Students' Reports at the Political Economy Research Seminar

Undergraduate students presented their research at the seminar.

1. Speaker:  Yulia Zhestkova  (HSE)

Topic:   " Catch Me if You Can: Election Manipulation in Non-Democracies"

Abstract: Election manipulations are often considered as an integral part of non-democracies and an essential procedure for an incumbent who wants to stay in power. However, an incumbent in non-democratic countries has a more effective and durable source of power -- political terror. Using a theoretical model, I show that repressions and election fraud appear to be substitutes rather than complements in their influence on election outcomes. I explore how the effect of political terror accumulates over the time, making manipulations in consequent elections unnecessary. The empirical part of the paper exploits the data of election monitoring missions from 1960 to 2014 and shows that a unit growth in political terror scale increases the probability of election fairness by 11 percentage points. Using random forest algorithm, I show that systematic political terror as a method of securing elections' results is mostly used in hybrid regimes. Though a presence of Western observers on elections plausibly affects democratic transitions in many countries, their estimates of election fairness often do not tell much about the real level of democratic development. 

 

2. Speaker: Ilya Kozis  (HSE)

Topic:   " Brain Drain in Non-Democratic Regimes "

Abstract: Empirical studies suggest that human capital is one of the determinants of economic growth. However, political aspects of human capital formation are largely neglected in theoretical literature. In my paper, I am trying to incorporate possibility of "brain drain" into a model of authoritarian regime, presented in the book of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson "Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy." In particular, I use a model with three income groups, where elites dictate their policy to other citizens, while poor and middle class, the latter is also considered to be educated and to have a non-negative impact on income of all citizens, can undertake a revolution. Besides that, educated group can also choose to migrate. Presented model, unlike already existing, fits in with such events as Huguenot Exodus from France in 1685, and Expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Also, to a limited extent I was able to show, that "brain drain", as a result of more redistributive policy, rather than the ideal policy of elites, is not less likely to happen in societies, where inequality between poor and rich is larger.