ABSTRACT How do residents perceive governance in Russia’s North Caucasus? Using original interviews and household survey data collected over nine months of fieldwork, this article offers a nuanced and empirically driven comparative account of governance in Chechnya, Dagestan, and Ingushetia. Mitigating between accounts of a hegemonic state that has saturated public space or strong non-state actors

ABSTRACT Immigration control in Russia, one of the world’s top five largest immigrant-receiving countries, is rife with corruption and other informal practices. Instead of framing corruption simply as bad governance, this article shows that informal strategies are intertwined with formal state practices to produce immigration control. Instead of presenting corruption as subversive of state institutions

ABSTRACT This article argues that to capture Russia’s influence abroad, one needs to comprehend the country’s “gray diplomacy” as a neoliberal realm open to individual initiatives. We define “entrepreneurs of influence” as people who invest their own money or social capital to build influence abroad in hopes of being rewarded by the Kremlin . We test this notion by looking at both famous and unknown

(2021). Roundtable on Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s the red mirror: putin’s leadership and russia’s insecure identity. Post-Soviet Affairs. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This paper assesses some of the factors that influence the public’s geopolitical preferences in the Association Agreement (AA) countries (Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine). Specifically, I test the winners and losers theory, according to which individuals with higher chances of success in a particular society (winners) tend to support EU membership more than those with lower chances (losers)

ABSTRACT This article considers the pervasiveness of military themes in the state’s framing of Russianness, and explores the strengths and weaknesses of militaristic means to enhance social consensus. Based on existing research and new survey data, it emphasizes the stratification of support for militaristic policy in the Russian population. The author argues that militarism cannot alleviate the growing

ABSTRACT What are the long-term effects of the financial sanctions against Russia? We provide a time-sensitive analysis of the sanctions impact on certain Russian financial markets and highlight how Russia has responded strategically. Our analysis also captures the effect of the threat of sanctions and informs the debate on sanctions effectiveness. Thus, our study indicates how financial sanctions

ABSTRACT Our research bears on two critical issues for contemporary Russia: federal–regional power relations; and whether Moscow can modernize institutions and address dissatisfaction with social service delivery, a major political issue. It is the first comprehensive study of a major 2015 reform that ended the state monopoly over service provision and initiated outsourcing (contracting out) to socially

ABSTRACT Nation-building has been an important and often complicated process in countries like Ukraine, which emerged from ethno-federal communist systems. In Ukraine, a civic approach to national identity has gained support since 2013, but it exists alongside a more ethnic Ukrainian–focused view of national identity. This article focuses on a central element of civic national identity in Ukraine:

ABSTRACT Studies explaining Georgian foreign policy present Tbilisi’s options as a dichotomy between the West and Russia, focusing either on power politics or personal characteristics of decision-makers. To paint a more nuanced and holistic picture, this article departs from these models and uses content analysis to explore what foreign policy visions political parties present to voters in their manifestos

ABSTRACT Over recent years, Russia’s government has been expanding its presence in domestic state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and instituting numerous regulatory revisions. However, research is inconclusive over the government’s underlying economic intentions, and intervention outcomes, vis-à-vis SOEs. Likewise, it remains imprecise in relation to various characteristics of government–SOE interaction

ABSTRACT This article explores the entry-level legal job market based on a survey of graduating full-time Russian law students fielded in 2016. The findings contradict the prevailing assumptions about the post-Soviet labor market that connections trump experience. They show that law-graduate-respondents placed little value on the contacts of friends and family. Regression analysis confirms that personal

ABSTRACT To understand the divergent institutional development in transition economies, we examine the role of institutional experience from the pre-Soviet era in institution-building after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. To measure institutional experience, we construct an index that captures previous experience with independent non-Soviet institutions. A cross-sectional analysis shows that institutional

ABSTRACT A strong leader – i.e. an individual who concentrates great power in his hands and uses it to solve the country’s problems – is often considered a good thing in contemporary politics. Vladimir Putin has always presented himself as precisely this kind of leader. This article considers whether Putin actually is a strong leader who has used his powers to do great things for Russia. The analysis

ABSTRACT The paper aims to contribute to studies of women’s human capital and fertility in post-Soviet societies. The post-Soviet regions are a particularly interesting setting to study this question because they have combined traditional family organization and rapid social change in recent decades. Based on evidence from Karachay-Cherkessia (Russia), we examine whether elements of a woman’s human

ABSTRACT The object of my analysis is the Tallinn-based discussion club Impressum, known as a platform for spreading pro-Kremlin interpretations of political matters. These public speeches give a broad picture of political discourses originated in the Russian academic community or among Russia-loyal academics in Europe, and shared with Estonian Russophiles. Two questions are central to my analysis

ABSTRACT This article uses a unique dataset from the September 2019 municipal elections in St. Petersburg in order to examine empirically the efficacy of strategic voting under authoritarianism, as manifest in the effects of the “smart vote campaign” of Alexei Navalny in Russia. The analysis allows for the conclusion that the campaign, while technically similar to the vote advice applications that

ABSTRACT This exploratory study represents the first attempt at examining the politics of exporting Russian higher education to the former Soviet countries. The existing numeric and narrative evidence on Russian universities’ international branch campuses (IBCs) was gathered and systematically organized in a new dataset. The study finds that the majority of IBCs operating in former Soviet countries

ABSTRACT We investigate whether lending by the dominant Russian state bank, Sberbank, contributed to Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power during the presidential elections of March2000. Our hypothesis is that Sberbank corporate loans were used as incentives for managers at private firms to mobilize employees to vote for Putin. In line with our proposed voter mobilization mechanism, we find that the growth

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the process of renegotiation of the informal contract between the regional and federal elites of Russia after the economic crisis. We use the database of Center of Public Procedures’ “Business against Corruption” to show that, after 2011, regional elites in Russia lost the pre-existing opportunity to extract rents from businesses in return for favorable election results

ABSTRACT Since about 2009, increasing budgetary constraints forced the Russian state to become notably less tolerant of lower-level corruption and predatory behavior by state agencies. In this paper, we argue that after a first stage of decentralized corruption and state capture during the 1990s, and a second period of decentralized corruption and business capture during the 2000s, Russia has entered

(2020). United we stand: the effects of subnational elite structure on succession in two Russian regions. Post-Soviet Affairs: Vol. 36, SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: PERSPECTIVES FROM CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA, pp. 475-494.

ABSTRACT This study investigates whether the economic freedom of a region drives firm performance. Despite the large number of papers about the relationship between economic freedom and growth, there is still little evidence on the role of economic freedom in the performance of individual firms. We address this gap in the literature using hierarchical linear modeling, allowing us to investigate regional

(2020). Political economy of development: perspectives from contemporary Russia. Post-Soviet Affairs: Vol. 36, SPECIAL DOUBLE ISSUE: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT: PERSPECTIVES FROM CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA, pp. 393-394.

(2020). Trajectories of political protest in post-Soviet spaces: an introduction. Post-Soviet Affairs: Vol. 36, Trajectories of Political Protest in Post-Soviet Spaces, pp. 189-191.

ABSTRACT Much has been written about the specific way in which the Russian government under President Vladimir V. Putin uses television to propagate pro-government views on domestic and international politics by influencing what is aired. This paper examines the first season of The Great Game (Bol’shaya Igra in Russian), a television talk show that appears on Russia’s national television network Channel

ABSTRACT The issue of poor performance of the Russian federal bureaucracy is addressed by linking performance to type of official, through analysis of biographical data on deputy ministers and division (departament) heads in five federal ministries since 2012, supplemented by internet searches on behavior, particularly of a corrupt nature. Education, previous career experience, and recruitment, including

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the mechanisms of creating a symbolic connection between several generations of protesters in the late USSR and in Putin’s Russia. Based on an analysis of the periodical press, data on human-rights violations during public protests, and published sources on the history of Soviet dissidents, the article traces how and for what purposes protesters in the 2000s and 2010s used

ABSTRACT There is an established tradition in social movement research to study protests through event datasets constructed from newspaper data. However, studies evaluating the magnitude of bias in newspaper reporting on protests have been largely confined to Western Europe and North America and have predominantly focused on time-invariant bias. I extend the past scholarship by analyzing the bias in

ABSTRACT Based on a case study of Euromaidan Ukrainian nationalism, we argue that civic nationalism may derive more from a commitment to a particular political event than from a set of stable political ideas and principles. We concur that civic nationalism can be as exclusivist as ethnocultural nationalism, and we develop specific criteria and mechanisms of civic exclusion originating from the unique

ABSTRACT How do protest movements affect electoral politics in electoral authoritarianism? Related research has usually focused on the immediate effects of protests on regime change, while longer time periods have received less attention. To address this shortcoming, this paper explores the 2017/18 presidential campaign of the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, asking how it was related