Tomila V. Lankina

A GEOGRAPHIC INCREMENTAL THEORY OF DEMOCRATIZATION Territory, Aid, and Democracy in Postcommunist Regions

The article examines the impact of geographical proximity to the West and of Western aid on democracy in Russias regions and advances a geographic incrementalist theory of democratization. Even when national politicians exhibit authoritarian tendencies, diffusion processes and targeted foreign aid help advance democratization at the subnational level in postcommunist states and other settings. The authors make this case by conducting process-tracing case studies of democratic institution building in two northwestern border regions and statistical analysis of over one thousand projects that the European Union carried out in Russias localities over fourteen years. They find that the EU shows commitment to democratic reform particularly in, but not limited to, regions located on its eastern frontier. Over time, this, as well as diffusion processes from the West, positively affects the democratic trajectory of the respective regions even if they had been more closed to begin with compared to other regions.

Authoritarian Versus Democratic Diffusions: Explaining Institutional Choices in Russia's Local Government

Two political scientists address questions posed by the puzzling survival of the institution of elected city mayors in Russia despite the efforts of the national government to abolish it. Based on datasets not only of local government reforms across all the regions but also of the regional component of European Union aid, statistical analysis is used to challenge dominant approaches to democratic institution building and diffusion theories are applied. The findings with regard to the spatially uneven and poly-nuclear nature of institutional influences challenge prevalent approaches to authoritarianism and democratic institution building.

The Dynamics of Regional and National Contentious Politics in Russia: Evidence from a New Dataset

The paper analyzes the regional dimension of Russia’s protests and its links to recent nationwide contentious politics based on an analysis of an author-constructed protest dataset for the period 2007-2012. The data indicate high levels of civic activism and a growing trend of the politicization of the Russian citizenry. Nevertheless, the analysis also points to the spatially and temporally uneven nature of protests. Drawing on scholarship on political opportunity structures, I argue that these variations mirror political-institutional closures and openings at local, regional and federal levels of authority.

Explaining European Union aid to Russia

Since 1991, Russia has received a large volume of funding from Western donors to aid its political and economic transformation. The European Union accounts for a substantial share of this funding, amounting to over 2.6 billion euros. Therefore, it is surprising that virtually no systematic scholarship exists on the pattern of aid choices and allocations, or indeed, on their longer-term impact on targeted actors. Although there are a number of case studies and policy papers on the various dimensions of aid or concrete projects, we still lack a comprehensive picture of the EU’s technical assistance. Such an exercise would allow us to begin to explain and to theorise about the reasons — economic, strategic, bureaucratic, political, cultural or other — behind the EU’s and its member states’ aid choices. This chapter presents findings from statistical analysis of a dataset that the author compiled of all EU projects conducted in Russia’s regions between 1991 and 2005. The analysis is complemented by interviews with European Union and Russian officials involved with TACIS (Technical Assistance to the CIS) projects as well as by an examination of key EU policy and strategy papers on Russia.

Authoritarian and Democratic Diffusion in Post-Communist Regions

There is a rich body of theorizing on the diffusion of democracy across space and time. There is also an emerging scholarship on authoritarian diffusion. The dynamics of the interaction between external democratic and autocratic diffusion processes and their effects on national and sub-national political regime outcomes have received scant attention in the literature. Do democratic diffusion processes help counter external authoritarian influences? And, in contexts where external diffusion of democratic influences is weak, do we observe greater susceptibility to diffusion from regional autocracies that might in turn reinforce authoritarian practices and institutions in “recipient” states? To address these questions, we perform analysis of data from two original under-utilized data sets—a data set on the European Union (EU) aid to Russia’s regions and a data set with statistics on trade among post-Soviet states. We find that EU aid has the effect of countering external authoritarian influences that work through Soviet-era inter-regional economic ties.

Competitive Religious Entrepreneurs: Christian Missionaries and Female Education in Colonial and Post-Colonial India

This article explores the influence of Protestant missionaries on male–female educational inequalities in colonial India. Causal mechanisms drawn from the sociology and economics of religion highlight the importance of religious competition for the provision of public goods. Competition between religious and secular groups spurred missionaries to play a key role in the development of mass female schooling. A case study of Kerala illustrates this. The statistical analysis, with district-level datasets, covers colonial and post-colonial periods for most of India. Missionary effects are compared with those of British colonial rule, modernization, European presence, education expenditures, post-colonial democracy, Islam, caste and tribal status, and land tenure. Christian missionary activity is consistently associated with better female education outcomes in both the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Unbroken Links? From Imperial Human Capital to Post-Communist Modernisation

Abstract The article explores imperial human capital affects on current human capital and democracy variations in Russias regions based on author-constructed datasets with imperial and post-communist statistics. Pre-communist education is a significant predictor of modernisation, which in studies of Russian regions explains a large share of regional democratic variation. Pre-communist education also apparently positively affects post-communist democracy. The communists did not build on a clean slate; nor did they overwrite pre-communist human capital stocks in the regions. The spatially uneven structural conditions related to frontier settlement and population movements after the emancipation of the serfs may also have a bearing on human capital variations.

Local Government in Poland and Hungary: from post-communist reform towards EU accession

Local government has been a central item on the reform agendas of the two trailblazers of democracy in post-socialist Central Eastern Europe — Poland and Hungary (Cielecka and Gibson 1995; Coulson, 1995: 24); (Davey 1995: 57).2 Hungary is known to have gone the furthest in both ideas and practice in this respect — a fact made possible due to a strong political consensus on the matter. It has been described as “a pioneer in local government reform among transition economies” (Kopanyi et al. 1999: 1), and its reforms — as “the best prepared”, “the most comprehensive”, and “the most liberal” in post-Communist Eastern Europe (Illner 1997: 31). Poland’s reforms, until recently, in contrast, have been haphazard and inconsistent, and changed according to the constellations of the political forces of the fractured party system at the center and the localities. Scholars used such words as “dysfunctional” and “illogical” to describe the products of the early efforts at reform (Ciechocinska 1994). In the late 1990s, when Hungary had already completed its second cycle of reforms at all levels Poland was still being criticized for its “high degree of centralization” (Kotka 1997: 155). Even recently, it has been described no more no less as an example of state “unitarism” (Matsuzato 2001: 191).

New data on protest trends in Russia's regions

LARGE-SCALE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PROTEST HAS CHARACTERISED political development in a number of post-communist and other transition countries over the last two decades. The colour revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia, and, most recently, the 2013–2014 protests in Ukraine, have demonstrated the potency of mass action in toppling undemocratic or unpopular regimes, or else in forcing political change. Citizen uprisings in the Middle East had also shattered the dual myths of popular passivity and stability of authoritarian polities in the region. Yet, as Graeme Robertson (2007) rightly notes, according to ‘conventional wisdom’, until 2011–2013 Russia has remained puzzlingly immune to large-scale mass protests despite a growing tide of authoritarianism, rampant corruption, and socio-economic disparities—the cocktail of factors contributing to the recent wave of anti-authoritarian mobilisations in other parts of the world. The mass protests that took place following the December 2011 elections to the Russian Duma appear to have caught both domestic and external observers by surprise. It has been estimated that electoral fraud in these elections enabled the ruling United Russia party (Edinaya Rossiya—UR) to claim 15 million extra votes, raising its estimated actual support from 34% to 49%. The respected GOLOS electoral monitoring organisation reported nearly 8,000 violations documented by observers at various polling stations (Lyubarev 2012, p. 2). In an unprecedented show of solidarity, tens of thousands of protesters of various political persuasions and socio-economic backgrounds took to the streets to protest against the many instances of electoral fraud. In Moscow, as many as 100,000 protesters were reported to have taken to the streets in just one rally in December 2011 (Najibullah & Whitmore 2011). Following Vladimir Putin’s victory in the first round of the March 2012 presidential elections mass demonstrations continued, albeit on a smaller scale. At the height of the protests, a Levada Centre public opinion poll conducted on 16–20 December 2011 revealed that nearly 45% of respondents were prepared to support street protests against electoral violations, while

The Virtuous Circles of Western Exposure in Russian Regions: A Case for Micro-Polity Analysis of Democratic Change

Exposure to democratic values has been regarded as a significant factor in the diffusion of democracy, and has also been linked through conditionality to assistance from Western agencies. Diffusion and the targeting of such assistance in a country of the size of Russia is likely to be uneven, however, implying uneven effects, as public authorities, private businesses and the broader citizenry are exposed to varying levels of influence according to the level of diffusion and assistance applied in particular regions. Statistical analysis shows regional exposure levels to be higher in regions that lie in closer proximity to the West, even when urbanization, gross regional product and other domestic variables are held constant. This further implies that methodological approaches to democratization based on assessing the ‘whole nation’ miss the significance of geographical factors in post-communist political change, which will need to be addressed in future analyses.