Externally guided experiment: rhetoric and representation of the Crimea mega poll

Abstract

This text is a response to Dmitry Rogozin’s article titled “On the Accuracy of the Telephone Survey about Crimea: A Posteriori Error Analysis” published in the current issue of the Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes (No 2, 2014). The author investigates the opinion polls concerning the attitudes of Russians towards the accession of Crimea and conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation and the Russian Public Opinion Research Center on March 14-15, 2014. According to the author, there is an ambiguity between big efforts in organizing the representation of the object, on the one hand, and big efforts on elimination of the differences from this object, on the other hand. The author considers that the opinion polls conducted by the companies show the direction toward which the development of the opinion polls` policy is developing in Russia. The author finds that in the short term the policy will demand from the public opinion companies to use certain techniques for the representation that can be easily convertible into techniques of surveillance. Control over the opinion poll discourse is also possible.