Trends in public opinion regarding the effectiveness of public administration. Presidential cycles 2000-2021

Since 2008, in the Editorial section of the journal, we have been monitoring the effectiveness of public administration; this helps us to analyze the consistent steps that the President makes in order to build new foundations of the Russian statehood, which was, in fact, completely destroyed in 1991. Besides, we assess the effectiveness of the President’s decisions from the point of view of the broad strata of the Russian population (voters), whose opinion is one of the main criteria for the effectiveness of the public administration system and the work of the head of state. In order to form an objective and unbiased view of the events and processes taking place in Russia and abroad, we use assessments obtained from a wide range of specialists in various fields: political analysts, economists, sociologists, philosophers, representatives of civil society. No less important is our regular access to a significant number of statistical, sociological, Russian and foreign databases; by using them comprehensively, we can look at the situation in the country and assess the effectiveness of public administration from the point of view of not only individual experts, but also voters. The main information source of sociological data in our research is the public opinion monitoring that we have been conducting in the Vologda Oblast since 1996. Regularly, once every two months, we carry out a survey covering 1.5 thousand residents of the region, thus obtaining an average annual “cross-section” of public opinion based on the estimates of nine thousand voters representing the main social strata and groups that differ in income, territory of residence, employment, marital status, education and many other socio-demographic characteristics. Due to a monitoring nature of the research, we can observe how, in the course of time, the events and decisions taken by the head of state are lined up in a clear, consistent, logically verified line, which many experts can see. But the majority of voters who observe “with the naked eye” the situation in the country and the actions of the authorities, do not see this line, because it is perceived on a subconscious and routine level, that is, based on the general opinion prevailing in their environment and stereotypes that people develop through their own life experience, the experience of relatives and friends (including negative life experience of the 1990s). This is why our editorial articles often supplement the analysis of latest events and processes in Russia and abroad with a retrospective look at the management decisions that preceded them. We pay special attention to the principle of historicism, and in this regard it is important for us to build a chronology of events. The current article is the last one in 2021; it briefly summarizes the analysis of public administration effectiveness in the context of Vladimir Putin’s presidential terms, with an emphasis on the first four years of the fourth presidential cycle (2018-2021).