This paper examines the mobilizing capacity of the middle class in fostering civic activism under authoritarian rule. In particular, we examine whether the middle class has the potential to recruit other strata in civic activism. We use a boutique N=2017 survey conducted in Moscow, Russia, in December 2021, with an embedded conjoint experiment that identifies the reaction of respondents to an invitation from a hypothetical neighbor to take part in a civic action. We find that self-reported willingness to engage in civic activism is positively associated with the share of the middle class in the respondent's district of residence. Furthermore, middle-class individuals are perceived as more knowledgeable and thus have higher mobilizing capacity; however, we find no evidence that individuals are more likely to be mobilized by someone from a similar social stratum. In districts with a low middle-class share, middle-class individuals exhibit higher willingness to engage in civic activism, but this difference disappears in high-middle-class districts. Finally, for civic activism, unlike the anti-regime protests, we find no evidence that dependence on the state reduces the self-reported willingness to engage in civic activism. A survey-based measure of past civic engagement augments findings from the conjoint experiment. Our findings contribute to research on authoritarian politics by refining our understanding of state-society relations, the middle class, civic activism, and local politics in autocracies, as well as to the general studies of impact of social context on civic activism, with implications beyond the Russian case.

Russian leadership for decades has been skeptical of the US-centric world, considering it both a threat to Russia's sovereignty and the great power status. At the same time, the main goal of Russia appears to be less making Russia the new global leader and more creating a multipolar world with numerous power centers engaging in various alliances and conflicts. The war in Ukraine, due to the commitment of the Western nations and the US to support this country, is currently perceived in Moscow as a way to coming closer to this multipolar world. Whether this perception has changed under Donald Trump, is doubtful.

How do different types of regional organizations react to current challenges and crises? This special issue of the Politische Vierteljahresschrift explores this question by bringing together contributions from European Union studies and comparative regionalism. This introduction discusses the concepts of crisis, adaptation, and resilience as well as the value of the dialogue between the two subdisciplines, outlines the aims of the special issue, systematizes the main findings of the contributions, and reflects on their implications for future research.

Over the last decade, Russia's political regime has become increasingly anti-Western in its rhetoric and ideational foundations. At the same time, Russian social sciences, and particularly economics, have pursued the path of internationalization, declaring the goal of becoming part of the global academic community. How can one reconcile these two contradictory trends? The article offers an in-depth investigation of the evolution of the internationalization of economics in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. The authors argue that internationalization is a complex phenomenon, with some of its aspects being problematic for the anti-Western regime, with others being acceptable or even beneficial. In particular, they focus on the tension between two goals of internationalization: dissemination of Western ideas and concepts in the domestic community (i.e. the role of translators and public intellectuals) and participation in the international exchange of ideas (i.e. publication in English-language scholarly journals). In the 2010s, Putin's regime promoted the second goal at the expense of the first, which was potentially more problematic from the point of view of the regime's logic. The authors also highlight the importance of economics as source of policy advice, even for an anti-Western regime like Putin's.

Small businesses are a crucial component of any country's economy and are typically the first to suffer from external shocks. This study aimed to assess Russian small business preferences for various adaptation strategies to the restrictions on product supplies from Europe due to the 2022 sanctions. Creativity of private business is an important (and unexplored) aspect of the Russian economy's adaptation to sanctions, explaining its robustness. To this end, we conducted a survey of 1,211 small business owners, including two survey experiments that identified preferences for adaptation strategies for the cessation of supplies from Europe. We found strong and significant preferences for proactive strategies (such as substituting supplies and reducing costs) over waiting or exiting. However, preferences for these strategies depend heavily on subjective future outlooks, including expectations of the possibility of resuming partnerships with Europe, and assessments of prospects for successful self-sufficiency and economic recovery.

In Russia, positive attitudes toward a free market economy and competition are firmly associated with the "Western" intellectual imports the country experienced in the 1990s. Anti-Western intellectuals and politicians typically embrace an anti-market stance calling for an economy with greater level of governmental interventions. There is a highly prominent exception to this logic: Putin himself appears to have a positive attitude toward free markets-in particular, free and unconstrained competition. This attitude does not seem to have changed even after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This article reviews Putin's rhetoric with respect to markets, competition, and economic freedom and offers several explanations for it. In addition to the more conventional story of the "authoritarian capitalism" logic, it offers a further explanation: the reinterpretation of markets in line with a "Darwinian" point of view where markets are perceived not as spaces of freedom but as spaces of hierarchy and power.

The new wave of protectionism in the global economy, which has been observed in the recent years, is accompanied by a specific narrative: The idea that globalization can be abused by authoritarian countries, who will use global economic connections to strengthen their power and to destabilize democratic states. Because of that, free trade should be limited to a group of like-minded nations, united by common values. The article interrogates this narrative and shows its logical flaws and inconsistencies. An attempt to link the access to the global trade to a small group of countries is likely to have negative impact on both economic wealth and political stability. One should not under-estimate the power of common interests as factors underlying the global economy.

Authoritarian states are intensifying bloc-building efforts. While the authoritarian regionalism literature suggests that membership in these “clubs of autocrats” can bolster domestic support for authoritarian leaders, such external recognition can also pose challenges, especially when aligning with “toxic” authoritarian partners. We argue that authoritarian regimes attempt to solve this problem by crafting strategic narratives and communicating them through regime-loyal media to the general public. The study examines strategic narratives of bloc building used by Russia and China in the first year after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022. Using “text-as-data” methods and qualitative analysis, we find important similarities and differences in the narratives of these two countries. Both use narratives highly critical of the United States and NATO. However, while Russia has crafted a “fortress narrative” that focuses on external threats and non-Western resilience, China promotes a “bridge narrative,” advocating for spanning geopolitical gaps and championing global integration. Both narrative strategies converge in their criticism of shared adversaries but diverge in their portrayals of the blocs they lead.

Communist rule left a strong imprint on the development of Eastern European countries, but the precise mechanisms and directions of this legacy effect are subject to debate. This article looks at the legacies of giant infrastructural projects, which played an important role in the ideology and policy practice of communist regimes. Using the natural experiment of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), we investigate the influence of this project on post-communist voting behavior. We show that the BAM legacy reduces the share of votes for United Russia, the party of power of Putin’s regime, and leads to a larger share of votes for the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). While the BAM legacy could be associated with a multitude of channels, we provide empirical evidence for at least one of them—the persistence of human capital, showing that BAM settlements are characterized by better educational outcomes than the control group.

This article serves as an introduction to the special issue devoted to historical continuities in Eurasia and different conceptualizations of the communist legacies. It highlights the main research challenges the special issue deals with and how they fit into a more general discussion about the application of the concept of “post-communism” as an analytical category. It further reviews the composition of the special issue and sums up the main scholarly insights it produced.

Abstract The chapter reviews the political science scholarship on Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the USSR, their collapse, and their legacies. It identifies key features of Communist regimes and positions them in the overall landscape of comparative authoritarianism studies. It points out the internal contradictions plaguing Communist regimes, but also factors explaining their durability and stability. It discusses main theories explaining the collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the USSR. Finally, it shows that Communist legacies remain an important obstacle for the democratic consolidation in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet Eurasia. The focus of the chapter is on both the Communist regimes themselves and the scholarship on Communist regimes and its place in the political science research on authoritarian regimes.

In the last decades, area studies have been subject to substantial criticism by the most mainstream social sciences. Area specialists are perceived as lacking the knowledge of modern research methodology and rather following the interests of humanities than social sciences. At the same time, studying individual regions and countries certainly requires the accumulation of specific knowledge, which would most likely be lost without area studies research. This paper discusses the main directions of criticism of area studies and possible suggestions towards modernization of this research tradition. The criticism towards area studies can be linked to three issues: the excessive dominance of the humanities in most area studies communities; insufficient consideration of modern theoretical and empirical approaches; and implicit normativity, i.e., the substitution of scientific analysis with value assertions. The modernization of area studies as an academic field is related to the application of alternative approaches to regional and country studies within three research projects: Comparative Area Studies (CAS), Transregional Studies, and regional specialization within individual disciplines