Ideas Russia is staging an election that matters to almost no one — except President Vladimir V. Putin and his inner circle. President Vladimir V.

Putin of Russia at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Ideas Why Autocrats Care What People Think Russia is staging an election that matters to almost no one — except President Vladimir V. Putin and his inner circle.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Sept. 18, 2026 Updated 5:47 a.m. ET Surprising as it may be, the Kremlin cares a great deal about what Russians think. The Federal Protective Service, or F.

S. O., the Secret Service-like guard that protects President Vladimir V. Putin’s life, operates its own sociology division that polls Russians and delivers clandestine results to the Kremlin.

The sociologist at the helm of VTs IOM, the main state-run pollster, is so important in Mr. Putin’s system that on social media his wife shows off a collection of 24 Hermès bags, worth a total of $630,000, according to a recent report by an anti-corruption foundation. And Sergei V. Kiriyenko, the Kremlin’s chief “political technologist,” meticulously gathers and analyzes what people are saying online in towns and cities across the country.

They all have been working overtime ahead of this weekend’s parliamentary election, the first since Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That controlled exercise in political theater is occupying the waking hours of thousands of Russian bureaucrats. Campaign teams are agitating for “opposition” parties that all conveniently support the war.

Regional officials are organizing the nuts and bolts of ballots and turnout. Milquetoast candidates populate the airwaves of state television. But hanging over the entire endeavor, from the government polling to the Potemkin politicking, is a gaping question: What is the point? What do polling and public opinion matter to an autocrat? Whether in Russia or China, Egypt or Cameroon, they can jail their opponents, write their own rules and then bend them as they please.

Why hold an election at all? Gauging popular opinion and holding elections in autocratic nations like Russia may seem irrelevant, but political scientists have largely found the opposite to be true. For leaders like Mr. Putin, mastering public opinion and election mobilization does more than confer a patina of legitimacy. It can also prolong a regime’s survival by lending the appearance of popular support and by helping to identify new internal threats.

Autocrats, then, ignore public opinion at their own risk. This summer, for instance, the Russian authorities saw how the old-school liberal party Yabloko, long seen as irrelevant, began to gain ground in public opinion polls as the only group running on a platform opposing the war in Ukraine. In August, amid a pressure campaign against the party, Russia’s Supreme Court took Yabloko off the ballot, though some of its candidates are still running.

It was a move that followed the oft-repeated maxim of political scientists that only amateurs rig elections on Election Day. Even as Mr. Putin chooses from what the political scientist Andreas Schedler calls the “menu of manipulation,” elections can still carry risks for autocratic governments. The basic purpose of the ritual may be to project long-term legitimacy, but offering a ballot can also invite instability and doubt in the short term, particularly if the orchestration slips up. “They face this general autocratic dilemma: If you cheat too much you reveal weakness, and if you don’t cheat enough you risk a result that could threaten your hold on power,” said Timothy Frye, a political science professor at Columbia University.

The aim, Mr. Frye said, is to craft “a result that is sufficiently large that you win, but not so large that the masses just don’t believe it.”.