Public Opinion in the Eurasian De Facto States

Abstract

Developing reliable social scientific knowledge about public opinion in de facto states is a challenging exercise. Since 2008 we cooperated with a variety of research partners to organize a series of social scientific surveys in all four de facto states in the post-Soviet region, organizing an initial round of surveys in 2010-2011 and a follow-up round in December 2014. In this contribution we summarize the responses by declared nationality to two questions asked in 2010-11 and then again in 2013-2014: preferred future status and trust in the president. We show the results for nationalities because these values tend to be most distinctive and indicate some of the key divides in the de facto states.