Opposition in Putin’s Russia: Resisting Propaganda By Aleksandra Urman Submitted to Central European University Department of Political Science In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Visiting Professor Oana Lup CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2017 Abstract Misinformation campaigns and propaganda are among the important pillars of contemporary authoritarian regimes which allow the incumbents to stay in power even without resorting to large- scale repressions. Still, under every authoritarian regime a certain share of citizens maintains oppositional attitudes towards the incumbent and his/her government and demonstrates resistance to the state’s propagandistic campaigns. Present study explores the reasons behind the opposition’s resistance to misinformation in Putin’s Russia. Main methods of Russian propaganda and ideas which it propagates are identified. The study builds up on the existing body of literature on information processing and selective exposure. The hypotheses that Russian opposition assesses new information based not on informed decisions, but on the existing attitudes and values, is confirmed through two online experiments. Big data analysis of media consumption of the supporters of oppositional leader Alexei Navalny and Russian prime-minister Dmitry Medvedev on major Russian social network Vkontakte suggests that at least a considerable proportion of Russian opposition consciously engages in selective exposure, seeking out the media sources that present points of view consistent with the users’ pre-existing oppositional attitudes. CEU eTD Collection i Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my supervisor Oana Lup for her dedication and time spent in discussions about this thesis. Her advice helped me a lot to find the right direction for this work and without her frequent and detailed feedback this thesis would never be possible. I would also like to thank professor Levente Littvay for our discussions and his continuous guidance and support. Without his classes and his advice I would never come up with an idea for this thesis in the first place. Special thanks goes to Anastasia Skripkina, Kostiantyn Riabkov and Yuliia Kazmina for their advice on the data analysis and the interpretation of the results, to Anton Mudrak for his comments on the Ukraine-related sections of this thesis, to Egor Sennikov for his help with the recruitment of participants for the experimental part of the present study. I am infinitely grateful to my family for their unconditional support and love as well as to my friends back home. To Andrew for the 10 years of our friendship and the late night calls. To Vladimir and Alexey for being present in my life every day in spite of the distance. To Yaroslav for his advice and our discussions. My sincerest thanks goes to my CEU family without who this year would have been much more difficult and boring. To Rustam for being the person I could rely on since my first day at CEU. To Anton for so many Friday nights. To Yan for his pirogi and making the dormitory feel like home. To Kostya for his sense of humour and our lengthy kitchen discussions. To Yulya for her sincerest care. To Nastya for her endless patience. To Olya for her timely advice and singing. To Egor for CEU eTD Collection so many stories. To Lev for his songs and thoughtfulness. And, of course, to Tanya, for one year of our Boston marriage-like life. ii Table of contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ i Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii Table of contents ............................................................................................................................ iii List of Figures and Tables............................................................................................................... v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. Russian Propaganda: What is it Like and How to Avoid It .......................................... 5 1.1 The role of propaganda in contemporary authoritarian regimes ...................................... 5 1.2 Russian propaganda: main features .................................................................................. 8 1.3 Selective exposure – a means of “inner emigration”? ........................................................ 12 Chapter 2: “The mentioned citizen” and “banderovtsy”: how Russian propaganda treats opposition and Ukrainians ............................................................................................................ 14 2.1 Sweeping aside the opposition ............................................................................................ 14 2.2 Russian misinformation and the Ukrainian crisis: from bad to worse ................................ 19 Chapter 3. Resistance to Russian propaganda: evidence from an experimental study ................. 29 3.1 Research methodology ........................................................................................................ 29 3.2 Research method ................................................................................................................. 31 3.3 Results: the experiments ..................................................................................................... 39 3.4 Regression analysis: data and design .................................................................................. 45 3.5 Results: regression analysis ................................................................................................ 48 Chapter 4. Testing for the presence of selective exposure effect using big data analysis ............ 51 4.1 Research methodology ........................................................................................................ 51 CEU eTD Collection 4.2 Background and case selection ........................................................................................... 54 4.3 Data ..................................................................................................................................... 57 4.4 Research method ................................................................................................................. 59 4.5 Results ................................................................................................................................. 61 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 70 iii Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 74 Appendix 1 .................................................................................................................................... 78 Appendix 2 .................................................................................................................................... 81 Appendix 3 .................................................................................................................................... 83 CEU eTD Collection iv List of Figures and Tables Figure 1. Approval rating of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government 2000-2016 ................ 19 Figure 2. Google Trends, Russian searches about Navalny and Medvedev, May 2012-April 2017 ....................................................................................................................................................... 56 Figure 3. Single decision tree....................................................................................................... 63 Figure 4. ROC curve, single decision tree. ................................................................................... 63 Figure 5. ROC curve, 2000 trees random forest. .......................................................................... 64 Figure 6. ROC curve, logistic regression model. .......................................................................... 65 Table 1 .......................................................................................................................................... 40 Table 2 .......................................................................................................................................... 41 Table 3 .......................................................................................................................................... 42 Table 4 .......................................................................................................................................... 48 Table 5 .......................................................................................................................................... 83 CEU eTD Collection v Introduction Information is one of the most important resources in the 21st century. Long before the humanity entered the post-industrial era, information was crucial to politicians as it is the key to influencing public opinion, thus gaining or cementing one’s popular support. The dictators of the 20th century, such as Stalin or Hitler, would not have been able to stay in power and do what they were doing without propaganda and massive misinformation