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This paper will investigate the role of political culture in the democratization process in three post-Soviet States. The paper is an extension of an earlier paper, written and researched over two semesters for graduate research seminars. This study used a most similar case approach involving Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. These three cases are similar in a variety of ways, but vary on the dependent variable, democratization success. The original hypothesis was based on the common argument that a democratic political culture in a state will improve that state’s democratization success The original study’s findings rejected the hypothesis of a positive connection between political culture and democratization, as no clear pattern emerged across the three states or even within them when the indicator questions were analyzed separately. One possible explanation for these findings involves the operationalization of political culture in the original study, as the questions used may have been capturing attitudes toward government policy performance rather than deeply held beliefs about democracy. The proposed paper will employ a different set of questions that arguably capture better the underlying values and beliefs of the population. Following an overview of the original findings, the paper will present an in-depth and critical analysis of the previous survey questions used. The responses of each state will be assessed and analyzed with the intent of finding a pattern within subsets of the original questions. It is not expected that such a pattern will emerge, thus showing the validity issues raised by poor operationalization choices. The paper will then present the results of a new analysis using different survey questions that are arguably more valid indicators of political culture as it is conceptualized in the existing literature. The expectation is that this new study will support the relationship between a democratic political culture and the democratization success of a state. In addition to providing findings important for the ongoing, broader examination of the relationship between political culture and democratization, the study will highlight the importance of question selection in the operationalization of political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do voters acquire preferences for particular parties and candidates? What causes a citizen or political actor to prefer one policy proposal over another? These questions, of central concern in contemporary political science, are variations on the more general question of Where do preferences come from? that has propelled much theorizing and research in the social sciences (Druckman and Lupia 2000). Within political science, three competing theoretical approaches – rational-choice, contextual/institutional, and cultural – offer different accounts of the formation of preferences. All three approaches have contributed to the accumulated knowledge of preference formation, but there have been few attempts to objectively assess and compare the validity of explanations derived from each approach. This paper will test hypotheses drawn from the three approaches with data gathered by the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, which has conducted surveys of representative samples of the Russian population from 1991 to the present. The political preferences of Russians the ideal data for the study because a natural experiment in preference formation has taken place in their nation over the last decade. With the collapse of communism in 1991, Russian citizens acquired civil liberties and for the first time in their lives they were able to make genuine choices in competitive elections, to openly support or disagree with government policy, and even to consider what type of political order post-communist Russia should have. After ten years of making such choices, most citizens now possess a more or less stable political party preference, if not a firm party identification (Remington 1999). By exploring how individuals acquired their party preferences in the critical Russian case, the paper intends to establish the foundation for an empirically grounded model of political preference formation with considerable explanatory and predictive power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causes of government change in Russia’s President-Parliamentary regime (1994-2003) and assesses three theoretical perspectives: 1) The view that the constitutional format of President-Parliamentary regimes causes government instability and conflict. 2) The proposition that Russia’s constitution creates such a powerful presidency that the incumbent can decide government changes unchecked. 3) The view that government change is the result of an institutionally structured bargaining process, in which the capability and willingness of actors to use their constitutional powers is shaped by election results, policy and public opinion shocks and government performance. The paper analyses opinion poll, economic and election data, the memoir literature, press reports and current event almanacs. This evidence suggests: 1) That the regime type perspective correctly identifies a tendency toward government instability in Russia’s president-parliamentary regime, but that it can neither account for the mechanisms of government change nor for variation in conflict and co-operation between president and assembly. 2) That the president was influential in many instances, but that major government changes had to be negotiated with the Duma, and that the president was not always able to secure his desired outcomes. 3) That government change in Russia appeared to be best understood as the outcome of an institutionally structured bargaining process, in which actors are influenced by election outcomes, public opinion and policy shocks and government performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In investigating protest activity, many scholars have focused on the costs and benefits of participation. In this paper, I am concerned with the characteristics of the individual that might enhance his/her probability of participating in protest activity. The literature on protest and collective action has pointed to interpersonal trust as an important factor influencing an individual?s propensity for protest activity. Theoretically, the influence of interpersonal trust on protest activity could be positive or negative: interpersonal trust can serve as a psychological signal to individuals that others will show up thereby enhancing the probability of successful collective action; or interpersonal trust can serve as a signal that others will participate and the individual can stay home without endangering the provision of the public good. Not only do I consider the specific influence of interpersonal trust on protest activity, but I also examine the potential influence of trust in government, generalized trust, and ethnic trust on protest behavior. In this paper, I test the various hypotheses about the effect of trust on an individual?s decision to engage in protest activity using data collected in the Russian republic of Sakha. Given the location of the study, I examine the varying levels of participation and trust of the two main ethnic groups?the Russians and the Sakha. In this paper, I find that there are important differences between the two groups in the factors that influence protest activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains why some opposition groups can inspire millions to stand in the cold for days while others generate little popular attention? This issue is not sufficiently understood by scholars of social movements and opposition processes, who tend to focus more on underlying and longer term conditions that promote or inhibit action and less on the moment when protests by small numbers of activists expand into mass popular demonstrations. Understanding this moment may help us see why "electoral revolutions" occurred in some former communist countries but not others. My claim in this paper is that cultural context, particularly the limits and opportunities provided by social understandings of nationalism and remembered history, greatly affects whether activists can convince large numbers of people to act together. I defend this claim by analyzing original interviews with youth activists in Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia. My paper shows that the structure of opportunity that activists face includes dominant cultural values and popular expectations that may constrain the story activists hope to tell. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction and the further abolition of the direct gubernatorial elections in Russia made it possible to study the governors' ability to stand up for their offices in different institutional designs. This paper gives an overview of the governors' ability to stay in office in 1991-2008 and shows their relations with the parties of power. The party of power is viewed as the federal center policy implementation tool that can co-opt the governors into the ruling elite. The paper argues that the federal center's aspiration to use the governors' resources of power in the building of the new "vertical of power" was the main factor that enabled the majority of the directly elected governors to stay in their offices after 2005. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an Ethnic Group Identity Index that seeks to create a qualitative measure of ethnic group identity. After creating the index, the paper will use a case study of Chechnya to measure their ethnic group identity. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent research demonstrates that the structural conflict between the propertied and the poor in non-communist authoritarian states affects the likelihood, timing, and outcome of democratization. In highly unequal societies, democratization has a strongly redistributive effect.The effect of transition in postcommunist democracies was quite different. Given the absence of private property in most means of production, the deliberate policies of wage compression, the widespread availability of income-support mechanisms, and the importance of collective consumption funds in such social goods and services as housing, healthcare, education, transportation, cultural goods and recreation, both income and consumption differentials were narrow compared with democratic capitalist societies at similar development levels. The transition, therefore, brought substantial increases in aggregate income inequality to the post-communist countries, with some post-communist countries reaching levels higher than those of some West European countries.Much political economy literature suggests that democratization is expected to make government more responsive to wider segments of society, more inclined to supply universal collective goods and services such as security of person and property, health care, education, and infra-structure, as well as to provide some minimum level of social insurance against the hazards of catastrophic income loss. These public goods and services should foster productive behavior on the part of economic agents, and thus growth, as well as the mitigation of extremes of poverty and inequality.However, collusion in rent-extraction by post-transition elites might be consistent with high rates of economic growth under some circumstances. If the elites take advantage of the new institutional environment of a post-communist state and capture control over productive assets for themselves, they might well use them to increase their own incomes, yielding rapid aggregate growth the benefits of which are concentrated in a narrow elite. The institutional advantages of democratization and property rights might be restricted to those holding monopolies over property, and not broadly shared. Their policies would lead to higher growth rates after an initial period of disorganization was overcome. But the benefits of the growth would be distributed unequally. An oligarchic democracy would complement an oligarchic form of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of the dual political and economic transition on income inequality trends, taking Russia's subnational regions (the subjects of the federation) as the units of observation. Noting that the regions differed widely both in their starting conditions and in the increase in income growth and differentiation as a consequence of the transition, it seeks to identify the political mechanisms that explain variation in income and inequality growth following the transition. Using both direct and instrumental measures of democracy by region, the paper finds evidence consistent with the "oligarchic democracy" model. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the important linkages between institutional choice and the issue dimensionality in three emergent democratic legislatures. We hypothesize that the adoption of party-centered versus candidate-centered electoral institutions had significant implications for the structure of the roll call behavior of legislators. We expect the roll call voting of legislators selected by party-centered systems to exhibit a lower dimensionality and greater structure than for legislators selected in candidate-centered systems. Using Lewis and Poole's (2004) W-NOMINATE procedure with bootstrapped standard errors, we compare the number of issue dimensions, the aggregate proportional reduction in error (APRE), and the percentage of variance explained by the 1st W-NOMINATE dimension across different electoral systems in the U. S. House of Representatives, the Ukranian Rada, and the Russian Duma. We found that the choice of electoral institutions has notable influences on the nature of roll call behavior, but that country-specific political context appeared to have important behavior implications as well.∗ Paper ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the centralization processes in Mexico and Russia. In this paper, the author traces and compares the development of the centralization processes that occurred in Russia from 2000-present and in Mexico from the revolution of 1910 to the eventual reversal of the country's tightly centralized system in the 1990s. The study demonstrates how the structure and strength of parties of power resulted in a shift in the balance of power between the center and regions and supports Riker's contention that federal institutions oftentimes take a back seat to other political factors in determining the actual distribution of power and resources within a federal polity.

This paper analyzes transnational relations with a special focus on the Russia. The main concern here is the reform movement in the Russian government at a state level with regard to the trade policy in order to access the World Trade Organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By comparing American and Russian responses to school targeted terrorism this paper analyzes comparative preparedness policies and dissemination techniques practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper statistically tests propositions that the Russian Constitutional Court favors some levels of government over others in making decisions on federalist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore the question of how organized crime and corruption have influenced the Chechen conflict in post-Soviet Russia. It is hypothesized that organized crime and corruption act to sustain and prolong the conflict. Specifically, crime and corruption act to magnify underlying dynamics and structures that effect protracted social conflicts. The extent to which this occurs can be gauged by using the taxonomy established by Richani (1999) to conceptualize a political economy condition within internal conflict situations or ?war-system?. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developments surrounding the media in post-Soviet countries highlight a nagging issue facing theorists and proponents of civil society and social capital. On the one hand, analysts argue that a strong civil society and ample supplies of social capital provide the free flows of information and trust necessary to both stimulate economic development and promote good governance. On the other hand, little guidance exists as to how these institutions develop; particularly in countries evolving from socialist regimes where former state structures essentially crowded out the so-called third sector. Analysts like Robert Putnam point to the existence of virtuous circles, a reciprocating and mutually reinforcing effect between civil society and economic development – but few analysts have indicated how these circular relationships are first set in motion. If students of democratic and market transitions are to understand how civil society develops in relation to the economy and state, they must identify the points of origins of key, tangible, social institutions like a free media. In this paper, the author brings a wealth of cases to the examination of this issue by examining the relationship between media freedom and a set of demographic, economic and political variables drawn from each of the 88 (minus the Chechen Republic) regions of the Russian Federation. Given the marked variation on key indicators across Russia’s regions, a subnational analysis of this issue allows one to isolate the socioeconomic, demographic and political variables of interest while controlling for a host of cultural factors which might otherwise hinder a cross-national study. Furthermore, the study benefits from a rather sophisticated media freedom measure developed by the organization "Obshchestvennaia Ekspertiza" (Social Expertise) which draws upon a complex set of measures related to information access and the production and distribution of media products for all of Russia’s federal subunits. The author concludes that, while economic diversification and development are key prerequisites for a free media, other factors, like a more liberal political culture and the nature of Russia’s asymmetrical federal structures, have a small role to play. The results indicate that levels of media freedom were mostly determined by economic development and the diversification of local economic structures during the 1990s. Nonetheless, the models also hint at some role for a latent liberal political culture existing in some regions as well as a measure signifying whether or not the region is an "ethnic" republic. Together these outcomes indicate that, while economic development appears to be a necessary prior condition for the development of a strong Post-Soviet media, certain regions appear to exhibit a preexisting liberal political culture that can at least enhance the development of regional media freedom. Furthermore, the significance of the ethnic republic measure supports the assertions of other authors (Kahn 2003) that the special status of these units has promoted the growth of regional authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers what role the Second Russian Constitutional Court has played in resolving center-regional conflicts from 1995-2007. Previous work indicated favoritism by the Court of central government and individual actors over regional actors in center-regional conflicts, but this was a limited by the number of years of cases available. This study expands the period of cases used and now covers most of the Putin era and its “verticalization” of the federal system. The analysis for this study includes basic statistics on number of cases brought before the Court and by what actors as well as binomial and ordinal regressions to test effects of time on the Court’s possible favoritism. In a change from previous work, additional analysis is included to determine the actual probability of the Court favoring particular actors over others in center-regional conflicts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on transition and democratization was for long dominated by internal explanatory factors such as economic performance, civil society, institutions, etc. Only recently have external actors' democratizing efforts - like those of the US and the EU - been incorporated. But the perspective remains too narrow, since only 'positive' external actors are considered, while possible 'negative' actors are left aside. This paper attempts to rectify the imbalance by analyzing a 'negative' case - Russia. First, an analytical framework that can be used to analyze both positive and negative actors' actions and effects is introduced. Then, the framework's applicability is illustrated by analyzing Russia's influence in the 'Near Abroad'. The analysis shows how Russia, primarily, weakens democratic perspectives in the countries of the post-Soviet area. Finally, on the basis of this analysis I discuss the implications that this 'negative' influence has for the success of the EU's Neighborhood Policy. It is argued that although Russia is a major hindrance to the West's democratizing efforts in the short run, the power-politics approach is undermining its influence capacity in the longer run. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent distributional theories of democracy postulate that structural conflict between rich and poor affects the likelihood, timing and outcome of democratization. Regime transitions in postcommunist states also featured distributional conflict, with wide differences in economic growth and income distribution resulting from the interaction of policy choices, regime characteristics, and inherited legacies of material and human assets. Through analysis of Russia’s regions, this paper examines the effect of the dual political and economic transition on incomes and income distribution. It finds that, even accounting for the inherited conditions, regions with more open political regimes have enjoyed greater economic growth and a faster reduction in poverty; however, at every level of income, more democratic regions also have higher levels of income inequality. The results are consistent with the theoretical conjectures in recent distributive accounts of democracy that in transitions where middle-income strata are allied with the rich, a partial version of democracy results, where policy-makers are accountable not to the median citizen, but to a restricted set of political and economic elites. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 2007, former Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would resume patrols of its long-range bomber fleet into international air space. The most symbolic of these flights occurred in September 2008 when a Tu-160 transited the Atlantic Ocean to Venezuela. The Tu-95/Bear-H and Tu-160/Blackjack bombers are a part of Russia-s nuclear triad and are capable of carrying the nuclear armed AS-15/Kent air launched cruise missile. Russian Air Force representatives claim the bombers are not armed and are simply conducting exercises and patrols with no aggressive intent. However, Russia-s leadership has stated publicly that it is willing to use nuclear weapons if provoked and has announced that it will aim its nuclear weapons at countries like Poland and the Czech Republic for harboring components of the US ballistic missile shield. Current President Dmitry Medvedev has also announced plans to increase funding to Russian strategic weapon platforms. These indicators have led to widespread concern over a return to Cold War hostilities between the United States and Russia. In this paper I intend to examine the role that these bomber patrols play in Russian foreign policy objectives and power projection aspirations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borderline democracies are political systems in transition, which have made tremendous progress in their democratic development, experienced some reversals on the way, and have arrived at an important historical juncture that will determine the future path of democratization. A borderline stage of democracy means that a democratic regime is still fragile and vacillating. To maintain a steady democratic advancement, such regimes may benefit from political science theories and the practices of other democratic regimes. This paper builds upon the relevant Western literature on democracy and applies it to the case of Russia. Russia represents a nascent democracy with unique cultural attributes and an adequate legislature and democratic institutions (the constitution, elections, and the constituency base). These institutions and written laws, however, lack full practical implementation and need further strengthening by grassroots movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract:We argue that there is a similar situation between today Russia and Weimar Germany because similar factors lead from a defective electoral democracy to an electoral autocracy. We demonstrate that a structural explation with socio-economic factors is not appropriate to explain democratic breakdown in the "crucial cases" of Weimar Germany and Post-Soviet Russia. We show that 1. a considerable lack of democrats on the elite level as well as on the population level and 2. an ill-defined form of government, that allows the president to rule without the parliament in combination with an nondemocratic actor which gets elected for president are sufficient reasons for a country to experience an authoriarian regression. In the second and third part of the paper we take a look on the question, when an electoral semiautocracy is in danger to get a fascist ideocracy. In the second part we show that there is fertile ground for fascism in Russia today. We demonstrate that as in Weimar Germany we can find in today Russia strong fascist actors and a widespread nationalism among the population. But in the third part we we will show, that all in all, ironically, in current Russia, in distinction to Germany 1. a manipulated party system and a underdeveloped third sector, 2. a strong semiautocratic president make it difficult for the country to become a liberal democracy, but make it also improbable that the Russian regime will transgress into a fascist autocracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses original survey data from national elections in Russia in 2000 and 2004 to explore the sources of electoral support for Putin, an example of a strong hybrid regime leader. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a difference-in-difference estimation design and matched sampling to compare the impact of sweep operations by Russian soldiers and Chechen militia on levels of subsequent insurgent violence in Chechnya. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to enhance our understanding of the political effects of climate change through a comparative-historical analysis of three very different communities: coastal Alaska, the Chinese-Russian border, and post-Katrina New Orleans. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a historical perspective on the Kremlin’s re-centralization of power and its attempts to re-draw regional borders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a game theoretic model to explain why Kazakhstan pursues a multi-vector foreign policy. In the game, Kazakhstan's best strategy is to challenge Russia's demand given a higher probability to find other partners to cooperate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I offer a historical account for the geography of homicide mortality in post-Soviet Russia. Russia's extraordinarily high national homicide rates are commonly attributed to the disorganization of state institutions and socio-economic shocks that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. I demonstrate that the striking spatial differences with regard to homicide mortality across Russia's regions cannot be explained by the shock of transition. Instead, I argue that the roots of this spatial differentiation are to be found in the patterns of Soviet planning and social engineering. Using an original panel dataset of regional homicide mortality and its correlates, I demonstrate that the geography of post-Soviet homicide mortality is partly explained by the geography of coercive demographic modernization by Soviet planners. Territorial populations whose characteristics were most radically transformed during the Soviet era are overwhelmingly the same populations that experienced the most severe failure of public order after communism. I use a two-stage procedure for estimating the effects of time-invariant factors on a time-variable dependent variable, to demonstrate that Soviet-era demographic transformations are significantly and positively related to regional homicide rates: in particular, I show that the speed and magnitude of (1) urban growth and (2) modernization of familial organization help account for the residual unit heterogeneity unexplained by existing hypotheses. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the beginning stages of the twenty-first century, China, Russia and India are all transforming their economies and, to some extent, their political systems to play an active political role in this globalized world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a comparative analysis of media-state relations in Russia and Ukraine, focusing on the systematic coercion of the press in both countries. The author begins by surveying the coercive tactics--ranging from bureaucratic roadblocks to physical violence--that the Russian and Ukrainian states have used to deter critical voices in the media since the late 1990s, when press freedom began a steady decline in both countries. Based on the data, a typology of media coercion was developed and an informal model to explain why both states have employed many of the same methods and have followed a similar pattern of coercion escalation.

This article explains how the sources of party finance affect the structure of individual political parties and the political system as a whole and the reason for the non-emergence of mass political parties in Russia. Wealth and income inequality and significant discretionary authority of the state over business affairs has led to weakness and a multiplicity of parties in Russia.

We view party strategy as fitting the compound imperatives of the entire "political business cycle"?from one election to the next?and focus on the legislative stage of that cycle. Our empirical cases are Russia and Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past several decades, significant attention has been paid to “getting the institutions right” in rapidly changing polities and economies. Concomitantly, a renewed interest in federalism and the design of federal institutions has spawned a search for factors favorable for the development of stable federalism. This study addresses this very important issue of institutional choice by investigating the origins of the post-communist Russian federation. Russia serves as an excellent case for building theory because it exposes key problems with already existing definitions, typologies, and theories concerning the origins of federations. Moreover, with a comparative eye to other cases undergoing simultaneous democratization and federalization, namely Brazil, South Africa, and Spain, the critical juncture framework developed to explain the origins of such federations goes beyond Russia and makes a modest claim to greater generalizability. Key to understanding the simultaneous processes of democratization and federalization are liberalizers’ decisions to broaden the base of the authoritarian regime and the types of constituencies with which they choose to ally themselves. Activating subnational elites with already existing institutionalized power bases as allies of the liberalizing project, while conducive to extrication from the authoritarian regime, produce significant integration challenges for the new federal regime. Among these are the continuation of subnational clientelistic patterns, fragmentation of central political authority, and increases in subnational leaders’ bargaining leverage vis-à-vis federal authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study critically evaluates different conceptual approaches to the operationalization of political institutionalization which have been offered in the literature on the subject. The author develops a detailed theoretical framework and operational indicators which help to measure the degree of institutionalization of a party system in a democratic country. The analysis focuses on two broad dimensions of political institutionalization, autonomy and stability, and proposes several feasible and precise indicators which allow the criteria of institutionalization to be operationalized. On the basis of this conceptual framework, the study measures levels of political institutionalization of the party systems in the five post-Soviet transitional countries: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1999 Russian national election, 48 percent of winners had been elected as independents. However, less than three percent of all independent victors that same year were women. Over the last decade, the percent of independent candidates who have gained seats has increased, while the percent of women winning as independents has decreased. The fact that most of the deputies in the Russian Duma are independents is no surprise given Russia’s weak party system. What is surprising is that women independent candidates do not win at the same rate that men independent candidates win. Why do men do well when they run as independent candidates and women do not? We argue that women fail to win as independents because they lack party affiliation. We suggest that the effects of party label on electoral success may be gender specific. Therefore, running as an independent will hurt a woman’s chances of winning, whereas men running as independents may actually gain more seats. We suggest that women lack other forms of electoral resources that are more readily available to men. They must therefore rely more heavily on the resources that are available to them through party affiliation. We examine the affects of party affiliation for both men and women candidates in the national elections for the Russian Duma and the Ukrainian Rada since their adoption of mixed electoral systems. Our findings suggest that party label is an important electoral resource for women running in Russian and Ukrainian national elections and that the affects of party affiliation are different for men and women candidates. This finding may aid us in explaining why the number of women in the Russian Duma has been decreasing since the first election under the new electoral system. Russian and Ukranian women who run as independents may be giving up an invaluable resource which, for them, may mean the difference between winning and losing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechnya has engaged in a separatist movement from Russia. Throughout the 1990s, Chechnya regarded their separatist movement as a relatively successful independence revolution due to their victory in the Chechen War of 1994-1996. However, since the war on terrorism began, the United States and Russia have denounced Chechnya as a terrorist state. Russian President Vladimir Putin has implemented military policies towards the Chechen separatist movement that has led to the current Russian occupation of Chechnya in the second Chechen War. Due to the inability of Chechen Guerilla soldiers to defeat the occupying Russians, Chechnya has relied on terrorist acts as a last military resort for Chechen independence. Through a case study analysis of the second Chechen War, my research suggests that a state evolves into a terrorist state only after military dominance by an occupying enemy in which the only defense left is terrorism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixed-member electoral systems embrace two distinct views of representation by electing some legislators in single-member district elections and others in a proportional representation in election. This can potentially create a “mandate divide” in legislatures, since single-member district legislators have an incentive to embrace parochial issues and proportional representation legislators have an incentive to center on national issues. Previous studies of this question have only found limited evidence of its existence. I argue that the level of party system institutionalization will fundamentally determine whether a mandate divide will exist in a mixed-member legislature. Using roll-call voting data from three post-communist legislatures, the Hungarian National Assembly, the Russian State Duma, and the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada, I analyze patterns of party discipline in each legislature to search for the existence of a mandate divide. The empirical results show that a mandate divide only existed in the legislature with the most weakly institutionalized party system, the Russian State Duma. This leads to the conclusion that the level of party system institutionalization will affect the probability of a mandate divide appearing in a mixed-member legislature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of panel data from Brazil, Mexico, and Russia suggests that presidential campaigns have ambiguous effects on inequalities in mass-level political knowledge. In all three campaigns, the gap in political knowledge between individuals with fewer socioeconomic resources and those with more resources stayed the same or widened. At the same time, less affluent, less educated citizens who paid a great deal of attention to the campaign learned more than equally attentive high-status citizens. These findings suggest that electoral campaigns have the potential to mitigate the knowledge gap, even if they fail to do so in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vladimir Putin enjoys a 70% approval rate. Under his leadership, Russia continues to experience stability and has reemerged as an active player on the world scene and is once again a serious factor in the global economy. In a three part essay, the author utilizes a psychoanalytic framework in an attempt to delineate the essence of Putin's leadership style and the psychological interaction he has with the Russian people. In part one, the author discusses the significance of Putin being reared as an "only child." Part two highlights Capitalist ideology, Putin's leadership approach and the subsequent resurrection of Russian social institutions. Part three focuses on the conceptualization of a "money and commodity exchange" paradigm and the impact it has on the Russian collective conscious. The author concludes that though Russians may be warming to capitalism, they are not particularly interested in furthering democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The West once again faces a resurgent Russian state determined to maintain power in its “sphere of influence.” On August 6th, Russian rhetoric gave way to discrete military action. The Georgian War was the first example of Russia directly interfering in a post-Soviet country since the end of the Cold War. Most analyses focus on the violation of state sovereignty, democratization, human rights issues, the Kosovo precedent and future relations between Russia and the West. Fewer scholars look at domestic variables, particularly civil-military relations. Civilian control over the Russian military has important implications for international security, especially if Russia continues to support ethnic minorities in bordering regions, like the Crimea. Since contemporary Russian politics are mainly based on personal allegiance to the Kremlin, the change of the presidency from Putin to Medvedev in April is an important aspect in this puzzle. Thus, analyzing the Putin-Medvedev power dynamic is central. In short, I investigate the civil-military relationship and recently proposed military reforms to reveal implications to larger security issues, like NATO enlargement. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the US have shown that minority-majority districts increase the turnout of minority voters and the electoral success of minority candidates. However, few studies have explored how various forms of ethnic geography affect minority electoral politics. We address this issue by examining the effects of Russia’s multiple layers of ethnic geography on minority electoral behavior. Russia’s ethnic federalism makes it a particularly interesting case since this type of federal structure arguably has direct and indirect effects of its own. Historically, ethnic federalism has advanced minority elites in leadership positions and promoted minorities’ geographic concentration and resistance to assimilation. We use census and electoral data disaggregated to the raion-level (roughly equal to a US county) to analyze the voting behavior of specific ethnic groups. We also use a multilevel framework, which allows us to capture the extent of the variation in our dependent variables--voter turnout and minority vote share--that is explained by the various levels of analysis, including raions, electoral districts, and federal regions. Our initial findings suggest that each level of ethnic concentration has a mobilizing effect on minorities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Russian state gained sovereignty in 1991, its central diplomatic institution, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has been stretched thin. I draw on new and original survey data on Russia's first post-Soviet generation of prospective diplomats to examine the factors that have contributed to the institutional crisis of the Russian Foreign Ministry and, more broadly, the relationship between the country's ruling elite and state officials. My findings show that the first post-Soviet generation of Russian diplomats is mainly driven by its (1) desire to have a high position and power, (2) desire to make a difference in society, (3) perception of the Ministry's prestige, and (4) view of the incumbent Foreign Minister. These findings have important implications for the relationship between Russia's ruling elite and state officials, suggesting that the former needs to yield some authority over the conduct of Russian foreign policy in order to maintain power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the crucial problems facing the Prospect Theory is the still incomplete understanding of the origin of gain/loss frames when assessing the importance of new developments. Although framing effects can be easily captured in experiments, it has proved considerably more difficult to do so in real-world conditions where decisionmakers are bombarded with information from large number of sources. This study attempts to further our understanding of framing choices by identifying conditions determining whether the choice of frame will be driven by domestic or international factors. A set of case studies examining arms trade and technology transfers between Russia and China suggests that under certain conditions domestic circumstances will be dominant in the decisionmakers' choice of frame, while in others the frame choice will be driven by international politics. Theoretical implications of this finding include a contribution to the ongoing relative vs. absolute gains debate, a novel insight into the question of two-level games, and an improved understanding of factors driving international arms trade, particularly among states that are rivals or even potential enemies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Russia Barometer surveys from 2004 and 2007 together with Russian Foreign Policy Elites survey 2004 indicate that Russian elites and masses are rather similar in their opinion of democracy. Only representatives of the executive branch and the military are less supportive of democratic ideals. Improved state of economy, both for individuals and the country, make people feel more content with democracy. But a pessimistic outlook (affiliated with a lack of control or responsibility over one's life) leads to dissatisfaction with democracy. If the government focuses on curtailing corruption to build public trust in state institutions instead of focusing on the state itself under the banner of 'sovereign democracy;' if the masses and elites become further informed about democratic ideas; if people take responsibility and see opportunities in life, then democracy will succeed in Russia. Both democratically-minded and democratically-active population is needed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoinstitutionalist Liberals debate whether hegemons use multilateralism or bilateralism in their approach to international relations. However, they argue that a hegemon cannot use both approaches in combination. Russia is a conundrum in this debate. In its relations with Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) member states, it seems that Russia tries to use both approaches. Through the use of nested treaties, where treaties build upon existing treaties to create complex relationships, Russia is able to combine multilateralism and bilateralism in its approach to international relations. This study advances arguments about the theoretical underpinnings of relationship building among states specifically among CIS states, specifically showing that states are not constrained by two options in international relations. There is a third option: bilateralism nested in multilateralism. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Government proposals for regulating Internet have been circulating in Russia for almost a decade. In 1999, the Russian government assured that “the freedom of information on the Net would not be infringed.” Russian former president Vladimir Putin expressed government’s position by saying that the state does not “wish to monopolize the Internet.” However, the tremendous increase in the numbers-about 32, 700, 000 users in March of 2008-has changed Internet’s role in the society. Now many government officials say that Internet should be regulated by law. For example, Internet companies should be legally responsible for information they distribute online. .x000d.There are two sides of policy arguments surrounding the issue. On the one hand, Senator Vladimir Slutsker noted that every fourth Russian citizen is using the Internet; however, no law regulates the area. On the other hand, it is the position of users to leave the Internet for self-regulation. Blogosphere will be the main target of regulations, if the initiative becomes a law. Sergey Molchanov, CEO of Hosting-Center RBK, said that the Internet is very mobile; thus, traditional methods of media regulation are not be applicable to it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Did Russia initiate conflict with Georgia in an attempt to restrain Georgia from formally joining the Western coalition, or was the decision more complex? What, specifically, did Russia hope to gain from initiating conflict? What value did Russia assign to maintaining an interest in regional oil trade routes, in which Georgia straddles an important route to the Caspian Sea region? How was the potential incorporation of Georgia into NATO factored into Russia's decision? To answer these questions, I used the expected-utility model developed by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. In this analysis, policy preferences and power measurements were considered to determine that Russia's decision was rationally selected based on a positive expected-utility calculation. I attempted to explain whether this model's explanatory and predictive capabilities could accurately elucidate Russia's conflict decision. Furthermore, within the context of the expected-utility model, what can we expect about Russian-Georgian relations in the near future? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corporatist approaches used to think about states as accomplished entities and overlooked the processes of state and nation building in the context of labor struggle.While in Latin America the question of nation building wasn't an issue for the corporatist analysis,in Eastern Europe the role of unions in political process is conditioned by national unity.Why are some unions weak while others are weaker during the democratic transitions that also involve nation and state building?Neither rational-choice,nor new institutionalism,and even not critical-junctures literatures explain why similar labor organizations that prevailed during the Soviet era develop into different directions during democratic transitions.The relative weakness of Russian unions results from the unfinished project of state and nation consolidation,which manifests itself in unions' confederation-style decentralization.The weakness of Ukrainian unions is a result of the unfinished nation building project: ethnical division between East and West.The authoritarian Belarusian state determines, rather than navigates, labor-capital relations.Nation and state building process,thus, must be involved into the corporatist analysis of labor relations in post-Soviet area. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both China and Russia underwent transitions out of economic Socialism in the 1990s, but these countries did so in vastly different economic and political contexts. In both countries, the speed and depth of economic transformation varied widely across localities. Russia’s transition combined a severe economic downturn with political liberalization, while China’s move to a market economy was orchestrated by the Communist Party with minimal political liberalization. Using two unique national surveys conducted in 2008, we compare the impact of economic transitions on individual-level participation in a range lawful political activities, some of which a sub-set are de facto strongly discouraged in China. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As problems with the competitiveness of Russian elections have grown more widely agreed upon and more extensive, election data have ceased to be a useful tool for illuminating the values and voting behavior of Russian citizens. Electoral data do, however, shed light on regional elites' control over politics within their regions. We examine each region's a) voting support for the in-power presidential candidate, b) voting support for the "party of power" in legislative races and c) level of voter turnout in presidential and legislative races. We first present and discuss the regional distributions of these three electoral results for all ten federal elections from 1991 to 2008. We then present and discuss a measure developed from those election results that indicate regional elites' abilities to control electoral outcomes during each of four different electoral "cycles": 1995/1996, 1999/2000, 2003/2004 and 2007/2008. Increasing numbers of those regional leaderships possessing such control use it to support the federal executive authority. We end by analyzing the regions' different "trajectories," that is, how their scores on our measure change from the first electoral cycle to the last. We find that Russia's "ethnic" regions become deferential earlier and remain so more strongly. For the non-ethnic regions, high levels of urbanization and socioeconomic development push regions away from deference to the Kremlin. Within the group of ethnic regions, while urbanization has no impact, the percent of Russian residents in the regional populace has a strong impact even though the ethnic regions share a relatively lower percentage of Russians compared to the non-ethnic regions. Russia's ethnic and non-ethnic regions are on separate trajectories of relations with the federal center to an extent not yet sufficiently analyzed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Path dependency" emerged as a theoretical approach in the social sciences (specifically economics) in the 1980s, and has gradually been applied with greater frequency in political science. As a form of historical institutionalism, it shows promise of casting significant light on processes of political stability and change. The present study applies core ideas in path dependency theory (particularly those derived from the work of Paul Pierson) to the study of political change and continuity in contemporary Russia. It does so by examining several large-scale defining traits of Russian politics from the perspective of historical path dependence. These traits include monocratic manifestations of political power; a tendency for political authority to be conceived and exercised in neo-autocratic modes; an apparently instinctive trend toward political centralization; and a tendency to vacillate between a weak and strong state, with powerful historical impulses toward the latter. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]