling tanks into crowds, the PAP has used more subtle methods, such as lawsuits, economic coercion, and media control to ensure the opposition does not get too powerful or popular. Far from taking the traditional approach to authoritarian politics, that is, banning all opposition parties, the PAP has decided upon a different role for the opposition: polling. Whilst knowing that they will ultimately never lose an election, the PAP and its candidates use the number of opposition votes cast as a sort of opinion barometer. A sudden decrease in vote share in a constituency is enough to prompt policy changes. This brutally efficient perversion of the liberal idea of popular led transitions of power has earned Singapore the title of Authoritarian democracy.
The Journalist
The idea of investigating the public’s opinion on policy is a relatively new one. In the age of feudalism and monarchy, so long as the public’s opinion didn’t compel them to disobey (or decapitate) their liege, it was of little consequence. With the liberalization of much of the world, leaders would begin to take a much keener interest in the opinion of their people, if only to gauge how a new policy would impact their reelection odds. Statisticians like George Gallup, creator of the aptly named ‘Gallup Poll’ would revolutionize the science of polls with the introduction of rigorous methodology in the avoidance of bias. In the liberal world, it was as easy as going door to door and asking people to fill out a survey. However, implicit in any poll is the assumption that most, if not all, people will answer honestly, people often relishing a way to make their approval, apathy or discontent known.
The problem of how to circumvent a population disinclined to voice their opinions openly, for fear of potential retribution, physical or otherwise, is also a relatively new one as well. In the era of the Cold War, door to door knocking was discouraged, if not banned in much of the illiberal world. Even as totalitarianism has fallen in the world, the job of a pollster has become less physically dangerous, but not necessarily easier. Most researchers and journalists, especially those foreign to their chosen country of inquiry, are often met with hostility and suspicion. In Russia alone, more than 100 journalists have been met with violence, 11 of whom have been killed, according to Reporters Without Borders, an NGO. This has pushed those seeking to determine things such as a country’s leaders or governments’ popularity to try less direct methods.
Rather than asking people directly, ‘do you support your leader’, a question which will undoubtedly put someone on the defensive, journalists have instead opted to try and figure out an individual’s implied opinion using ‘list experiment’ polls. The process is rather simple; present an individual with a set of questions, with some being as simple as ‘do you like apples’. Mixed in with these innocuous questions will be one or two more controversial ones, ‘do you approve of your government’, ‘would you like to see a new government take its palace’. Then by asking an individual to say how many they agree with, without necessarily saying which and comparing this to more direct polling on the inconsequential questions, pollsters can get an estimate on how people actually feel.
The results have proved surprising. Compared to traditional polls which measured 90% approval rating for the Chinese Communist Party amongst random citizens, a 2024 study done by researchers at UCLA found a revealed approval rating of 50-70% using the “list experiment”. In Russia, researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, have found a drop-in support of 15% when comparing traditional methods to list experiment results.
The idea that autocracies are always unpopular, if not reviled, by their own people has long been an assumption in liberal thinking. Although approval still remains high in much of the illiberal world, the suspicion that official polls are not to be taken at face value has, at least in some part, been proven true. Despite advancements, the battle for truth in autocracies is still ongoing, and the true feelings of the people faced with dictatorship and repression will probably never be truly known.
I was born in New York, but moved to Europe as a teenager. I am currently a second year BEMACS Student. I enjoy writing as a means by which to record and disseminate the things I find interesting such as politics, history and culture.
