Suchergebnisse

What explains Putin's enduring popularity in Russia? In 'The Red Mirror', Gulnaz Sharafutdinova uses social identity theory to explain Putin's leadership. The main source of Putin's political influence, she finds, lies in how he articulates the shared collective perspective that unites many Russian citizens. Under his tenure, the Kremlin's media machine has tapped into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation - derived from the Soviet transition in the 1990s - and has politicized national identity to transform these emotions into pride and patriotism.

"This book inquires into Vladimir Putin's leadership strategy and relies on social identity theory to explain Putin's success as a leader. The author argues that Russia's second president has been successful in promoting his image as an embodiment of the shared national identity of the Russian citizens. He has articulated the shared collective perspective and has built a social consensus by tapping into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation derived from the painful experience of the transition in the 1990s. He was able to overturn these emotions into pride and patriotism by activating two central pillars of the Soviet collective identity: a sense of exceptionalism that the Soviet regime promoted to consolidate the Soviet nation, and a sense of a foreign threat to the state and its people that also was foundational for the Soviet Union. Putin's assertive foreign policy decisions, culminating in the annexation of Crimea, appeared to have secured, in the eyes of the Russian citizens, their insecure national identity. The top-down leadership and bottom-up collective identity-driven processes coalesced to produce a newly revanchist Russia, with its current leader perceived by many citizens to be irreplaceable. Politics of national identity in Russia are promoted through a well-coordinated media machine that works to focus citizens' attention on Putin's foreign policy and on Russia's international standing. Public fears are played out against the backdrop of Soviet legacies of national exceptionalism and the politics of victimhood associated with the 1990s to conjure a sense of collective dignity, self-righteousness, and national strength to keep the present political system intact."--

This article reviews four recent books that inquire into the nature and challenges of institution-building in the post-communist region. The main lessons learned from this scholarship relate to the complexity of establishing effective domestic institutions securing property rights and
the role of various domestic and global factors that shape these processes. Domestic variables include political connections, bargaining power, and the nature of a social equilibrium that shapes norms, expectations, and behavior of economic actors. Global factors include structural constraints
and opportunities associated with the global financial system and institutions.

Intellectual efforts to understand post-Crimean Russian society have brought to prominence explanations that emphasize psychological and attitudinal legacies of Soviet society. The recent revival of the term homo sovieticus (or Soviet man) in the media and intellectual discourse is a good illustration of this trend. Yurii Levada's late-Soviet sociological research project on the "simple Soviet man" serves as a frequent reference point in these discussions. In this article, I explore the ideological and analytical foundations of the Levada project and juxtapose the sociological construct developed by Levada and his team with the interpretative approach developed by Natalya Kozlova, another Soviet scholar who dedicated her life to studying Soviet society. I argue that essentialist and deterministic views of individual personality underpinning the Levada project that guide the current use of the Soviet man category are more politically and ideologically driven rather than being based on the state of the art in social psychology.

This study uses the 2011 BEEPS survey for the Russian Federation to study factors influencing corruption perceptions in Russian regions. Specifically, the analysis relies on Henry Hale's theory of patronal presidentialism to explore the effects of the institutional environment and, particularly, of regional political uncertainty, on the perceptions of economic actors embedded in it. The analysis reveals that political instability – when measured by the recent political turnover in the region and the presence of regional inter-elite conflicts – works to increase corruption perceptions among economic actors. These findings support earlier literature on the importance of informal rules and 'insider entrepreneurship' in Russia.

This study uses the 2011 BEEPS survey for the Russian Federation to study factors influencing corruption perceptions in Russian regions. Specifically, the analysis relies on Henry Hale's theory of patronal presidentialism to explore the effects of the institutional environment and, particularly, of regional political uncertainty, on the perceptions of economic actors embedded in it. The analysis reveals that political instability - when measured by the recent political turnover in the region and the presence of regional inter-elite conflicts - works to increase corruption perceptions among economic actors. These findings support earlier literature on the importance of informal rules and 'insider entrepreneurship' in Russia.

This paper reviews the literature that explores the drivers and effects of financial secrecy on emerging economies. It shows that most of the research on financial secrecy has been focused on issues of tax avoidance, neglecting the problems of institutional arbitrage that go beyond taxation issues. The paper discusses the limits of the institutionalist paradigm that treats businesses solely as rule-takers and calls for more attention to business agency and responsibility. Discussions about corporate social responsibility in emerging economies should incorporate thinking about the potential role that businesses, and especially big corporations, could play in promoting more effective institutions at home. Further research is needed to understand the political and institutional effects of global financial secrecy at the domestic level. The paper suggests some promising avenues for future research as well as new items to be included on the policy-making agenda in relation to financial secrecy.

This study takes advantage of a publicly salient policy sphere -- road quality -- in the Russian Federation's capital city to explore the use of digital technologies as means of aggregating information and demonstrating government capacity and effectiveness. It focuses on the potential linkage between road quality based on citizens' complaints and electoral outcomes in two rounds of Moscow mayoral elections in 2013 and 2018. The data on more than 200,000 online potholes' complaints were collected and combined with local election data. The causal relationship between these two processes is established, making use of an arguably exogenous variation in the differences across local weather conditions during the heating season that differentially affects pothole creation but is uncorrelated with electoral outcomes. The results indicate that greater use of digital technologies (measured by pothole complaints) results in an increased number of votes and a higher margin of victory for the incumbent. They highlight digital technologies' role as a tool to create participatory governance mechanisms and convey to the public an image of a transparent, responsive, and capable government.