Quincy's poll on negotiations in Ukraine is fine
UC San Diego professor Branislav Slantchev's criticism reveals a common misundertanding about polling and language.
The Quincy Institute is promoting recent polling which indicates that 69% of Americans “would support the US urging Ukraine to engage in negotiations ASAP.” And predictably, they’re being smeared as agents of the Kremlin for it.
Yesterday, however, UC San Diego professor of political science Branislav Slantchev came up with a rare justification for this attack: methodology. According to Slantchev, it is “the wording of the question” that makes it suspect:
The reason these types of questions are meaningless is simple: we don’t know what people mean by negotiations or peace. On what terms? …If you ask, do you support negotiations, almost everyone says Yes but the reply is meaningless because we have no idea what people mean by that.
Slantchev’s criticism here implicitly appeals to a serious misunderstanding of language, but before we get there I think some context would be useful. Here is Quincy’s question, along with some similar questions in recent polls:
How much would you support or oppose the U.S. urging Ukraine to engage in diplomatic negotiations with Russia and the U.S. as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine? (Quincy)
Do you think that Ukraine should engage in negotiations with Russia to try to achieve peace? (NDI)
In addition to the military, Ukraine should also look for a diplomatic way to end the war with Russia in order to minimize human casualties. (KIIS)
Do you support direct negotiations with the Russian Federation in order to achieve peace? (Razumkov Center)
If it was up to me, Europe should push Ukraine towards negotiating a peace deal with Russia (The European Council on Foreign Relations)
Would you support or oppose the United States pursuing diplomatic negotiations as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine, even if it means Ukraine making some compromises with Russia? (Data for Progress)
This is just a handful of dozens of similar polls that have been conducted over the past few years, but already we can see that the kind of question Quincy is asking is exceedingly common. None of these firms specify what the specific terms of negotiation or diplomacy would be, and yet all of them have found this a useful question to ask. These are not, moreover, firms that most people would associate with the Kremlin — on the contrary, one is the ECJR and two (KIIS and Razumkov) are from Ukraine itself.
It is true, as Slantchev suggests, that if you attached specific terms to these hypothetical negotiations (like “should Ukrainians be willing to give up land”) you would get different answers to these questions. This does not logically imply that the question is meaningless, however, and if you look at the polls above (and the public debates surrounding them) you can see way. In popular discourse, calls for the US and Ukraine to negotiate typically mean something like “we should initiate negotiations” as opposed to “we should wait for Russia to initiate negotiations” or “we should refuse to negotiate and simply achieve a total military victory instead.”
This certainly seems to be how respondents have read the question, judging by the results. A basic empirical problem with Slantchev’s objection is that if the question were truly meaningless, you wouldn’t expect to see polling results like 69% vs. 31%; you’d expect to see an even 50/50 split, with essentially random answers averaging out into an even distribution across the possible responses. If on the other hand support for diplomacy meant something extremely banal like “support for peace eventually on acceptable terms” you would not expect to see “almost everyone” say yes; you would expect a 100/0 split.
But that’s not the split we see, either. Instead, what we have seen with questions like this is that support for “negotiations” (whatever that means) was relatively low a few years ago but has steadily grown into numbers like 69% today. What we have also seen is that Ukraine hawks like Slantchev become more likely to accuse you of being a “Kremlin shill” as those numbers get higher even though they are supposedly meaningless. My hypothesis is that these trends can probably be explained by a growing popular impatience with the war in Ukraine and a growing preference to see it settled at the negotiating table rather than in the battlefield. Perhaps there is a better explanation, but “these numbers are meaningless” isn’t even wrong — it’s just a refusal to explain a demonstrable trend.
That trend, incidentally, points us to a fact about human language that is widely misunderstood. There is probably no way to ascribe some definite objective meaning to the question “Should Ukraine engage in diplomacy,” and it seems certain that if you ask a hundred people about it they will probably give you a hundred slightly different answers. But empirically, we can see that the word is at the center of some kind of popular disagreement that is not just random; something about seeing the word used this way promps most Americans to react supportively and others to start saying insane things about a Kremlin conspiracy. This is how most of our language seems to work. All of the different ideas and associations and connotations that everyone attaches to “diplomacy” have given it a real position in a semantic web of shared meaning that allows us to communicate with each other; but that web is probably far too complex for any of us to keep in our working memory or articulate with any real precision.