Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party “Yabloko” to the government party “United Russia” on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

选举专制政权的投资者是否因政治活动而受到歧视？在本文中，我们实施了一个简单的实验，以测试与执政党的隶属关系或政治​​反对派是否会影响投资者从俄罗斯地区的投资促进机构获得建议的可能性。在2016年12月至2017年6月之间，我们向70个俄罗斯地区的188个投资促进机构发送了1504封电子邮件，其中包含一个简短的问题和一些随机处理方法。尽管名义上俄罗斯促进了投资促进机构的政治化，但我们发现，将潜在投资者的政治隶属关系从反对党“ Yabloko”转变为政府党“统一俄罗斯”的可能性平均增加了30％。