In 2007, the Russian government instituted quotas for immigrant work permits that have consistently been lower than actual labour demand. While low quotas are politically popular on the mass level, this article argues that low quotas are also a tool of the government to distribute patronage resources to regional political and economic elites. Decisions about quotas are firmly in the hands of prime minister Putin, giving him a powerful tool to control the immigration process and labour market manually. While this manual control is effective in the short-term to manage contentious policy arenas, it suffers a number of long term consequences.
Although on the periphery of the migrant-receiving world as traditionally conceived, Russia is well entrenched in the global migration crisis. Migration crisis in Russia is largely a political construction, yet it is often framed as any other type of crisis (e.g. terrorism, geopolitical conflict, economic crisis), marked by a perception of existential threat, urgent public pressure, and uncertainty. This discussion of Russian policymakers’ approach shows how routinizing crisis decision making, through repeated reactionary moves that are institutionalized into law, creates continued crisis feedback loops that reinforce short-term policy horizons and fails to address long-standing demographic and labor market problems related to migration.
This paper considers the role of Russian print media and government in forming and publicizing nationalist sentiment through a content analysis of newspaper coverage of ethnic conflict in Stavropol in 2007. It shows that though the government officially pursues an inclusive multicultural approach (which I call associative nationalism), newspapers owned by Kremlin-loyal business holdings printed quite nationalist and sensationalist versions of the events in question. I argue that this is a passive promotion of a dissociative type of nationalism on the part of the Kremlin, which works against its stated purposes of bringing together all those in the Russian territory into a united national identity.
In this paper, we present new indices for government responses to COVID-19 within six policy areas crucial for understanding the drivers and effects of the pandemic: social distancing, schools, businesses, health monitoring, health resources and mask wearing. We create these measures from combining two of the most comprehensive COVID-19 datasets, the CoronaNet COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset and the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, using a Bayesian time-varying measurement model. Our daily indices track government responses for each of these policy areas from January 1st, 2020 to January 15th, 2021, for over 180 countries. By using a statistical model to generate these indices, we are able to estimate uncertainty within the index and provide external validation for these two COVID-19 policy datasets, showing that though they represent distinct data sources, they show strong convergent validity. We further explore the correlation between these indices and a range of social, public health, political and economic covariates. Our results show that while business restrictions and social distancing restrictions are strongly associated with reduced general anxiety, school restrictions are not. School restrictions are, however, associated with higher rates of personal contact with people outside the home, higher levels of income inequality and bureaucratic corruption. Additionally, we find that female heads of state are more likely to implement a broad array of pandemic-related restrictions than male leaders.
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