Suchergebnisse

Many predicted that the strength of the Communist Party in Russia would wane as the elderly pensioners who disproportionately supported the party died off. Contrary to this prediction, the findings of our analysis indicate that voters who reached retirement age during the past decade were even more supportive of the communists than the cohort of pensioners who preceded them. We believe this occurred because it was workers approaching retirement, not pensioners per se, who were disproportionately injured by the transition to a more market-oriented economy. Like pensioners they lost savings, but in many cases they also lost their jobs. They also had little opportunity to learn the new skills that the Russian economy increasingly calls for. There is as yet no indication that the communists have begun to die out.

This volume offers a number of forensic indicators of election fraud applied to official election returns, and tests and illustrates their application in Russia and Ukraine. Included are the methodology's econometric details and theoretical assumptions. The applications to Russia include the analysis of all federal elections between 1996 and 2007 and, for Ukraine, between 2004 and 2007. Generally, we find that fraud has metastasized within the Russian polity during Putin's administration with upwards of 10 million or more suspect votes in both the 2004 and 2007 balloting, whereas in Ukraine, fraud has diminished considerably since the second round of its 2004 presidential election where between 1.5 and 3 million votes were falsified. The volume concludes with a consideration of data from the United States to illustrate the dangers of the application of our methods without due consideration of an election's substantive context and the characteristics of the data at hand

As with standard models of rationality, theorists generally treat prospect theory's demonstration of risk aversion in gains but risk tolerance in losses as domain-general. Yet evolutionary psychology suggests that natural selection has designed a domain specific cognitive architecture-with systems specialized for some substantive domains but not others. Here we address risky choices through that lens asking whether humans' risk responses dispose them to enter social relationships even when doing so is counter to normative rationality and regardless of whether the 'enter' versus 'not enter' choice is framed as between gains and losses. Laboratory findings in five sites across three countries provide a positive answer to both possibilities. Participants could enter or not enter inherently risky social relationships. They were more willing to enter such relationships than rational choice models would predict and were equally so willing regardless of whether equivalent alternatives were framed as gains and as losses. With the 'social context' extracted in otherwise identical games, participants' risk responses were consistent with prospect theory. The present findings suggest the possibility of adaptations designed to facilitate sociality-despite its risks and how those risks are framed. Adapted from the source document.

The authors explore the best Russian and foreign practices of academic fundraising. The key problem of the study is the search for factors that increase the number of participants in academic fundraising in modern Russia. The authors focus on student philanthropy – a phenomenon that is not represented in modern Russian practice and, accordingly, in the scholarly discourse of Russian authors. The study has revealed that the formation of a culture of donations in the interests of the prosperity of one's alma mater in financial or non-financial forms is excluded from the modern context of the formation of educational content and students' competencies in Russia. In-depth interviews with employees of Russian universities' endowments and a literature review conducted during the study made it possible to identify the common best practice of Russian and foreign universities in terms of mass fundraising – the use of social networks. The authors tested and confirmed a hypothesis that there is a close connection between the activities of endowments and alumni associations as holders of up-to-date databases of student and alumni contacts at ten leading Russian universities. The analysis of the financial performance of Russian universities' alumni associations that are legal entities revealed the unique experience of entrepreneurial activities of the St. Petersburg State University Alumni Association, including the sale of souvenirs. The authors described a unique experiment of Tomsk State University on the creation of the UniProfi platform to promote students' employment in graduates' companies as a promising factor in increasing the number of participants in academic fundraising. The authors also presented a negative experience of starting a new practice by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology endowment: "Make a will in favor of MIPT!". The novelty of the study lies in the identification of youth fashion for social entrepreneurship both in Russia and abroad as a new factor in increasing the number of participants in academic fundraising. The authors propose to consider student philanthropy and youth social entrepreneurship in close relationship with the growth of the cumulative financial and non-financial effects.