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This paper addresses the issue of economic voting in transitional democracies using data from the Russian federal elections. It argues that the shock of inflation that followed the fundamental economic reform has a lasting influence on voters. Specifically, it shows that in Russia, where inflationary policy led to hyperinflation & the widespread loss of personal savings, the magnitude of savings lost at that time continues to explain a significant portion of the variation in the regional support for the communist party in parliamentary & presidential elections. 9 Tables, 8 Figures, 70 References. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis has provided an opportunity to re-evaluate how the federal relations work in authoritarian Russia. In particular, the crisis has confirmed that the regional governors are an integral part of maintaining the stability of the non-democratic regime. Since the whole system and thus, the political careers of the incumbent governors depend on Putin's popularity, they are interested in maintaining it, even at the expense of their own popularity with the population. In Spring 2020 the regional governors have demonstrated both loyalty and willingness to shield Putin from political responsibility for unpopular measures associated with the epidemic.

In this article, we explore the inherent trade-offs and inconsistencies of Russia's policies toward the post-Soviet space. We argue that attempts to rebuild an image of Russia as a "great power" have actually led to a reduction of Russian influence in the post-Soviet region. The more Russia acted as a "Great Power," the less credible was its promise to respect the national sovereignty of the former Soviet republics. In 2011, Vladimir Putin declared that during his next term as president, his goal would be to establish a powerful supra-national Eurasian Union capable of becoming one of the poles in a multipolar world. However, Russia's attempt to force Ukraine to join the Eurasian Union provoked the 2014 crisis. The Ukrainian crisis has de-facto completed the separation of Ukraine and Russia and made successful post-Soviet re-integration around Russia improbable.

В эпоху глобализации механизмы принятия решений становятся все более сложными и включают игроков разной природы. Подход многоуровневого управления как многообещающая аналитическая модель, в фокусе которой находится адаптация процессов принятия решений к территориям/секторам с множественными юрисдикциями, получил признание как в силу того, что использование данного подхода позволяет более полно объяснить действия политических акторов в Евросоюзе в условиях, когда один и тот же актор будет использовать разные стратегии на разных институциональных площадках/уровнях – наднациональном, национальном и региональном. Будучи автономными, эти уровни стратегически взаимосвязаны: ключевые акторы принимают во внимание последствия взаимодействия на всех уровнях, но придают разное значение (вес) результатам различных "игр". В зависимости от возможностей сотрудничества на разных уровнях и относительной значимости результатов такие связи между играми могут привести к использованию стратегий, которые для внешних наблюдателей, возможно, покажутся нелогичными. Авторы рассматривают стратегии национальных правительств в странах Евросоюза, изучая кейсы принятия внешнеполитического решения и политики сплочения с использованием подхода многоуровневого управления.

Strong institutions and good governance are instrumental for success in the global economy. While the quality of national governance has positive effect on a country's economic performance, it is not a necessary condition. Poor governance can be offset with the country's comparative advantages; however, such advantages are likely to be geographically concentrated. We argue that in present-day Russia weak institutions and low quality of national governance make most regions unable to compete in the global economy.

Has government protection of human rights improved? The answer to this and many other research questions is strongly affected by the assumptions we make and the modeling strategy we choose as the basis for creating human rights country scores. Fariss (2014) introduced a statistical model that produced latent scores showing an improving trend in human rights. Consistent with his stringent assumptions, his statistical model heavily weighted rare incidents of mass killings such as genocide, while discounting indicators of lesser and more common violations such as torture and political imprisonment. We replicated his analysis, replacing the actual values of all indicators of lesser human rights violations with randomly generated data, and obtained an identical improving trend. However, when we replicated the analysis, relaxing his assumptions by allowing all indicators to potentially have a similar effect on the latent scores, we find no human rights improvement.