How Can We Know if Russia is a Threat to Western Democracy? Understanding the Impact of Russia’s Second Wave of Election Interference

Since 2014, the Russian government has sought to influence at least twenty Western
democratic elections via the distribution of junk news, theft and dissemination of emails; and
measures to corrupt the vote count.3 An enormous amount of information has recently come out
about this campaign – particularly in the 2016 Presidential elections in the United States. The
Mueller indictments, analyses of data provided by social media firms to the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence,4
and a number of academic and journalistic accounts5 now give us a
rich picture of the extent and character of Russian interference. However, relatively little effort
has been made to assess the impact of this effort.6 To what extent is Russia to blame for the
recent rise of populists in the United States and elsewhere?
Given the wide range of factors shaping national elections, it is difficult to isolate the
precise impact of Russian interference. Nevertheless, we can asses the plausibility of Russian
influence by looking not just at the supply side – the extent and character of Russian efforts that
have been the focus of most studies – but at the demand side – the extent to which Russian
activities were simply redundant of major domestic factors (major domestic political parties,
domestic media, electoral cleavages) already pushing in the same direction. Examining the
degree to which Russian efforts were redundant provides a clue as to whether outcomes would
have been the same absent Russian meddling.
Such an approach suggests that it is unlikely that Russian efforts had much of an impact
in the United States. Efforts to use social media to mobilize Trump supporters, or increase
polarization were already being undertaken on a much larger scale by the GOP and a significant
network of rightwing media. At the same time, there is little evidence that non-redundant
measures such as distribution of stolen emails or efforts to demobilize leftwing constituents had a
noticeable impact on support for Clinton. More broadly, a preliminary look at other cases of
Russian intervention suggests that almost all cases where outcomes favored Russian interests can
be more easily explained by the actions of powerful domestic actors rather than Russian actions.