Shooting for the Tsars: Heterogeneous Political Volatility and Institutional Change in Russia

Abstract

Can deliberate political instability, including terrorism and/or political violence, have an effect on changing formal political institutions? This paper offers two major contributions toward answering this question, one focused on data and one focused on methodology. In the first instance, this paper introduces a brand-new dataset of monthly political instability in Russia from 1788 to 1914; Czarist Russia was a country plagued by informal instability and political violence throughout the nineteenth century, and which saw waves of reform and reaction. As such, it makes an excellent test case for examining the relationship between informal political instability and formal political change. Secondly, in order to trace the evolution of Russia's political institutions in the presence of various forms of instability, I utilize non-traditional estimation in the form of Poisson, IV-Poisson-GMM, and logistic regressions to account for the slow-moving nature of political regime change. The results of these estimations show that some forms of instability did indeed "work" in forcing a modicum of liberalization. On the other hand, large-scale unrest or external conflict had no correlation with political regime change and actually appeared to be counterproductive.

New Russian Economic History

“…Hartwell (2020) studies changes in the formal political institutions in Russia between 1788 and 1914. Using novel econometric techniques to account for the slow-moving nature of these changes, he provides evidence that individual acts of terror against the tsars were associated with gradual liberalization of the regime, whereas large-scale unrest and external conflicts, if anything, were associated with turns toward more oppressive political institutions.…”

Political violence and financial markets in Tsarist Russia

“…If theory is not the limitation, then empirics must be, and it is here where this article leaps into the fray. To explore the effects of political violence on Russian capital markets, I have amassed a new, comprehensive and unique monthly database on finance and political unrest by their type and location in Tsarist Russia from 1788 to 1914, first presented in an abbreviated form in Hartwell (2020) but upgraded substantially since that first article and encompassing more and different types of political violence in Russia throughout its imperial history 2 . This database is used to model asset price movements using an Asymmetric Component GARCH-in-Mean (ACGARCH-M) model, teasing out the short- and longer-term effects of political violence.…”