Unbroken Links? From Imperial Human Capital to Post-Communist Modernisation

Fabricating votes for Putin: new tests of fraud and electoral manipulations from Russia

“…Despite Putin's recentralisation reforms-which had the effect of undermining political pluralism in the hitherto more democratic regions-, we observe intertemporal continuity in the reproduction of regional patterns of electoral malpractice. In what dovetails with earlier research, we find that these variations are in turn to a certain extent conditioned by variables like levels of regional modernization and specifically education (Hale 2007;Lankina 2012Lankina , 2016Lankina and Getachew 2008;Saikkonen 2015). Despite the Kremlin's protestations to the effect that fawning governors in some regions are simply "trying too hard" to please the national regime in delivering implausibly high results, our analysis is more suggestive of the fact that fraud and other irregularities are perpetrated where regional authorities feel that they can get away with them and where they possess significant levers of influence over citizens.…”

Growing Old Without Grace: Electoral Authoritarianism and the Age Composition of Russia's Regional Legislative Assemblies

“…The only cross-regional index of this kind available for the study of contemporary Russia is the Petrov-Titkov democracy index, a composite measure defined as an average of ten indicators pertaining to different aspects of political regime openness, including the quality of elections and local self-government, economic liberalisation, civil society development, and media freedom. 4 The values of the index are derived from expert judgment, which is certainly a shortcoming from a methodological perspective, yet its empirical validity has been demonstrated in several recent studies (Lankina 2012;Obydenkova and Libman 2013). In a second step, given that my major theoretical explanation of the observed impact of electoral authoritarianism upon the dependent variable is derived from the expectations regarding the age profile of the pro-government party, United Russia, I employed the percentage share of deputies elected under the label of this party as one of the independent variables.…”

Soviet Legacies of Economic Development, Oligarchic Rule, and Electoral Quality in Eastern Europe's Partial Democracies: The Case of Ukraine

“…Some scholars have employed pre-communist literacy statistics to link patterns of pre-Communist schooling to levels of demand for democracy and resistance to Communist indoctrination (Darden et al 2006;Peisakhin 2015). In turn, Lankina (2012) demonstrates that Russia's regions with higher literacy levels in the 1890s also exhibited higher levels of democracy in the 1990s. The values of this indicator varied significantly among territories comprising present-day Ukraine, with literacy levels ranging from below 20 percent to over 50 percent of the population.…”