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Many people need support from their community at some point in their lives. For people trying to escape a repressive political regime, community support can be a matter of life and death. In this study we investigate what triggers Russian migrants who left the country in the aftermath of invasion of Ukraine, to support their compatriots who are still in Russia, but want to leave it. In the six months since the beginning of invasion of Ukraine, Russian migrants abroad have managed to establish dozens of officially functioning media outlets, charitable foundations, anti-war committees, and other non-governmental institutions, as well as hundreds (if not thousands) of informal initiatives, many of which help Russian citizens’ relocation and integration. 31.8% of Russian migrants report that they help other Russian migrants. Given resource constraints and obstacles caused by anti-Russian sanctions, people willing to support other migrants face tough choices about their funds and other resources allocation. At the same time, not only can the support be life-changing for the recipient, but also it influences migrants’ influx and shapes the Russian community abroad. We draw on the literature of deservingness, in which the lion's share is taken up by studies of the attitudes of European and U.S. citizens toward newly arriving migrants. We bear in mind that our respondents are themselves recent migrants who have left their country amidst political and economic crisis, provoked by the military conflict with a neighboring country. Hence, to shed light on the formative effect of their political experience on their support choices, we also utilize concepts of repression, guilt, and responsibility. To test the motivators for support, we will employ choice-based conjoint experimental design with paired profiles (Hainmueller, J., Hangartner, D. and Yamamoto, T., 2014). We will ask respondents to make a forced choice between two hypothetical candidates’ profiles for getting support from the Russian migrants’ community to leave Russia. Each respondent will be presented with two paired conjoint tasks. The hypothetical candidates’ profile will contain information about the candidates’ gender, age, occupation, ethnic background, motivation for leaving Russia, and experience of repression in Russia.

Every policy produces winners and losers. Deep structural reforms and welfare retrenchment often impose costs upon various groups of the national population. As the studies of the US and European states show, one of the most crucial negative political consequences of such reforms is the decrease in mass support for the government responsible for the initiation of the reform. However, sometimes governments manage to avoid popular outrage for welfare retrenchment. Several viable strategies of political blame avoidance have been identified in the previous literature, including (a) shifting the blame to subordinate or competing political actors; (b) providing compensations to most vulnerable groups affected by the reform; and (c) framing the public perception of reform via various media channels. In this project we focus on the latter strategy and test whether intentional media framing of a potentially unpopular welfare reform may help a non-democratic government to escape political losses associated with the reform. Drawing on the existing literature on political support, we identify a variety of media frames that may potentially affect mass attitudes toward government in the context of a major welfare retrenchment reform. We estimate the effects of those frames by using a conjoint vignette experiment about a hypothetical healthcare reform in Russia.