Suchergebnisse

Do economic sanctions turn the public against the target government or cause it to rally around the flag? How do sanctions affect attitudes toward the sanctioner? How does bad economic performance under sanctions shape support for the target government? Despite their importance, these questions have rarely been explored with survey data. Results from two surveys in Russia find that exposure to information about economic sanctions does not generate a rally around the flag, leads some groups to withdraw support from the target government, and reduces support for the sanctioner. Respondents also react more strongly to the reasons why sanctions were put in place—the annexation of Crimea—than to the sanctions themselves. These results suggest the need to reevaluate theories of the impact of economic sanctions and blame-shifting under autocracy.

Language, ethnicity, and policy orientation toward Europe are key cleavages in Ukrainian society, but there is much debate about their relative importance. Based on a survey experiment of 1000 residents of Ukraine that manipulated three features of a fictional candidate running for parliament, I find that a candidate's ethnicity and language had little impact on reported vote choice, whereas economic policy orientation toward Europe was strongly associated with vote preference. Despite the intense politicization of both ethnicity and language and the violence in eastern Ukraine vote choice has not been reduced to an ethnic or linguistic census. Adapted from the source document.

Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standing concerns in political science. This is in itself a sign that after years on the periphery of political science prior to 1989, the study of politics and economics in postcommunist Eurasia has come in from the cold. Adapted from the source document.