Is There Anything Wrong with Putin's Electoral Ratings? A Study of 2012 Russian Presidential Elections

Linking Preference Falsification and Election Fraud in Electoral Autocracies: The Case of Russia

“…Two explanations can be readily excluded. Previous research on the 2012 presidential election indicates that the non-probability sampling design used by a majority of the organisations cannot explain the observed inflation in the estimates (Kalinin, 2014). Since across all the survey organisations, with a range of relationships to the Kremlin, polling estimates vary within the margin of error, it is unlikely that data fabrication took place.…”