Research
Cargo 200: War Propaganda, Regime Support, and Russian Casualties in Ukraine
Can new information on casualties hinder the spread of war propaganda and erode regime support in an autocracy? While many studies have explored the impact war has on political attitudes in democracies, the implications it has for autocrats are unclear. To fill this gap, we explore the temporal-spatial variation of Russian casualties in Ukraine and link it to social media engagement indicative of pro-war and pro-regime sentiment. Local reports on casualties, in particular, not only reveal the human toll of war but also are in contrast to the statements made by the federal government in Russia. To capture regime support and engagement with propaganda, we leverage 8 million postings from geolocated government-curated communities on the VKontakte social networking site (VK) and classify them using keyword analysis and topic modeling. Our findings indicate that user engagement with content employing military vocabulary dropped after the start of the invasion and after the casualty reports were in, and the same is true for posts mentioning the president. These results lend support for the “proximate casualties” hypothesis and suggest that new information on the cost of war can disrupt the spread of propaganda in autocracy and has the potential to erode the autocrat's support base.
The effect of regional casualty reports on likes for war-related content (left) and content mentioning president (right).
Unexpectedly Mortal: The Effects of Political Violence and Commemoration on Pro-Social Behavior
Journal of Historical Political Economy: Vol. 2: No. 1, pp 65-87.
In this paper, I address collective memory as a potential transmission vehicle and study how the commemoration of political violence might promote the associated effects. I exploit variation in the location of 1930s political arrest sites in Moscow and in the locations of memorial plaques that commemorate these arrests. I find that individuals currently residing nearby the arrest sites are less likely to engage in pro-social behavior, namely online donations. Most importantly, the effect appears insignificant in the absence of commemoration. These findings suggest that commemoration and collective memory revitalization might play a crucial role in the persistence of historical legacies even in transient communities.
The 1937 arrests (left) have no effect on the intensity of online donations (right) unless there is a commemorative plaque installed nearby.
Crooks 'n Thieves: News, Corruption, and Sovereign Debt
with Aleksei Kiselev
This study investigates whether news about corruption can affect the likelihood of sovereign default by examining the impact of Alexei Navalny's blog posts on Russian sovereign debt markets from 2008 to 2011. It focuses on how Navalny's blog posts about corruption in state-affiliated companies influenced sovereign spreads after the Global Financial Crisis. The analysis uses data on sovereign spreads and the timing of Navalny's posts, showing that unexpected disclosures of corruption in Russian state-owned enterprises (SOEs) significantly increased sovereign borrowing costs. The findings indicate a statistically significant relationship, with corruption revelations explaining up to two-thirds of daily variation in sovereign spreads in 2008-2009, especially when oil prices were low. This research underscores the importance of sovereign credibility, the role of independent media in exposing corruption, and the broader economic mechanisms beyond sovereign debt. It highlights the critical role of information transparency and anti-corruption efforts in maintaining sovereign credibility and debt market stability.
All posts
In-depth corruption investigations
The figure above reports the rolling window estimates for the days around Navalny's blog posts. While the impact of ordinary posts fades out by the second half of 2009, the in-depth investigations pertain their effect on the sovereign spreads.
Fear, Trust and Demand for Regulation: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Russia
Understanding demand for state regulation is a foundational issue for social science. To account for this demand, existing theories rooted in market failure and government failure have focused on various forms of trust, but have paid little attention to fear. We test how fear and trust shape demand for government regulation by drawing on especially precise measures of Covid-related regulations gathered in a survey of more than 23,000 respondents in 61 Russian regions. We show that fear of contracting the virus is directly related to greater demand for regulation. In addition, the impact of trust is conditional on the level of fear. Higher interpersonal trust is related to lower demand for Covid-19 regulation, while higher institutional trust is associated with greater demand, but, provided fear is sufficiently great, demand for regulation will be high regardless of levels of interpersonal and institutional trust. These results inform debates about theories of regulation, identify critical scope conditions for existing research on trust and demand for regulation, and open a fruitful line of research by examining how fear of social bads shapes support for state intervention.
We observe a positive correlation between demand for Covid-19 regulation and fear of getting infected with Covid-19. The effect is larger for less economically costly measures.
Higher trust in institutions is also associated with higher demand for regulation, while the opposite is true for the confidence in others' compliance with regulations already in place.
2SLS estimation yields similar results.
The Neolithic Origins of Gender Norms
with Ekaterina Borisova and Koen Schoors
The Neolithic transition, marked by the shift from hunting and gathering to sedentary farming and herding, has been proposed as a potential contributor to persistent changes in labor-related gender norms and ongoing gender inequality in the labor market. In this study, we test this hypothesis using a novel dataset of sustainable genetic markers, specifically Y-DNA haplogroups associated with the Neolithic transition, to trace Neolithic ancestry in contemporaneous populations. Our findings indicate that countries with higher levels of Neolithic ancestry have lower female labor force participation rates and residents with more gender-discriminatory attitudes towards female labor market participation. Conversely, locations with higher levels of hunting-gathering ancestry exhibit the opposite trend. These results are consistent at the country level, individual level, and for subsamples of second-generation migrants with respect to the agricultural ancestry of their country of origin. They also remain robust to the use of alternative datasets of genetic markers and the inclusion of a wide range of control variables. Moreover, our Neolithic ancestry measure is a better predictor than related measures such as years since the Neolithic transition, grammatical gender intensity or plough use. We conclude that differences in gender roles and norms can be traced back to a persistent cultural response to the change in the division of labor between genders that resulted from the Neolithic Revolution.
OLS estimation results performed on a sample of second-generation migrants in the US show that female respondents whose parents come from countries with a longer history of sedentary agriculture are less likely to be employed.