In an era before public opinion polling, how do we conclude that a regime enjoyed popularity and support?

Discontent is a lot easier to measure, since it can be documented by police and the military as they react to uprisings or unrest. We can draw conclusions about discontent based upon the breadth and frequency of such uprisings and other forms of resistance, such as tax evasion, draft dodging, pamphleteering, desertion, subversion, and so on.

But I increasingly have the feeling that we simply take the absence of obvious discontent as a sign of popularity, when they're not at all the same thing. After all, a population might be cowed into obedience, or might be too spread-out to organize resistance, or might be too occupied with daily survival, and so on.

This came to mind yesterday as I was grading student essays and a student wrote that Napoleon enjoyed support among the Poles. This is the consensus position of historians for a long time now: Napoleon was popular among Poles for creating a Polish state, albeit stopping short of a "Poland." I have often seen that asserted, and usually without any sort of documentation or evidence.

Surely we can find written evidence of this among that small portion of the population who could write, or whose writing was preserved for whatever reason. But among the peasantry broadly?

Modern historiography generally asserts that early 19th-century populations were not much moved by appeals to national identity. They responded instead to quotidian priorities like taxes, conscription, and general prosperity. This has been the consensus of most recent historians who have worked on the Dutch, German, and Italian regions in the Napoleonic era.

Is there any reason to assume that the Poles were different? Is there any hard evidence showing popular support for the Napoleonic hegemony among Poles?

For example: do police records show that Poles were more likely to resist the taxation or conscription of their Austrian, Prussian, or Russian overlords, than they were to resist the same in the Duchy of Warsaw? Do we have records showing that more local people joined the municipal councils in the Duchy, than they did under, say, the Prussians, who used a similar system? Was there a pattern of volunteerism for the military in the Duchy that was not present under, for example, the Austrians in Galicia?*

In other words: is there any hard data to show that the Duchy of Warsaw enjoyed more popular support than the former Kingdom of Poland, or the regional administration of the Prussians, Austrians, or Russians?

I'm not talking about memoirs of a handful of aristocrats whose personal fortunes waxed as a result of loyalty to a regime. I'm talking about the masses.

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* Granted, volunteerism for the military can also be an indicator of bad times, as men are unable to make a living in any other way.