Research & Expertise – News

On June 4, 2015, Mattias Kumm, director of the Law Centre at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin and professor at New York University School of Law, read a lecture at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences on ‘Liberal Constitutional Democracy 25 Years after the End of the Cold War’. The event was organized in conjunction with the Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies Foundation.

A new academic journal, Russian Politics, has just been launched by Brill Academic Publishers (Leiden, Netherlands and Boston, USA). Three members of the editorial board are representatives of the Higher School of Economics — Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor Nikolay Petrov and Professor Rostislav Turovsky. The first issue will be published in early 2016 and there will be four issues per year.

At the April International Academic conference William R. Thompson, Rogers Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington and Managing Editor of International Studies Quarterly, gave an honorary lecture on 'Norms, Behavioral Compliance, and Status Attribution in International Politics'. He also participated in the session on State Capacity and Durability/Vulnerability of Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes with a paper entitled State Capacity, Democratization and Public Policy, co-authored with Thomas J. Volgy.

Eastern European history shows that in the majority of post-Soviet countries, where lustration was carried out in one form or another, the situation with corruption is now considerably better than in those countries where lustration was not carried out. But what we see in Slovenia is, in fact, an clear deviation from this pattern. Lustration was not carried out in Slovenia. Nonetheless, the country is among the best performers in terms of anti-corruption measures and can be compared with Estonia, where lustration did take place. The Slovenia phenomenon has been analysed in the article ‘Fighting Corruption: The Slovenian Phenomenon’ by Yuliy  Nisnevich, Professor at the School of Political Science, Academic Supervisor of the Laboratory for Anti-Corruption and Heather Stetten, independent researcher (USA).

The economic and political transformation following the fall of the socialist bloc has affected health and average life expectancy differently in former socialist countries. In nations where reforms led to true political and economic liberalization, health indicators are higher than in countries with hybrid regimes, according to a study by Vladimir Kozlov, a Research Fellow at HSE’s Laboratory of Social and Demographic Policies, and Dina Balalaeva, an Assistant Professor in the School of Political Science.

From January 29 – February 2, 2015, second-year political science students of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, together with students of the MGIMO Faculty of Political Science, went on a field trip to Chisinau, Tiraspol, Comrat, and Taraclia. The purpose of the expedition was to study the territorial identities of Moldova’s different ethnic groups.

A special issue of Osteuropa journal (Berlin) has been published, and four authors from the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences participated in it. The topic of the issue is ‘The People and its “I”: Authoritarian Rule and Legitimacy’.

Andrei Melville, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, reflects on the direction of political science today.

From the 5-9 August the Fourth Global International Studies Conference organised by the World International Studies Committee took place in Frankfurt. The dean of the the HSE Social Studies Faculty, Andrei Melville, spoke in his capacity as Chairman of the Programme Committee.

An article by Andrei Melville,  Denis Stukal and Mikhail Mironyuk ‘King of the Mountain’, or Why Postcommunist Autocracies Have Bad Institutions’ was published in the U.S. journal Russian Politics and Law (vol. 52, no. 2, March-April 2014, pp. 7-29).