Bryn Rosenfeld discusses how citizens approach political risks in repressive environments like Putin’s Russia

In nondemocracies, such varied political acts as protest participation, voting for the opposition and abstaining from supporting regime candidates entail risks. Yet citizens' attitudes toward risk-taking have seldom been studied directly in authoritarian settings. This talk considers how citizens’ attitudes toward risk shape political participation under authoritarian rule. It proposes a theory of how affective factors interact with an individual’s baseline tolerance for risk to explain risky political behavior—even when the strong organizational ties emphasized by exiting literature on high-risk participation are absent. I test this argument using survey data from Russia on expressions of regime support (and evasive responding), voting behavior (including non-voting and opposition voting); and a survey experiment on willingness to protest after regime repression. This research on which this talk is based is the first to benchmark the predictive power of risk attitudes relative to other known determinates of regime support and voting in an autocracy. It also contributes to our understanding of how ordinary citizens in repressive environments overcome their baseline aversion to political risk-taking. 

Bryn Rosenfeld is an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology. Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. She is also the recipient of a Frances Rosenbluth best paper prize, as well as a Best Article Award honorable mention and Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section. Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research, among other outlets. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and has worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

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Patronage — the selection of government officials at the discretion of a political actor — is ubiquitous among democracies. Yet, some countries managed to curb it over time while others failed. Under what circumstances do democratic governments reduce patronage and establish professional bureaucracies? The paper argues that the success of bureaucratic reform is rooted in the type of patronage regime. Although all countries had some form of patronage, substantial differences in their firing practices can significantly impact the reform’s outcome by creating opportunities for the emergence of political entrepreneurs interested in bureaucratic reform or precluding such opportunities. Drawing on state-building scholarship in comparative politics and political development in American politics, I introduce a theoretical framework that accounts for successful and failed bureaucratic reform attempts. I apply the theory to the U.S. and Argentina, providing original archival evidence. The article elucidates the longstanding puzzle of bureaucracy professionalization in democratic contexts, generating new insights for contemporary debates on state-building.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Julieta Casas is the Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow in Rule of Law at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative political development and political economy with a substantive focus on the state bureaucracy, political parties, and democracy. Her projects address fundamental questions regarding the causes and effects of state capacity, concentrating geographically on Latin America and the U.S. Her research includes retrieving and digitizing original archival materials to produce new datasets.

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Appealing to voters’ group identities can be an effective way for new parties to gain an electoral foothold. Yet political outsiders can do so in different ways, employing competing ‘styles’ of identity politics. Across the twentieth century, some new party families have appealed chiefly to a politics of group solidarity, mobilizing a cohesive ingroup against a clear outgroup within a symmetric logic of group conflict. Other parties have drawn instead on the politics of group antagonism, uniting a heterogenous ingroup of voters through outgroup appeals. In this paper, I introduce a distinction between two varieties of identity politics that new parties can draw upon: solidaristic identity politics and oppositional identity politics. While solidaristic identity politics has been a winning strategy for many waves of new parties, this approach is only possible under certain structural and organizational conditions. I develop a theory to explain divergences in the use of each style and provide support for my hypotheses by comparing two waves of party entry in Western Europe: early 20th-century socialist parties and interwar fascists across Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alex Mierke-Zatwarnicki is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and was previously a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Alex’s work focuses on political parties and group identity in Western Europe, in macro-historical perspective. A core theme of her research is understanding how different patterns of political and social organization combine to shape the ‘arena’ of electoral politics and the opportunity space for new competitors. Alex’s ongoing book project studies how challenger parties articulate new group identities into politics, comparing processes of party-building and entry in Great Britain, Germany, and the Netherlands over more than a hundred years. 

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Research on reentry documents how material hardship, network dynamics, and carceral governance impede reintegration after prison, but existing scholarship leaves underdeveloped other instances in which adverse outcomes stem from the institution’s inattention to structural, interpersonal, and intrapersonal dynamics. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork with people on parole, this study analyzes three sources of adversity — which occur because reentry institutions’ or actors’ practices are incompatible with the behaviors and needs of system-involved people. I demonstrate how unrecognized vulnerability, discretion’s benefits and drawbacks, and risk-escalating rules contribute to adverse outcomes — withdrawal and rule-breaking — that sometimes lead to reincarceration. In failing to account for aspects of human agency and dignity, such as the ability to provide for oneself and to advance personal and familial well-being, parole guidelines often prompted withdrawal and subversion. This study carries implications for those interested in understanding how socioemotional dynamics shape state processes and social citizenship.   

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Gillian Slee is the Gerhard Casper Fellow in Rule of Law at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. Her work focuses on understanding and ameliorating inequality in American state processes. To this end, she has studied institutions with far-reaching consequences: public defense, child protective services, and parole. With each of her projects, Gillian aims to humanize key state processes and, in so doing, demonstrate how institutions’ relational dynamics shape inequality. She uses a range of methods — ethnography, in-depth interviews, and statistics — and has published her work in Theory and Society, Social Service Review, Politics & Society, and Journal of Marriage and Family.

Gillian completed her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University in 2024. She earned her M.Phil. in Criminology at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Herchel Smith Harvard Scholar. Gillian graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Social Studies and a minor in Psychology. Her research has been recognized with Centennial, Charlotte Elizabeth Procter, Marion J. Levy, Jr., and P.E.O. Scholar fellowships.

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A fundamental aspect of democracy is that losers accept defeat. However, despite the importance of this concept, we do not have a clear sense of the empirical prevalence of concessions, nor do we have systematic evidence assessing its effects on election outcomes. This article presents the first global dataset on concessions in presidential elections in all countries worldwide from 1980 to 2020. For each election, we code whether the top-placing losing candidate made a concession statement that clearly acknowledges defeat, as well as the number of days they took to concede. We find that candidates in democratic countries are more likely to concede compared to candidates in autocratic countries. Surprisingly, losing incumbents are more likely to concede compared with non-incumbents who lose. The data also shows that precedence matters: if the loser in the previous election conceded, the current loser is more likely to concede. Finally, concessions are positively and significantly associated with fewer post-election protests (including those alleging electoral fraud), although it is difficult to convincingly establish a causal relationship.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Anne Meng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Her research centers on authoritarian politics, institutions, and elite power sharing. Her book, Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2020), won the Riker Book Prize and was listed as a 2021 Best Book by Foreign Affairs. She has also published articles on authoritarian ruling parties, rebel regimes, opposition cooptation, term limit evasion, leadership succession, and democratic backsliding. Her work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, PS: Political Science & Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and others. 

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Over the past two decades, postcommunist countries have witnessed a sudden shift in the electoral fortunes of their political parties: previously successful center-left parties suffered dramatic electoral defeats and disappeared from the political scene, while right-wing populist parties soared in popularity and came to power. This dynamic echoed similar processes in Western Europe and raises a question: Were these dynamics in any way connected? This book argues that they were. And that the root of the connection between them lies in the pro-market rebranding of the ex-communist left—the key explanatory variable. This book argues that, though the left’s pro-market shift initially led to electoral rewards, it had a less straightforward impact on left-wing parties’ electoral fortunes in the long run. Traditional supporters of the left (working-class and economically vulnerable groups) were alienated by the new economic policies, and the middle-class voters newly drawn to these parties did not compensate for those losses. As a result, for several electoral rounds following the rebranding, reformist parties on the left suffered dramatic electoral defeats. In response, right-wing parties in their respective countries adopted more redistributive economic platforms consistent with preferences of former supporters of the left, and incorporated sizeable shares of these electorates. This contributed to the growth of right-wing populist parties in the countries with a pro-market left.

The book traces this process in postcommunist Europe on different levels of analysis: cross-country observational data, case studies, and individual-level experimental surveys. It argues that scholars should incorporate the economic policy dimension when explaining the demise of the left and the rise of the populist right in the region. It also examines important parallels between the dynamics of Western and postcommunist countries by arguing that the idiosyncrasy of Eastern European politics has been overstated in scholarly literature. It also offers policy recommendations about ways for the centrist parties to curtail the rise of populism.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Maria Snegovaya (PhD, Columbia University) is a Senior Fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and an Adjunct Professor at  Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. The key focus of her research is democratic backsliding and re-autocratization in postcommunist Europe, as well as Russia's domestic and foreign policy. Her research results and analysis have appeared in policy and peer-reviewed journals, including West European Politics, Party Politics, Journal of Democracy, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Washington Post‘s political science blog, the Monkey Cage. Her first book, When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2024. Her other manuscript, “Russia’s Foreign Policy and Nomenklatura Continuity in Ruling Circles,” is under contract with Oxford University Press.

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There is growing concern over rising social divisions in the U.S. We develop a new method to endogenously partition society into groups based on homophily in values. The between-group differentiation that results from this partition provides a novel measure of latent polarization in society. For the last forty years, the degree of latent polarization of the U.S. public has been high and relatively stable. In contrast, the degree of partisan polarization between voters of the two main political parties steadily increased since the 1990s and is now converging toward that of underlying values-based clusters. Growing partisan polarization in the U.S. is a reflection of partisan views becoming increasingly aligned with the main values-based clusters in society.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Klaus Desmet is the Altshuler Professor of Cities, Regions and Globalization at Southern Methodist University, Research Fellow at CEPR, and Research Associate at NBER. He holds an MSc in Business and Engineering from the Université catholique de Louvain and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. Before moving to SMU, he was Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His research focuses on regional economics, climate change, and political economy. His work has appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Theory, and the Journal of Development Economics. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Robert E. Lucas Jr. Prize, and in 2010, he was awarded the August Lösch Prize.

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The Middle East is often understood as a violent, unstable, conflict-ridden region in which the United States sometimes intervenes — or fails to intervene — to provide security and order. This talk presents an alternative understanding of the Middle East as a transnationalized warscape characterized by perpetual (though not constant) war in which the US has long been an integral structural component. This approach, I argue, better explains the patterns of state failures, recurrent conflict, and authoritarian rule across the region, as well as the seeming failures of US foreign policy. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Marc Lynch is Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University and the Director of the Project on Middle East Political Science. He is the author of The Arab Uprisings and The New Arab Wars, and co-editor of Making Sense of the Arab State.

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