Time Of The Tough Guys

Among the least negative were citizens of the world's two fastest-rising powers: China and India. Even Bush got a 41 percent confidence ranking in the Middle Kingdom, while Putin got a stratospheric 75 and Hu a 93. Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, explains Chinese respondents' generosity by arguing that "when you're on the rise, there's an upbeat feeling that leads to a sunnier disposition. The Chinese feel that life is working for them." Or as Daalder puts it: "Where is the average condition of the average person looking brighter?"

It's nonetheless remarkable to see confidence ratings for major world figures cluster within such a narrow and low band. This underscores the truth in the cliché that all problems are now global, and that there's often precious little individual governments can do about them. Festering conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Congo, acute food and oil shortages, global warming—create scary headlines everywhere, feeding what may be a planetary crisis of confidence. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, put it in an e-mail, "People around the world feel themselves to be in the grip of forces larger than any leader can control." Who can blame them?

Still, the widespread pessimism doesn't explain the relatively high scores enjoyed by the autocrats. The fact that they did so well in their home countries isn't surprising. As Daalder put it, "authoritarians do well in their own countries because they have to." Government control of the media is tight in both Russia and China, and Putin and Hu are able to use the full machinery of the state to carefully groom their images. Moreover, respondents in those nations may not have felt comfortable speaking openly—and harshly—about their local strongmen. Yet there's reason to believe that even if they had, they'd have scored their leaders highly. The economies in both states are booming, nationalism in on the rise and citizens feel grateful to their national chiefs for restoring their pride and place in the world.

What's harder to grasp is why Hu and Putin did relatively well—better than any democrat but Brown—in other countries. Kull, the director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, argues that the poll shouldn't be read as reflecting a global endorsement of the authoritarians; though they did score slightly better than Bush and Sarkozy, they did so by narrow margins (less than 10 percentage points). It's also important to remember that the survey wasn't weighted by country. Craig Charney, another international pollster, points out that if the data did reflect country size, Bush's standing would be higher, since he got relatively good scores in some of the world's biggest states: China, India, Indonesia and Nigeria. Putin would do even better from such a ranking, however, since his score in India was also strong, and his rating in China (75) was commanding. The Russian leader also racked up impressive tallies in places like Ukraine (59 percent positive), South Korea (54 percent) and Iran (48 percent). And he seems to be the only major leader whose approval rating rose in the past year, by four points (based on a comparison of the WorldPublicOpinon.org survey with Pew's).

This owes, in part, to dumb luck. Russia is a big winner in the dead-dinosaurs sweepstakes: it sits on huge carbon reserves at a time when oil and gas prices are skyrocketing. That's produced a stunning turnaround in the Russian economy and an overall boost in Moscow's power and prestige. Minxin Pei, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., argues that this unprecedented wealth helps explain the autocrats' confidence rating abroad. "Normally we'd expect undemocratic leaders to do more poorly," he says. "But it happens that the economies of their countries are on the upswing, while the democracies are on the downswing. So it cancels out the traditional 'terror discount' "—which would otherwise depress the rankings of strongmen like Putin and Hu.

Larry Diamond of Stanford's Hoover Institution, a foremost democracy expert, suggests another, more worrisome reason for Putin's popularity. Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, he argued that the wave of liberation that followed the end of the cold war has stalled, leading to a "democratic recession." Rights have been rolled back in Russia, Thailand, Venezuela, Bangladesh, the Philippines and elsewhere, and other new democracies have hit hard times. In January, a Freedom House survey showed that for the first time since 1994, freedom around the world had declined in two successive years. Add in the damage that the Iraq War has done to U.S.-style democracy promotion, and the result is a global slide in the public's faith in democracy as a system—and in democratic leaders as individuals. More and more voters are embracing tough officials (like Putin or Venezuela's Hugo Chávez) at home and abroad. And while majorities worldwide still think democracy is the best form of government, that support is also dropping.