3.8m people have left Russia since this started, a rate of more than 1% of the population per month. How can such a flood of emigration coexist with an 80% approval rate?
> How can such a flood of emigration coexist with an 80% approval rate?
Well, it could be that all the people that don’t approve have left.
Or, it could be that in a state with highly active secret police, and widely known both legal and extralegal punishments for dissent, people tell opinion surveyors, if they say anything at all, exactly what they want the government to hear more of then than in freer societies.
That "may" is a bit far-fetched when the rate of emigration rises steeply to a fantastically high level and another measure of satisfaction stays unchanged. The people leaving didn't suddenly get a much more positive view of life elsewhere, after all.
In this case, you may be trying to make sense of garbage data. It's not unusual for public health figures in the 3rd world to be off by an order of magnitude. How confident are you that any of the numbers we have for Russia are better than a wild guess?
As for Russian emigration, the portion of society with the money and sophistication to support just up and leaving must be extremely small, and is probably very isolated socially from the rest of the population. So you have two distinct demographics that would poll very differently.
3.8m people have left Russia since this started, a rate of more than 1% of the population per month. How can such a flood of emigration coexist with an 80% approval rate?