The Study of Authoritarian Regimes: Methodological Challenges and Innovations

Room 1: Understanding Authoritarian Regimes from Within

Rebecca Fradkin (University of Oxford)
“Strategy and Access in the Field: Kazakhstan and Russia”

My research examines how authoritarian regimes co-opt majority religious groups as a process of nation building and how citizens respond to these efforts. Using a mixed methods research approach, I carried out fieldwork over the course of six months in Kazakhstan and Tatarstan, Russia. In this presentation I will discuss difficulties related to restricted access in post-Soviet authoritarian regimes and strategies employed to overcome these barriers in order to interview elites and "ordinary" citizens. I will also discuss how the triangulation of data can aid in overcoming these constraints.
 

Mariya Rohava (University of Oslo)
“Overcoming Research Obstacles in Belarus: Data Availability and Research Strategies”

The presentation discusses the pitfalls of organising and conducting a qualitative research on political topics in authoritarian regimes from the perspective of an insider. Depending on the sort of research questions posed, political research in authoritarian contexts requires greater flexibility and experimentation. The first step in finding an appropriate research strategy is to recognise the need for deeper contextualisation of the field according to the contingencies of everyday life in an authoritarian state. Building on my fieldwork experience in Belarus, this presentation showcases a strategy of how to make use of easily accessible materials and open data in the field. It also discusses advantages of shifting the research focus on informal realms of politics and the domestic sphere for an in-depth country analysis. I aim to clarify how studying everyday perspectives and practices of people in an authoritarian state contributes to the discussions on regime survival and stability.
 

Room 2: How to Study Economic Policy in Russia?

Ewa Dabrowska (University of Amsterdam)
“Ideas and Interests in the Russian Industrial Policy”

Conflicts in the Russian elite are not always about power and direct material interests; some of them concern identities, ideas and more abstract interests. One question has been particularly hotly debated in the Russian policy-making during the whole Putin era: Can abundant oil revenues be effectively invested in the domestic economy or would such investments merely provoke inflation in the view of inefficient governance institutions? Putin's initial understanding of “financial sovereignty”, according to which oil revenues should be kept intact in the Reserve Fund and in the Fund for National Welfare, contrasted with the views of conservative administration and business elites. The latter deemed investing of those revenues essential for modernising the economy and for obtaining authentic economic and political sovereignty. Thus, this debate exposed a clash of political and economic ideas-cum-interests in Russia. Moreover, it revealed the paradox of Putin's politics of ideas: While the Russian president's political ideas became increasingly illiberal, conservative and anti-Western, his economic policy was a pragmatic combination of orthodox-liberal and statist measures. Putin's “liberal” approach towards oil revenues was therefore not consistent with his political quasi-ideology of sovereignty vis-à-vis the liberal West, which caused a tension in Russia's governance. In the presentation, the case of the Russian debate over oil revenues is used to show how to examine political and economic ideas and related interests and how to theorise the role of ideas in authoritarian politics and policy-making.


Janis Kluge (Witten/Herdecke University and German Institute for International and Security Affairs)
“Sticks or Carrots? Comparing Effectiveness of Government Shadow Economy Policies in Russia”

How can economic policy and its success be measured? In our study, we compare the taxi market of 76 Russian regions to explain the effectiveness of different policy approaches to formalising the shadow economy in Russia. We try to find out if harsher punishments (“sticks”) motivate entrepreneurs to formalise or if positive incentives (“carrots”) such as subsidies for small firms are more effective. All regions are subject to the same federal laws, which means that – formally – there is no variation in punishment that we could use to analyse the effectiveness of “sticks”. We solve this problem by focusing on the enforcement of the laws: Courts have discretion in applying the laws and they use it differently across regions. For our “sticks” indicator, we measure how many of the prison sentences that are given in a region are unsuspended. We model “carrots” as the amount of government subsidies that are paid to small and medium-sized firms in each region. We find that stricter courts, ceteris paribus, have a strong positive impact on the number of official taxi licenses in a region, indicating a smaller shadow economy, while subsidies are insignificant. We explain this result with interest group capture of subsidies and low trust in the state by entrepreneurs in the shadow economy.