Research & Expertise – News

On July 23-28, 2016, the 24th IPSA World Congress of Political Science ‘Politics in a World of Inequality’ was held in Poznan, Poland. The event was organized by the Polish Association of Political Science and the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of Adam Mickiewicz University. Over 3000 researchers, scholars and experts in political science and related fields from over 100 countries (including lecturers, students and doctoral students from HSE Faculty of Social Sciences) took part in the event. Plenary meetings, over 600 research panels as well as lectures by renowned experts, dedicated to topical issues of world policy and political sciences, were held during the congress.

On June 17-18, Venice hosted the International Conference ‘State and Political Discourse in Russia’, organized by the Italian Foundation for Reset Dialogues on Civilizations (ResetDOC). The HSE was one of the co-organizers of the conference, together with London School of Economics and Political Science, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (Harvard University), and others.

Professor Graeme Gill from University of Sydney has conducted the seminar on ‘Symbolic politics and social constructions of past’ at HSE Moscow. He presented the paper ‘Symbols and Post-Communism: an inherent ambiguity?’ and talked about how the transformation of communist regimes created an imperative for the development of a new system of symbols to legitimise the new status quo.

What is a сenter of excellence, and how to establish one – these were the topics of the talk delivered by the Professor of the Academy of Finland and of the University of Helsinki Uskali Mäkiat at the seminar of the Department of Political Science on May 19.

The seminar ‘Symbolic politics and social constructions of past”, organized by the School of Political Science of the Higher School of Economics and the RC on political ideas and ideologies of the Russian Political Science Association was held on the 12th of May.  Prof. Graeme Gill presented the paper ‘Symbols and Post-Communism: an inherent ambiguity?’

From April 7 – 10, 2016, the 74th annual Midwest Political Science Association (MPSA) Conference took place in Chicago. The MPSA Conference is one of the most respected events in the political scientists’ professional community. Papers in over than 80 sections in various political science research areas were presented at the conference. The conference attracted over 6,000 political scientists, economists and sociologists from 70 countries, including Nikita Savin, lecturer at the HSE School of Political Science.

Transitional constitutionalism remains the subject of intensive political controversies. A conflict between the new legal regulation and the existing social reality can be settled in favor of either the former via constitutionalization or the latter via reconstitutionalization. Read an interview with Andrey Medushevskiy to “The Great Epoch”.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, virtually none of the post-communist countries have attained the level of socioeconomic development characteristic of advanced democracies. Likewise, none of the post-communist countries have emerged as successful autocracies with high-quality public institutions, such as those found in Singapore or Oman. Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, and Mikhail Mironyuk, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Political Science, examine possible reasons why it is so.

The book ‘Democracy in a Russian Mirror’ edited by Adam Przeworski was issued by Cambridge University Press in May 2015. Three of the authors — Boris Makarenko, Andrei Melville and Mikhail Ilyin — are staff members of the School of Political Science.

An article “Bad enough governance': state capacity and quality of institutions in post-Soviet autocracies” written by Andrei Melville and Mikhail Mironyuk was published in the Post-Soviet Affairs journal. The article contributes to current discussions on state capacity, quality of institutions, and political regimes.