On October 15, 2025, the Bologna Institute for Policy Research hosted a seminar titled Ethnicity and Public Opinion in Autocratic Regimes: Evidence from Russia, featuring Kyle Marquardt, Professor at the University of Bergen. In an engaging presentation, he examined how ethnic identity shapes political attitudes and public support in authoritarian regimes, drawing on recent survey evidence from Russia to illuminate the complex interplay between ethnicity, state legitimacy, and regime stability.

Marquardt began by emphasizing that public support is central to the endurance of modern autocracies. Yet, minority groups, shaped by historical experiences of exclusion and discrimination, may hold attitudes toward the state that diverge significantly from those of majority populations. Understanding these dynamics, he argued, requires moving beyond simplistic categorizations of identity to consider how ethnicity interacts with institutional structures and political narratives.

Focusing on Russia, he described a state that, while enjoying broad popular support, is characterized by deep ethnic diversity. Roughly 20 percent of Russia's population identifies as non-Russian, and minority groups are territorially, linguistically, and culturally dispersed. Many of these groups have reasons to feel distant from the central government, including an increasingly nationalist political discourse, the suppression of ethnic activism, and the disproportionate recruitment of minority populations into the war in Ukraine. Russia's ethnofederal institutions, designed to manage diversity, have at times enabled regional resistance, further shaping attitudes toward the state.

To investigate how these dynamics influence public opinion, Marquardt presented findings from two waves of surveys conducted by the Levada Center. The first, in November 2022, included regionally representative telephone surveys in the republics of Buryatia and Tatarstan, each with 250 respondents, alongside a nationwide survey of 1,601 participants. The second, conducted between November 2024 and January 2025, drew on three nationally representative CAPI surveys with a combined total of 4,841 respondents. These surveys measured support for President Vladimir Putin, attitudes toward Russia's military campaign in Ukraine, and responses to indirect questions designed to capture sensitive political views.

The results revealed marked differences across ethnic groups. In 2022, members of titular groups in Buryatia, where 33 percent of the population is Buryat and 64 percent is Russian, and in Tatarstan, where 54 percent of residents are Tatar and 40 percent are Russian, were significantly less likely to support President Putin or the war in Ukraine compared with ethnic Russians in the same regions. Although results from 2024 were more nuanced, they continued to show substantial variation across ethnic groups in terms of both support for Putin and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Indirect questioning techniques indicated that members of certain titular groups may be less supportive ofPutin than when they are asked directly.

He concluded that these findings underscore the importance of understanding how ethnic identity shapes public opinion in authoritarian states, as overlooking such differences can lead to misinterpretations of how widespread regime legitimacy actually is.

In a follow-up interview Marquardt highlighted the importance of innovative methodological approaches such as list experiments, which allow respondents to express sensitive views indirectly and reduce self-censorship. He stressed that disaggregating public opinion by ethnicity is essential, as aggregate figures often mask significant differences that shape regime legitimacy and potential sources of dissent. While open resistance among minority groups remains limited, the attitudinal differences revealed by the surveys point to underlying tensions that could become increasingly important as the human and economic costs of the war continue to grow.

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hosted by Professor Eugene Finkel


Kyle Marquardt is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen.

Prior to that, Marquardt was Assistant Professor of Politics and Governance at HSE University (2019-2022), and Associate Research Professor and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg (2015-2019). He received his PhD in Political Science from UW-Madison in 2015.

Marquardt's main research interests include: identity and separatism, authoritarian politics, survey research and latent variable models. His work has been published most recently in International Political Science Review, American Political Science Review, and PS: Political Science & Politics.