Please join us for a talk with Timothy Frye, Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy and former Director of the Harriman Institute. Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters when asked about Presidential approval in Russia? With three colleagues, Tim Frye conducted two surveys in Russia in January and March 2015 specifically designed to detect dishonest responses to this question. The results have important implications for the prospects for political change in Russia as well as they reliability of survey research in the region. Timothy Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy and a former Director of The Harriman Institute. Professor Frye received a B.A. in Russian language and literature from Middlebury College in 1986, an M.I.A. from Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs in 1992, and a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1997. His research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats Building Markets in Russia, which won the 2001 Hewett Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and Building States and Markets after Communism The Perils of Polarized Democracy. Among other projects, he is working on a book manuscript, Property Rights and Property Wrongs Institutions and Economic Development in Russia. He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at State Research University-Higher Economics School, Moscow.

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