Publications

Since 2012, with a view to strengthen the development of strategically important regions, Russia has established several federal agencies responsible for these territories. The essay investigates one of these agencies: the Ministry for the Development of the Far East (Ministerstvo Rossiiskoi Federatsii po razvitiyu Dal’nego Vostoka). We identify two main trade-offs associated with the governance approach used in Russia—between federal power and local knowledge, and between bureaucratic expertise and novel ideas—and examine how the ministry has dealt with these trade-offs and their consequences for the ministry’s performance.

Regional authorities consider the expediency of developing a new cargo transportation hub in the region in which it would provide transshipment services. It is considered that each transportation operator working in the region will use these services only if they are competitive with the currently existing ones. This competitiveness for a particular cargo means that the total transportation tariff for moving this cargo does not exceed (substantially or in principle) the (minimal) currently existing one as a result of including a transshipment via the hub in the transportation scheme for the cargo. A verifiable sufficient condition for the transshipment service competitiveness is proposed. Its verification consists of establishing the solvability of a system of linear inequalities being part of the system of constraints in the problem of finding optimal competitive transshipment tariffs for a set of cargoes expected to be moved via the hub. The latter problem is formulated as a quadratic programming one.

Why does a regime that is predominantly characterised by conservative ideology introduce opioid substitution therapy (OST), a liberal policy? This article applies the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to examine the introduction of OST in Belarus. Methodologically, the research draws on qualitative content analysis of drug policy documents and reports as well as on interviews. Results show how an increased HIV prevalence among injecting drug users opened a policy window in the problem stream. The increase in HIV cases could be used by a network of global and local policy entrepreneurs to frame OST as a public health policy instead of a drug policy measure. Findings suggest that, in nondemocratic regimes, global policy entrepreneurs can play a dominant role in introducing new policy ideas. However, the sustainability of the policy change remains questionable when acquiescence by key policymakers is lacking.

This research is based on theories of federalized party systems, second-order elections and nationalization of party system comparing long-established democratic federations in terms of actual autonomy of their subnational party systems. The study shows that despite obvious prerequisites for subnational autonomy (such as federal institutions, different timing of elections, freedom to establish regional parties and blocs) most federations have created solidly nationalized party systems. Nevertheless, we explore striking differences among the federations in terms of presence and strength of regional parties, while our thorough comparative analysis of electoral turnout and parties support at federal and regional levels of elections reveals that federations are very different and sometimes unique. Also, we see that the theory of second-order elections does not work consistently which in our point of view means the decisive role of regional agenda and emphasizes the presence of national parties consistently inclined to local politics. We conclude that the development of partially autonomous subnational party systems and biases of electoral outcomes in federal and regional elections depend on the historical evolution of political institutions in the state rather than create similar patterns across the federations.

As evidenced by the 2016 US presidential election, conspiracy theories, such as birtherism, the belief that Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen, have become more impactful on modern-day liberal democracies. This study investigates the consequences of the conspiratorial narratives espoused by populist candidates, arguing that the creation of a narrative involving a “conspiring” establishment figure can positively benefit populist candidates during elections by allowing them to position themselves as defenders of “the people”. Taking the case of Donald Trump and the birther conspiracy theory, empirical testing indicates that by helping to spread birtherism, Donald Trump was able to create for himself a core group of supporters who turned out to vote for him in both the Republican primaries and general election. Moreover, when tests are performed to investigate whether this was a consequence of rallying a right-wing base or mainstreaming the fringe conspiracy theory, significant positive relationships are demonstrated not with more conservative birthers, but instead with the more moderate ones, testifying to the strength of the mainstreaming effect.

Restricted access to data hampers trust in research. Access to data underpinning study findings is imperative to check and confirm the findings claimed. It is even more serious if there are apparent errors and numerical inconsistencies in the statistics and results presented. Regrettably, this seems to be what is happening in the case of the Sputnik V phase 3 trial.

1

The article explores the place of the concept of rights and freedoms in the discourse of the European populist radical right. By applying instruments of critical discourse analysis to electoral speeches of Marine Le Pen and Jarosław Kaczyński, the leaders of two very dissimilar EU PRR parties, the Rassemblement National and the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, it demonstrates how the PRR instrumentalises references to rights and freedoms to discursively create and qualify the identities of social actors. The analysis shows that references to rights and freedoms are used as a coherent discursive strategy to construct social actors in accordance with the populist radical right ideological core of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. As the PRR identifies itself with the people, defined along nativist and populist lines, rights are primarily attributed to it. The PRR itself is represented as the defender of the people and its rights, while the elites and the aliens are predicated to threaten the people and the realisation of its rights. The concept of rights and freedoms in populist radical right discourse intrinsically links the individual with the collective, which, in its turn, allows to construct and promote a populist model of ethnic democracy.

The deployment of the resilient city concept remains divided between those who see resilience as a set of (bottom-up) enabling capacities, and those who accuse it of (top- down) post-political tendencies that normalize the status quo and cast off the vulnerable. This paper offers a conceptual framework that overcomes this binary. We argue that a critical and trans-historical deployment of resilience to the actually-existing conditions of urban crisis can re-politicize the very conditions necessitating cities to be resilient. Politicizing the lived experiences of resilience draws attention to the relationality and agency of resilience: how resilience is constructed, negotiated and resourced, at which temporal and spatial scales, and with what political antecedents, consequences and power struggles. The paper considers the lived politics of the resilient city juxtaposed across two purposefully disparate case studies: Leningrad during the 872-day siege in 1941-1944, and New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This unorthodox comparison both transgresses clear-cut ideological and epistemological conventions and develops a complex picture of how resilience unfolds in reality. These tragic events show a range of conditions that incorporated state-imposed cast-off top-down resilience and, in response, individual and community-led bottom-up resilience. We demonstrate the pre-eminent role of the state in how both disaster and resilience are constructed and (mis)managed, but also how cast-off resilience compels citizens and communities to activate mechanisms for negotiating disaster and recovery, generating a co-constituted resilience of cities and individuals.

The research note focuses on the issues of eating behaviour of young people in Arkhangelsk. The authors analyze the dynamics of general indicators of morbidity and mortality from diseases of the digestive system in the regions of the Arctic zone and substantiate the relevance of nutrition studies in these regions. Based on the results of the survey conducted in 2018 at schools, colleges and universities in Arkhangelsk, the authors show that a significant part of the youth have irregular eating habits and characterise the structure of their own nutrition as unsatisfactory. University students show a greater commitment to balanced nutrition than college students, but it is college and university students that disregard frequency of nutrition, which can be a consequence of inadequate catering arrangement and its affordability at local schools.

Estimates of the gross urban product (GUP), GUP per capita and GUP growth rates are compared with the level and evolution of gross domestic product (GDP) and gross regional product (GRP) to examine relationships between the structure of urban economies and economic development. Agglomeration economies are manifested in the largest capital cities of Russian regions, but the benefits differ significantly between capital cities since they depend on economic structure and efficiency. A test of the hypothesis that housing construction is a driver of the economic growth of capital city economies was rejected because no causal relationship was found between housing construction and GUP in most of the cities.

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region after the Arab Spring, monarchy has turned out

to be a far stronger negative predictor of destabilization than it was before 2011. For the MENA, the

period after 2010 can be subdivided into three periods: a mass protests period (2011–2012), the period

of explosive growth of radical Islamist activities (2013–2016), and the second mass protest period (since

2016). Our analysis demonstrates that monarchies’ stabilization capacity was preserved in 2011–2012 and

grew substantially during 2013–2016, as MENA monarchies turned out to be more resilient in the face of

the outbreak of radical Islamism in the region.

Models for converting expert-coded data to estimates of latent concepts assume different data-generating processes (DGPs). In this paper, we simulate ecologically valid data according to different assumptions, and examine the degree to which common methods for aggregating expert-coded data (1) recover true values and (2) construct appropriate coverage intervals. We find that the mean and both hierarchical Aldrich–McKelvey (A–M) scaling and hierarchical item-response theory (IRT) models perform similarly when expert error is low; the hierarchical latent variable models (A-M and IRT) outperform the mean when expert error is high. Hierarchical A–M and IRT models generally perform similarly, although IRT models are often more likely to include true values within their coverage intervals. The median and non-hierarchical latent variable models perform poorly under most assumed DGPs.

Research background: Ethnic identity development, while universal, is also recognized as an especially important prerequisite for economic and social life among indigenous populations [1, 2]. Global transformations such as technology, industrialization, global warming and political and economic forces are impacting positive ethnic identity development in indigenous populations around the world. Purpose of the article: The purpose of this study is to examine gender differences in ethnic identity erosion in the adolescent indigenous Nenets population of the Russian Siberian Arctic Region. Methods: The study sample included 78 children in boarding schools from the northern area of Western Siberia. To define ethnic identity, the "Types of Ethnic Identity" questionnaire [3] was used. Findings & Value added: The study results show that across 8th-9th grade as well as 10-11 grade Nenets adolescent boys perceive their ethnic identity positively. However, the same indicators show girls do not view their ethnic identity as positively. There are also several other interesting gender differences that emerge between the students in each grade. This may be the result of specific gender differences in perceptions about the economic and social realities of tundra life, the position of women in traditional societies as well as the impact of global transformations on indigenous populations overall.

Voluntary assessments by a team of critical friends (external peer challenges) among local governments became established as popular complement to compulsory and centralized audits and inspections. This study empirically investigates the decision of English local authorities to have a voluntary peer challenge or not by taking advantage of an original dataset about participation in the Local Government Association’s Peer Challenge Programme (CPC) 2010-2015. We find that the LGA’s CPC programme does not carry a risk of leaving behind authorities with performance shortcomings. Councils with poor past performance scores and those with excellent ones do not differ in their tendency to invite a team of critical friends. Spatial clusters exist in the case of small district councils but not in the case of larger unitary authorities, London boroughs and metropolitan authorities. This implies that the corporate peer challenge process seems to be more suited to small authorities delivering community based services.

This essay examines the policy response of the federal and regional governments in federations to the COVID-19 crisis. We theorize that the COVID-19 policy response in federations is an outcome of strategic interaction among the federal and regional incumbents in the shadow of their varying accountability for health and the repercussions from the disruptive consequences of public health measures. Using the data from the COVID-19 Public Health Protective Policy Index Project, we study how the variables suggested by our theory correlate with the overall stringency of public health measures in federations as well as the contribution of the federal government to the making of these policies. Our results suggest that the public health measures taken in federations are at least as stringent as those in non-federations, and there is a cluster of federations on which a bulk of crisis policy making is carried by subnational governments. We find that the contribution of the federal government is, on average, higher in parliamentary systems; it appears to decline with the proximity of the next election in presidential republics, and to increase with the fragmentation of the legislative party system in parliamentary systems. Our analysis also suggests that when the federal government carries a significant share of responsibility for healthcare provision, it also tends to play a higher role in taking non-medical steps in response to the pandemic.

The current study investigates the effect that formal education, as a factor of socio-economic development, have on the intensity and forms of political protest. By way of increased socialization of democratic values, increased cognitive understanding of the society at large, and human capital to participate in protests, increases in a country's level of formal education should theoretically lead to increased levels of peaceful protest. On the other hand, increases in formal education are also theorized to play a mitigating role on the intensity of violent protests (riots) for the previously mentioned reasons as well as the fact that education acts as a strong factor in increasing social mobility. With data from 1960 to 2010 and spanning 216 countries,

When analyzing the official statements and policies, media reports and commentaries, as well as exchanges between foreign policy and national security experts, one may draw the reasonable conclusion that Russia and the West are caught in a trap of mutual distrust and expect a further decline in relations. Reciprocal accusations are numerous; appropriate actions in the form of various sanctions against Russia are plentiful. Though they are hurting the country, there are no signs of significant changes in its ''malevolent behavior''. The inverted commas may be removed if the reader shares the major contours of the Western narrative. As accusations, sanctions and countersanctions continue to mount on both sides, relations continue to deteriorate. This chapter aims to explore specific security-related causes of the downward trend in Russia-NATO relations as well as the opportunities for the rebound that will happen sooner or later.

The article reveals how the opposition between the “hard 1990s” and the “stable 2000s” was constructed by Putin and Medvedev from 2000 to 2018. By qualitative content analysis of public speeches and interviews, it demonstrates how contrastive use of the recent past worked for legitimation of Putin’s power through three discursive mechanisms 1) coining buzzwords that later became symbolic descriptors of the 1990s in public discourses, 2) populist framing of the new political course, 3) composing narratives about past events. Being constructed largely in the early 2000s, the negative framing of the 1990s became essential for the official legitimizing discourse.

This paper investigates the links between investment activity and personal contacts for small and medium-sized firms with public officials at the sub-national level in Russia. A list-experiment design, using a survey of 21,000 Russian firms in 2017, was used to evaluate the importance of personal connections with officials for conducting business. A total of 27% of firms without investment and 37% with investment considered personal connections with officials an important factor for doing business. The importance of such contacts was lower in regions with a better investment climate. However, a higher proportion of firms were likely to invest in the regions where higher importance was placed on political connections. Therefore, in Russia in the mid-2010s, investment from politically connected firms did not crowd out investment from other firms. Although the available data did not allow causality to be defined, the research shows that political connections are important for investors in emerging markets and that the importance of political connections diminishes with improvement in the business climate. This paper provides a quantitative estimate of the relationship between political connections and firm investment in Russia, an example of large emerging economy. This relationship is moderated by institutional quality at the subnational level. The results provide empirical support for the theory of limited access orders elaborated by North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009), and stress the importance of rents and their productive utilization for the development of emerging economies.

A high level of corruption usually constrains economic development in emerging countries. However, anti-corruption campaigns often fail because the relevant policies need to be implemented by existing corrupt governments. This article studies the extent of bureaucrats’ heterogeneity in attitude to the problem of corruption. Due to the sensitivity of direct questions on corruption, we conduct the list experiment among public procurement officials in Russia. We show that female bureaucrats consider corruption an obstacle to public procurement development, and find no such evidence for male bureaucrats. This heterogeneity holds even at the high-level occupied positions. Although the negative attitude to corruption does not necessarily imply the anti-corruption activity by women, recognition of the problem seems to be a prerequisite for supporting an anti-corruption policy.