Conventional thinking suggests that autocrats need foreign enemies to bolster their regimes’ popularity at home. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is often thought to reap domestic legitimacy from belligerence. But as Adam Lenton and Henry Hale discuss, Putin wins as much popular support when he presents himself as prudent and cooperative rather than as hostile and aggressive. This suggests that Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine was not driven by domestic political necessity. Indeed, autocrats may try to have it both ways, trying to covertly stoke hostilities while overtly appearing to be moderate and cooperative pursuers of stability and prosperity.
Guests: Henry Hale is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Adam Lenton is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University.
International Security Article: Henry E. Hale and Adam C. Lenton, “Do Autocrats Need a Foreign Enemy? Evidence from Fortress Russia,” International Security, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Summer 2024), pp. 9–50.
Originally released on November 7, 2024
Jeff Friedman:
Hello everyone. Welcome to the International Security Podcast. We are produced by International Security, a quarterly journal edited at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. Each episode of the podcast highlights a piece of research from the journal, drawing out its implications for understanding the theory and practice of international politics.
I'm Jeff Friedman, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.
Today we're speaking with Henry Hale and Adam Lenton. Henry is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Adam is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest.
Their recent International Security article is titled “Do Autocrats Need a Foreign Enemy: Evidence from Fortress Russia.” It challenges conventional wisdom about how autocrats use bellicose foreign policies to gain domestic support and uses that insight to reinterpret Russian behavior in Ukraine. Henry, thanks for joining us today.
Henry Hale:
Thanks for inviting me.
Jeff Friedman:
And Adam, thanks for being here as well.
Adam Lenton:
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Jeff Friedman:
Okay, Adam let's start with you. Why don't you just set the stage by summarizing: What is the conventional wisdom that you address about how autocrats gain support from aggressive international behavior?
Adam Lenton:
Yeah, thanks Jeff. So in general, incumbents often see short-term upticks in their approval ratings from all sorts of international conflicts. Populations feel a heightened sense of national unity when faced with an external threat, they might be distracted from other political issues. And this is a classic rally ’round the flag effect that you see.
And there's reason to think that autocrats may reap particular benefit from such conflicts. It can keep society in check and it can help them to maintain power at all costs, which is of paramount importance. And so if we follow this logic, it actually suggests that autocrats may have incentives either to adopt an aggressive foreign policy posture, to emphasize threats posed by foreign enemies, and even create enemies where they don't exist, to portray themselves as defenders of the nation.
Jeff Friedman:
And can you give us a sense of how has that conventional wisdom been used to explain Vladimir Putin's behavior in Ukraine?
Adam Lenton:
Yeah, so we'll often hear that conflict has benefited Putin's domestic support right from 1999, when you see the Second Chechen War beginning, to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And it's in part because of this, it's been argued that Putin's behavior stems from domestic pressures: Escalation, and ultimately the full-scale innovation, were driven by the need to shore up domestic support through foreign aggression.
Jeff Friedman:
Let me take it over to you, Henry. To what extent does this conventional wisdom seem to have support, empirically? In general, what made you and Adam think that this conventional wisdom needed a closer look.
Henry Hale:
Well, the conventional wisdom is grounded, first of all, in a lot of studies that do show that public support for leaders tends to rise in situations of conflict, in particular where countries initiate conflict, but also where they're attacked.
Most of this research, we've noted, has taken place in democracies. So that was one of the reasons we wanted to explore what happened in an authoritarian regime like Russia. There are also a lot of very interesting anecdotal accounts. There are reported instances where Kremlin representatives actually articulated that they thought that foreign hostilities actually benefited them electorally.
So all of this does make for a plausible argument along the lines of the conventional wisdom. But on the other hand, having looked at Russia for a long time, I think there were reasons to suspect that maybe something else was going on, or at least that things were a little more complicated than just the very simple logic would show.
For example, just looking back at the 2011 election, which we don't discuss in particular in the article, but this was one of the formative elements of our thinking: You had the Kremlin during a situation when its popularity was in decline. And it was appealing to hostility from the West, making hostile appeals, but it didn't save the Kremlin from the outbreak of widespread protests.
And so there were a lot of factors like this that we just thought meant that the question needed more rigorous analysis and we just did not find a comprehensive examination of this particular question in existing studies. And there are a lot of reasons to think that the answer might in fact be complicated. Just the fact that people can respond to threat in different ways—you might have cooperative responses to threat as well as bellicose responses to threat. So this I think was a lot of the reasoning that drove us to pursue the study.
Jeff Friedman:
And give us a sense also of the stakes of this. Maybe we can talk about policy implications towards the end of the conversation, but upfront, just to give the listeners a sense, why does it matter whether this conventional wisdom is right or what general kinds of insights do you think that might reveal about how Vladimir Putin, or other autocrats behave?
Henry Hale:
Well, I mean, I think in the most obvious sense, we see the consequences of actions by leaders like Putin in the case of Ukraine, which just caused unspeakable suffering and death in the world. And it's important that we understand what's going on.
That doesn't mean that we can necessarily stop it. But at least if we have a better understanding of why autocrats like Putin are doing what they're doing, we at least have a better chance of anticipating it and anticipating options. But arguably we also might have a better chance of being able to come up with other solutions or ways to pressure the regime or incentivize it to do something else, if we understand better why they might be engaging in aggressive actions in the international arena.
Jeff Friedman:
You mentioned a moment ago that there just hadn't been a systematic evaluation of public responses to Putin's behavior in Ukraine. So give us a brief sense, if you can, of the different streams of evidence that you and Adam looked at in the article.
Henry Hale:
Yeah, so our idea was to try to be as systematic and comprehensive as possible. We started with looking at Putin's rhetoric, like what is he actually saying to his public?
And one of the findings we'll talk about later is just that it's, it doesn't exactly correspond with the conventional wisdom. We also wanted to look at public opinion poll data. So for example, do long-term trends in both Putin support and anti-American sentiment or anti-Western sentiment track together?
We also wanted to look at how individuals perceived Putin within Russia. Did they see him as someone who was anti-Western, who was hostile? And was this correlated with patterns of his support at the individual level? And then finally, we wanted to just take a qualitative look at important episodes in Russia's international history where attitudes towards the United States or towards the West were salient, and to see in some granular detail, does the idea of authoritarians needing an enemy really make sense when we look at the details of what actually happened?
Jeff Friedman:
Okay, Adam, let me ask then, let's just go through some of these streams of research. Henry mentioned that you found that Putin's rhetoric doesn't conform with the conventional wisdom about using international aggression to stoke domestic support. So what did you find when you examined Putin's rhetoric?
Adam Lenton:
Yeah, so we found on the one hand that Putin does portray the West as threatening, particularly the United States, and this changes over time. Right at the beginning of his tenure, in the early 2000s, this is pretty implicit, but at least after the infamous Munich speech of 2007, he's describing the United States as pursuing a quest for hegemony, which he says is both a threat to Russia and, I would add, he also saw it as threatening to the United States’ own interest, or at least as how Putin understood these interests. But on the other hand, as we've mentioned, it's important to distinguish between depicting a threat and then responding to a threat aggressively.
And in this respect, you actually see Putin constantly contrasting what he sees as this threatening, misguided behavior from the United States with his own preference for pragmatism and moderation. You see it throughout his speeches well into the late 2010s, that he calls for equal partner–like relations with the United States.
And so I'd say that in this regard, the evidence is mixed. Yes, he does portray the West as threatening, but he doesn't advocate for a hard line or aggressive response to these threats, and this is what we argue was very much part of Putin's brand that he would sell to the public.
Jeff Friedman:
And what about voters, do Russian citizens seem to perceive Putin as being anti-Western? Does that appear to be what they're looking for in their leader?
Adam Lenton:
No, they definitely did not, and this is pretty consistent with his brand. So the Russian election study surveys that we analyze, they ask people what they think Putin's position is on relations with the West. And in every single survey we looked at, from 2004 right through to the eve of the full-scale invasion in December 2021, we saw a majority of respondents thinking that Putin wanted to treat the West either as an ally or a friend rather than a rival or enemy. And this is what people on the whole seem to want from their leader, too. So when people were then asked about their own preferences, between 55 and 72% of respondents, so relatively large majorities, also wanted Russia to treat the West as an ally or a friend. And of course these majorities did decrease over time. But it's worth emphasizing that even as late as December 2021, these patterns held.
Jeff Friedman:
At least in the United States context, we might often think that, even if a group is a minority of the population, they might hold intense preferences. They might hold extra weight. So is there any evidence that's what's going on in Russia? Maybe even if the anti-Western folks aren't the biggest group of voters, might Putin support stem from them specifically, or phrased another way, is there evidence that Putin support mostly stems from an anti-Western strain in Russian public opinion?
Adam Lenton:
Yeah, so this is an interesting point because on the one hand, Russians did respond to this notion of threat. And so we asked Russians if Russians thought that the West was threatening, they were more likely to vote for Putin by between 22 and 32 percentage points. But most people saw Putin as a soft-liner, and so he gained a lot of support disproportionately from pro-Western Russians on several occasions from 2013 and 2016.
And actually respondents with this more hardline preference were generally less likely to vote for Putin. This pattern holds, but it becomes a little bit less clear when we are leading up to the full-scale invasion. So this doesn’t quite hold as strongly in December 2021.
Jeff Friedman:
Henry, let me turn back to you. Adam mentioned upfront that there is this general finding that leaders benefit from a rally ’round the flag effect, that there's a short-term boost in public opinion that goes along with the use of force. Do we see that in the data with respect to Putin invading Ukraine? And if so, how does that fit in with your general argument that he isn't generally using international aggression to bolster domestic support?
Henry Hale:
Yeah, so we do find that he benefits from this invasion, but it's not as large of a bump in public opinion as one might expect.
So just first of all, to establish the baseline, Putin's approval ratings were already fairly high all throughout 2021. It remained above 60% in the more reputable polls that take place in Russia. And so there was no urgent need for him to shore up support. And what we find is that the bump was on the order of about a dozen percentage points. And so it's certainly not transformative, but it is definitely significant. And I think partly there are reasons to think that this bump in popular support was certainly not among the major ones in Russian political history. It never reached the heights that were reached after the Crimea annexation.
And in fact we mentioned in the article that out of 276 months that this Lavada Center polling agency that we use a lot has been asking the question in Russian public opinion polls, Putin's highest approval rating, basically this was only, the 35th-highest mark that he reached. So it was a significant bump, but certainly not a transformative one.
Jeff Friedman:
You just mentioned the earlier invasion of the Crimea. Can you just say how polling data from the middle of the 2010s fits into your argument? Does that show us anything different than what we see in response to the 2022 invasion?
Henry Hale:
Yeah, we talk about the Crimea annexation in part as a classic example of how correlation does not necessarily equal cause, because there is a correlation in the sense that we see a big spike in anti-Americanism at the time of the Crimea annexation in 2014. And we also see a big spike in Putin's support. But if one goes into an analysis of what actually happened and looks at the studies of this particular rally ’round the flag event in Russia, what we basically find is that it was a baseline support for annexing Crimea that had long existed in public opinion that led to this positive response in the population as much as anything.
You had majorities wanting Crimea or thinking Crimea should be part of Russia before Putin took this action. And they responded very positively to it. And so I don't think you can say that it was the anti-Westernism that went along with the Crimea annexation that caused Putin's support to go up.
Instead it was Western resistance to this move that led to more hostile orientations in the Russian population. There was a big boost, a big rally ’round the flag, but it had to do with more actual support for what Putin had done than it did with any anti-Americanism that might've been involved.
Jeff Friedman:
Just to sort of pull out a summary before we move on to the implications of your work, it seems like a general theme in what you're finding is that stoking hostility towards Ukraine is maybe not the optimal political strategy for Putin to pursue. And I wonder if you could just speak to that.
I mean, in general do we think that other options for Russian foreign policy would have served him better, or is it that hostility to Ukraine is just sort of only operating at the margins of Putin's political fortunes? Or in general, how does this research cause you to think about what Putin's optimal political strategy with respect to Ukraine would be?
Henry Hale:
Yeah, so we were very interested in this question and we decided to conduct an experiment in the summer of 2019 to try to get at it. And basically, in this experiment, all respondents got a question on how much they supported Putin. But then we randomly divided the sample into groups and we exposed different subsamples to different real quotes by Putin and compared them to a control group.
And so one group got actual quote from Putin that expressed a great deal of hostility towards the West, and emphasized the American threat to Russia. And we find that indeed this did bring him substantial set of new supporters relative to a measure of support that we had in the poll in the same survey before we asked them this question.
But what was interesting is we also asked another subset, another randomly selected subsample, and we gave them a quote from Putin expressing a desire for friendly cooperative relationships with the US stating that this is how things should be. And basically the political gains were almost the same. I mean, they were pretty much statistically indistinguishable. So to us this suggests that, yes playing up foreign threat can work for leaders, and it does, but that it's not the only strategy that can work, that leaders can also benefit from a sense of threat by appearing to be a reasonable, pragmatic leader emphasizing stability and trying to find ways to cooperate with other countries. So you can try to thread the needle in that way. And we find that this is something that may resonate with other incentives that authoritarian leaders might have, which are to appear as a source of stability and to actually try to provide some prosperity for people as a way of gaining legitimacy.
Jeff Friedman:
Adam, let me go back to you and let's pull it out and just sort of talk about the general implications of what you found. To the extent that you're finding that Putin doesn't seem to gain the kinds of domestic political support that we might ordinarily think international aggression might bring, does this tell us anything about the origins of the war and the politics that led Putin to invade Ukraine in 2022?
Adam Lenton:
Yeah, I think it does. And I think there's two main lessons I draw from our research. One is that this was definitely a rupture rather than a continuity. And it demonstrates that the full-scale invasion was by no means inevitable. It was very much out of sync with Putin's own longstanding domestic legitimation strategy that we've described. Putin's approval ratings were still very high on eve of the invasion, but also people's attitudes towards the West quite favorable. I mean, in mid-to-late 2021 more Russians had positive views than negative new views of the United States, which has only happened on a handful of occasions after 2014.
On the one hand, we think it's definitely a choice made by Putin, but it also helps us to understand, I think, the particular way in which the Kremlin has tried to draw upon these pre-2022 patterns to sell the war at home. Putin identified the United States and NATO as the main culprits and he portrayed the invasion as a response to Western hostility, very much trying to thread the needle of depicting threat, but also suggesting that Russia's response is measured, it's pragmatic, even as that comes into clear tension with the actual response that Putin has conducted since then.
Jeff Friedman:
Yeah, one of the things that this makes one think is that the invasion was much more discretionary than something that Putin needed to build public support. And I wonder if that has any implications for thinking about the future of the conflict, to the extent that the conflict doesn't seem to be something, according to your research, that Putin needs for his political survival.
Does that tell us anything about the prospects for off-ramps to this conflict or how the war might end?
Adam Lenton:
Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, it’s the big question on everybody's minds, and I think that our research offers mixed findings. On the one hand, at least domestic public opinion would probably be quite receptive to such a move. There's also a lot of room to be exploited for sort of status-enhancing actions. We see that cooperation is quite popular among Russians.
And so we think that the domestic population would probably be quite receptive, were there some sort of negotiated settlement. But on the other hand, I think the other takeaway from our research is that domestic public opinion is likely not going to be the driving force behind such a negotiated settlement. And I think in that case we have to look at other incentives and drivers of this conflict beyond domestic politics for that.
Jeff Friedman:
Henry, you mentioned a moment ago that generally challenging this conventional wisdom about the political value of aggressive foreign policies might tell us something more broadly about optimal way for autocrats to maximize public support. And I wonder if you could just speak to that in general. How do you think this changes our general views about autocratic politics?
Henry Hale:
I think one way to think about it is just that, like all political leaders, they have an incentive to try to have their cake and eat it too, in the sense that on one hand they might benefit from senses of foreign threat, but these same senses of foreign threat can be destabilizing, which could hurt them in other ways and damage their other sources of support, which draw on perceptions of stability and economic prosperity. And to the extent our findings can be generalized, I think it does indicate that leaders have some strong incentives to try to thread that needle. Now, of course it'll depend on a lot of things that may not be the same as in the Russian case.
One of them may just be, of course, the beliefs of the leader himself, because as was already mentioned leaders do have a lot of discretion when they have a good deal of, sort of a good stock of legitimacy already built up that they can maybe afford to expend some of it to pursue goods that they want to do.
But of course it also does depend on the mood of the public. Authoritarians can shape that mood to some degree. But it's not always infinitely manipulable. And certainly there are populations out there that are much more hostile to the United States or West than we actually find Russians to have been over the years. And so in those particular cases, there may be more, stronger incentives for leaders just to outright pursue hostility. But we suspect that in a lot of cases there may be different configurations that do resemble Russia's and may this and so that the optimal strategy may be something like we see Putin having tried to do before he decided to kind of spend some of his political capital to try and realize his vision for basically conquering Ukraine.
Jeff Friedman:
What do you think that might say about US-China relations in particular?
Henry Hale:
Well, it's hard to say. I think in general what we can say is that most likely leaders in cases like China are probably trying to balance these twin concerns.
Certainly we know in the case of China, I mean, there's a strong nationalist impulse. But at the same time, so much of the legitimacy of the current regime has been built up on building prosperity and bringing China into the developed, into the kind of developed leading economic world.
And so in that sense I think that we should be attentive to the possibility that even if something might go wrong in China, that it might not be a natural or inevitable response that it would try to do something like to take Taiwan in order to boost popularity.
At the same time, if this is something that the leadership actually believes, then it's probably going do this regardless of what public opinion is, so long as it feels that it can weather this particular storm. So I think that's one of the lessons. On the one hand public opinion doesn't necessarily have to be a constraint, but on the other hand, public opinion may not be driving foreign policy aggression in cases where we do see it in the world, right? This is not something, aggression isn't something that naturally or inevitably flows from authoritarianism itself. I think that's one of the larger conclusions we try to draw here.
Jeff Friedman:
We always end the conversations by asking guests to give us some recommended reading. And I'll say, in this case, it seems like your research really shows that conventional wisdom about autocratic politics is just a lot more complicated than we think, that we have this general impression of the incentives under which autocrats operate, that may just be quite oversimplified and may lead us astray when thinking about current events.
Adam, why don't I start with you? If readers are interested in learning more about autocratic politics or how publics respond to the use of force, where might they go?
Adam Lenton:
Well, I think in this case I'd say that there's a lot of very good quality biographies of Putin out there, and I think that certainly in this case, one could do much worse than looking at, for example, Philip Short's biography of Putin to get a sense of the values, the codes, the incentives that may be driving him as a leader.
Jeff Friedman:
And Henry, what about you?
Henry Hale:
I mean, the work that came to mind immediately for me was Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel's new book Russia and Ukraine, which came out just earlier this year, which I think is a really good examination of how the conflict itself emerged and what a lot of the incentives at the public level were and were not driving Putin, also putting an emphasis on considerations at the elite level. So I think for people interested in this particular conflict our article sheds some light on it I think. But I think this is a very good in-depth exploration of the conflict itself that would probably be of great interest.
Jeff Friedman:
Well, thanks again to Henry and Adam for joining us today, and thanks everybody for listening to the International Security Podcast produced by International Security, a quarterly journal at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and published by MIT Press. If you like the conversation, please take a moment to rate and review us or share us on social media, as that helps other people find the show.
I'm Jeff Friedman. The executive editor of International Security is Jacqueline L. Hazelton. Our producer is Monica Achen. Our associate producer and technical director is Benn Craig. See you next time.