Topic: "Democratic Support for the Bolshevik Revolution: An Empirical Investigation of 1917 Constituent Assembly Elections"
Scholars have long-debated the causes of popular support for the Russian Revolution and how this support translated into successful regime change. We systematically investigate cross-district and cross-city variation in popular support for the Bolsheviks using voting outcomes of the All Russian 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, occurring right after the Bolsheviks seized power. We find that the Bolsheviks managed to mobilize more popular support in districts with more of a presence of industrial workers, Russian-speaking peasants and soldiers. However, we show that politics rather than fundamentals explain the variation in pro-Bolshevik voting and the policies that supported this coalition was hardly stable, forewarning the command economy to come.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3059131
Topic: "Political Economy of Sanctions - Evidence from Russia"
Sanctions are a foreign policy instrument applied in order to change certain actions and decisions of the target country. They result in economic and political consequences. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of sanctions is still debatable. Thus, the aim of my research is to reveal the impact of sanctions, if there is one, within three chosen aspects: stock prices, regional economies and intergovernmental transfers. In this paper I intend to check whether the companies with state participation in the ownership are more responsive to the situation of high sanctions’ risk. The research is conducted utilizing the identification strategy based on the conflict fatalities that increase risk of sanctions and event study analysis applied to stock market returns for firms differently affected that have been successfully applied in the conflict literature, yet have not been employed in relation to sanctions’ studies.
On Wednesday, February 21 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. Professor A. Lepskiy gave a lecture on «Conflict of evidence evaluation within the framework of the theory of the belief functions»
Considerable research on developed countries shows the economic factors matter for voters. But for transitional democracies there has been uncertain evidences of the economics and elections connection using microdata. This view fits the Russian case well, where research on aggregate data supports economic voting but the conclusion can be limited due to institutional restrictions on access to elections and self-selection of voters. We consider modelling economic voting as a two step process, where the voters first decide to turn out and then choose the party at the polls. Given the subjective question this analyse uses, particularly in the context of likely endogeneity, an instrumental variable method is called for. We observed that negative egotropic perceptions does not decrease the probability to vote for the incumbent.
Using laboratory experiments conducted in two countries, we examine how poor institutions influence individuals support for redistribution. Contrary to conventional expectations, we argue that high-earning individuals will prefer more redistribution when they can more easily evade taxes. To test our expectations, we conducted a series of experiments from February to May 2016 simulating earned income and tax evasion. We find that high earners do indeed prefer more redistribution when they can more easily under-report their income. Our findings make an important contribution to the little studied question of how institutional quality affects social policy preferences.
On Wednesday, January 17 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. Professors Gorelov M.A. and Ereshko F.I. gave a lecture on «Blockchain techonology and control models in digital society»
Recently, it came to light that some national governments have been employing paid commentators (“trolls”) to interfere with online political conversations to express pro-government views and to challenge the narrative of political opposition. In this study, I explore the behavior and impact of 700 trolls allegedly employed in late 2014 and early 2015 to leave pro-government comments on the popular social media website LiveJournal.com. Using probabilistic topic modeling, I develop a method to estimate the causal effect of trolls intervention in online discussions under a set of assumptions. I find that trolls are more successful in diverting the discussions from politically charged topics than in promoting a pro-government agenda. I also find that trolls are successful in diverting discussions from purely political topics, but have no effect if users discuss problems of the national economy. Those who discuss poor economic growth, unemployment, and/or price inflation seem not to be responsive to troll interventions.
Eric Maskin, Nobel laureate in economics and Chief Research Fellow of DeCAn lab, gave an interview to RT.
During the past two centuries, western nations have successively extended the voting franchise to citizens of lower income. We explain this process of democratization as a rational way for incumbent elites to wage war effectively on other nations, as in a strategic game of international conflict handing over military spending decisions to citizens who face a lower tax cost of arming may confer a strategic delegation advantage. We find supporting empirical evidence in case studies of franchise extensions in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.
The mass privatization of housing was one of the most dramatic elements of the transformation of post-Soviet societies following the collapse of the USSR. However, the potential long-term consequences of the rapid creation of a large contingent of homeowners have not been fully appreciated or studied empirically. The growing scholarly literature that examines the political and social effects of homeownership is based almost entirely on market economies, in which homeownership is closely tied to family wealth, income, and other aspects of socioeconomic status. Due to its sudden and relatively arbitrary nature, housing privatization in the former USSR provides a unique research opportunity to assess the validity and mechanisms of the effects of homeownership on political attitudes and civic engagement that are proposed in this literature. The lecture presents results from the 2015 Comparative Housing Experiences and Stratification Survey (CHESS), implemented in Russia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kyrgyzstan. A range of analyses indicate that homeowners are more supportive of incumbent regimes, more civically engaged, and more politically active than non-homeowners in all four societies, with some variation by outcome.
