Maria Snegovaya

This chapter discusses the role of economic factors in the rise of illiberal politics in today's world. Unlike similar studies on this topic, it expands the focus beyond the "usual suspects," such as populist, nativist, or far-right parties to also include the illiberal ideas, movements, and thought collectives in the conceptualization of illiberal actors driving this wave of democratic backsliding. Such an approach is arguably more instrumental in tracing how and when the ongoing backlash originated before illiberal parties and politicians had a chance to come to power. This chapter seeks to explore today's illiberal wave by analyzing the role of economic factors such as accumulated frustration with the e ects of neoliberalism, nancial crises, and globalization. It also analyzes the economic policies embraced by incumbent illiberal parties and leaders. While focusing primary attention on Europe, it also traces parallels across countries' trajectories in di erent regional contexts, including Asia and

Вопреки распространенному мнению, после распада СССР в России случился не демократический транзит, а временное ослабление власти федерального центра. Об отсутствии транзита свидетельствует почти полное отсутствие смены политических элит и воспроизводство в почти неизмененной форме многих институтов советской системы властных отношений в постсоветской России. Исходя из этого анализа, реавтократизация России была не следствием роковых ошибок отдельных политических лидеров (будь то Ельцин или Путин), а всего лишь вопросом времени.

Scholars often blame Russia’s recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders: Yeltsin or Putin. This essay casts doubt on such accounts. It argues instead that we need to reconsider whether Russia indeed transitioned to democracy in 1990s keeping in mind the composition of the elites. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced not a democratic transition but a temporary weakening of the state (incumbent capacity). This is evidenced by a lack of elite rotation and the preservation of the same type of formal and informal institutions that characterized Russia’s political system in the past. Accordingly, subsequent re-autocratization of Russian politics was just a matter of time.

Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1-3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approximately 60% of contemporary elites. Most have ties in the middle and lower, rather than the top, ranks of the nomenklatura. In addition, the share of those with nomenklatura backgrounds in Putin-era elites is significantly higher than the share of siloviki. These results reflect a noticeable continuity between the Soviet-era and Putin-regime elites 30 years after the transition. This often-ignored characteristic helps understand the absence of an elite split and a high degree of elite compliance with re-autocratization in Putin's Russia.

As Russia’s economy stagnated and real disposable incomes declined in the aftermath of the Kremlin’s 2014 war with Ukraine, observers have tried to analyze the extent to which these factors are able to shift Putin’s foreign policy priorities. This paper reviews the existing evidence to analyze how the perceived deterioration of the economic situation affects the Russian population’s foreign policy priorities. Overall, polls reveal dramatic shifts in Russian popular attitudes since 2014. In light of the worsening economic situation, popular demand for a stable and growing economy in Russia has dominated over other considerations. But while domestic opinion constrains the Kremlin’s foreign policy decisions, it has previously proven incapable of imposing serious political costs on Putin for his reckless foreign policy decisions and international escalation. However, as socio-economic problems continue to accumulate, these domestic constraints on the Kremlin’s foreign policy will become more severe.

How does perceived political corruption affect electoral preferences? Scholarship of Eastern Europe addressed this question primarily through the study of observational data. This study contributes to the existing scholarship by addressing the endogeneity problem and allows to causally interpret effects of perceived corruption on voting intentions. It combines hypotheses tested in earlier studies to investigate the impact of perceived political corruption on different electoral choices. A survey experiment in Hungary shows that exposure to political corruption makes respondents more likely to abstain from voting, less likely to support the incumbent party, and more likely to expect the anti-establishment party to win.

How does perceived political corruption affect electoral preferences? Scholarship of Eastern Europe addressed this question primarily through the study of observational data. This study contributes to the existing scholarship by addressing the endogeneity problem and allows to causally interpret effects of perceived corruption on voting intentions. It combines hypotheses tested in earlier studies to investigate the impact of perceived political corruption on different electoral choices. A survey experiment in Hungary shows that exposure to political corruption makes respondents more likely to abstain from voting, less likely to support the incumbent party, and more likely to expect the anti-establishment party to win.

Vladimir Putin's Russia meets the classical definition of fascist state, says Maria Snegovaya, except for one factor-the Kremlin can't yet unite the public around a clearly articulated nationalist ideology. This missing piece constrains the aggressiveness of the state. Without it, the Russian people will not accept fighting foreign wars indefinitely.

This third, last article observes the dynamics of the development of Russia, the fourth of the BRIC countries, which have been analyzed in the context of the formation of its institutions and culture. Main factors that create a potential barrier on the way of Russias democratization and its transition to the innovation phase are selected. On one side, this barrier is lower in Russia than in other BRIC countries: bureaucracy is weaker than the Chinese one and there is no institutional separation of the society, as in India and Brazil, levels of education are relatively high, while oil export could bring additional resources for the institutional reforms. On the other side, Russia doesnt have cheap labor force which permits other BRIC countries to postpone the transition to the innovation phase of development. Will Russia be able to overcome the barriers to its development in the nearest future, and what is necessary in order to achieve this? This article aims to answer this question.

Following the issue of innovational potential of catching-up countries the authors consider the peculiarities of China, India and Brazil’s institutions and culture. According to their opinion, these peculiarities can limit innovational development of the said countries. For each of them the limitations have their specifics, but when positive factors are exhausted they can become the brake to development. This issue is also important for Russia because it has its own limitations.

This paper explores the correlates of Russia's aggressive international policy and argues that rising oil revenues increase the aggressiveness of presidential foreign policy rhetoric. Using content analysis and machine-learning techniques, I generate a measure of aggressive discourse as the share of anti-western sentences in Russian presidential speeches delivered between 2000 and 2016. These are analyzed using OLS regressions with lagged dependent variables. I conclude that the aggressiveness of foreign policy rhetoric in Russian presidential speeches positively correlates to oil prices. I also find no support for alternative explanations linking hawkish foreign policy to NATO expansion or domestic legitimacy concerns.

Scholars on “rally ’round the flag” often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign policy preferences among respondents exposed to negative economic priors in Russia. In line with the earlier findings on this topic, my analysis shows that participants who encounter negative economic primes report significantly less support for assertive foreign policy narratives. These results suggest that continuing economic strain may limit the Kremlin’s ability to divert public attention from internal problems through the use of assertive rhetoric.

The regime that has emerged in Russia under President Vladimir Putin is no longer only Russia's problem. By promoting corruption, kleptocratic practices and the violation of democratic norms in Western societies, and by using chemical weapons on their territories and carrying out assassinations abroad, Putin's regime has become a significant domestic problem for the EU and the US. However, the preventative measures put in place by the West fall short of fundamentally influencing the regime's behaviour. This article offers some suggestions on how to adjust existing European policy to enable it to more effectively influence the actions of the Kremlin on the international stage.

Scholarship analyzing Russia's influence in Europe has focused primarily on the supply-side of this relationship, especially on the links between the Kremlin and specific parties. Surprisingly few studies have focused on the demand-side. My paper fills in this gap. First, I compile a dataset of pro-Russian parties in the European Union and show that Russia-sympathizers are found across different (left and right) party families. Second, I demonstrate that supporters of these parties across different party families show stronger Eurosceptic attitudes than the electorates of mainstream parties. This finding explains the endorsement of narratives and policies indirectly favorable to the Kremlin by political actors whose electorates harbor Eurosceptic sympathies. It also sheds some light on the opportunistic rather than ideological nature of Russia's influence operations in the European Union, which exploit opportunities presented in respective regions. In other words, these parties are the Kremlin's fellow travelers.

The study scopes out the Kremlin’s malign social media operations in the United States, their key purveyors, platforms and enablers. It analyzes how the Russian approach to conducting social media campaigns targeting domestic audiences in the US has evolved since 2016 and whether its efforts can be deemed successful or effective. Snegovaya and Watanabe attempt to determine what demographic characteristics make specific members and segments of the US audience more susceptible to the Russian disinformation campaigns and how that impacts their voting behavior. The report articulates a list of policy recommendations for improving the US society’s resilience to the Russian malign influence campaigns.

In the 1990s, many left-wing parties abandoned their traditional economic policies and adopted more pro-market economic stances. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context to explore the impact of these policies on the electoral fortunes of the left-wing parties that adopted them. Although rewarded at first with electoral victories, the adaptation of pro-market positions had a less straightforward impact on the left-wing parties’ electoral fortunes in the long run. CHES data on party positions and ESS survey data on party support show that pro-market left parties obtain reduced support; this effect is particularly pronounced among the economically vulnerable occupational groups. In countries with more pro-market left parties, these groups have a higher propensity to vote for right-wing parties. These findings highlight important parallels between the dynamics of Western and Central and Eastern European party systems.

In this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as 'populist' in literature-namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France's Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic's Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. Unlike rightwing populists, technocrats lack a distinctive ideological profile and tend to adopt more inclusive rhetoric by appealing to a broadly-defined community of people. When contrasted with supporters of rightwing populists, empirical analysis of supporters of Macron's and Babiš' parties shows that the two have few commonalities. Relatively few examples of such political leadership , the lack of a distinct ideological profile and the variation of their support bases suggest that one should use caution when conceptualizing technocratic populists as a distinct theoretical type.

How does perceived political corruption affect electoral preferences? Scholarship of Eastern Europe addressed this question primarily through the study of observational data. This study contributes to the existing scholarship by addressing the endogeneity problem and allows to causally interpret effects of perceived corruption on voting intentions. It combines hypotheses tested in earlier studies to investigate the impact of perceived political corruption on different electoral choices. A survey experiment in Hungary shows that exposure to political corruption makes respondents more likely to abstain from voting, less likely to support the incumbent party, and more likely to expect the anti-establishment party to win.

On the concept of “rally around the flag,” scholars often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign policy preferences among respondents exposed to negative economic primes in Russia. In line with the earlier findings on this topic, my analysis shows that participants who encounter negative economic primes report significantly less support for assertive foreign policy narratives. These results suggest that continuing economic strain may limit the Kremlin’s ability to divert public attention from internal problems through the use of assertive rhetoric.

Across Europe and many other parts of the world, traditional parties of the left seem to be in terminal decline. While there are many reasons for this, we argue that the most important was the left's shift to the center on economic issues during the late twentieth century. Although this shift made some sense in the short-term, over the long-term it had deleterious, perhaps even fatal, consequences: It watered down the left's distinctive historical profile; rendered socialist and social-democratic parties unable to take advantage of widespread discontent over the fallout from neoliberal reforms and the 2008 financial crisis; created incentives for parties to emphasize cultural and social rather than economic or class appeals; and undermined the representative nature of democracy. The shift in the left's economic profile, in short, deserves center stage in any account of its decline. Moreover, this shift and its consequences have been crucial to the rise of a nativist, populist right and to the broader problems facing democracy today in Western and Eastern Europe, as well as other parts of the world.

This paper explores the correlates of Russia’s aggressive international policy and argues that rising oil revenues increase the aggressiveness of presidential foreign-policy rhetoric. Using content analysis and machine-learning techniques, I generate a measure of aggressive discourse as the share of anti-Western sentences in Russian presidential speeches delivered between 2000 and 2016. These are analyzed using OLS regression with lagged dependent variables. I conclude that the aggressiveness of foreign-policy rhetoric in Russian presidential speeches positively correlates to oil prices. I also find no support for alternative explanations linking hawkish foreign policy to NATO expansion or domestic legitimacy concerns.

Maria Snegovaya dissects how the Kremlin reimagined Russia’s identity to support its policies both at home and abroad. It was the starting point for two of the most influential narratives in the Kremlin’s contemporary propaganda kit: the “predatory West” and the glorification of Russia’s past. Snegovaya concludes that not only is the Kremlin successfully reframing contemporary perceptions of Russia, but that its propaganda pen is not yet out of ink.

Vladimir Putin's Russia meets the classical definition of fascist state, says Maria Snegovaya, except for one factor-the Kremlin can't yet unite the public around a clearly articulated nationalist ideology. This missing piece constrains the aggressiveness of the state. Without it, the Russian people will not accept fighting foreign wars indefinitely.

Russia has been using an advanced form of hybrid warfare in Ukraine since early 2014 that relies heavily on an element of information warfare that the Russians call “reflexive control.” Reflexive control causes a stronger adversary voluntarily to choose the actions most advantageous to Russian objectives by shaping the adversary’s perceptions of the situation decisively.
Moscow has used this technique skillfully to persuade the U.S. and its European allies to remain largely passive in the face of Russia’s efforts to disrupt and dismantle Ukraine through military and non-military means. The West must become alert to the use of reflexive control techniques and find ways to counter them if it is to succeed in an era of hybrid war.
Reflexive control, and the Kremlin’s information warfare generally, is not the result of any theoretical innovation. All of the underlying concepts and most of the techniques were developed by the Soviet Union decades ago. Russian strategic theory today remains relatively unimaginative and highly dependent on the body of Soviet work with which Russia’s leaders are familiar. Russian information operations in Ukraine do not herald a new era of theoretical or doctrinal advances, although they aim, in part, to create precisely this impression. Russia’s information warfare is thus a significant challenge to the West, but not a particularly novel or insuperable one.
It relies, above all, on Russia’s ability to take advantage of pre-existing dispositions among its enemies to choose its preferred courses of action. The primary objective of the reflexive control techniques Moscow has employed in the Ukraine situation has been to persuade the West to do something its leaders mostly wanted to do in the first place, namely, remain on the sidelines as Russia dismantled Ukraine. These techniques would not have succeeded in the face of Western leaders determined to stop Russian aggression and punish or reverse Russian violations of international law.
The key elements of Russia’s reflexive control techniques in Ukraine have been:
• Denial and deception operations to conceal or obfuscate the presence of Russian forces in Ukraine, including sending in “little green men” in uniforms without insignia;
• Concealing Moscow’s goals and objectives in the conflict, which sows fear in some and allows others to persuade themselves that the Kremlin’s aims are limited and ultimately acceptable;
• Retaining superficially plausible legality for Russia’s actions by denying Moscow’s involvement in the conflict, requiring the international community to recognize Russia as an interested power rather than a party to the conflict, and pointing to supposedly-equivalent Western actions such as the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo in the 1990s and the invasion of Iraq in 2003;
• Simultaneously threatening the West with military power in the form of overflights of NATO and non-NATO countries’ airspace, threats of using Russia’s nuclear weapons, and exaggerated claims of Russia’s military prowess and success;
• The deployment of a vast and complex global effort to shape the narrative about the Ukraine conflict through formal and social media.
The results of these efforts have been mixed. Russia has kept the West from intervening materially in Ukraine, allowing itself the time to build and expand its own military involvement in the conflict. It has sowed discord within the NATO alliance and created tensions between potential adversaries about how to respond. It has not, however, fundamentally changed popular or elite attitudes about Russia’s actions in Ukraine, nor has it created an information environment favorable to Moscow.
Above all, Russia has been unable so far to translate the strategic and grand strategic advantages of its hybrid warfare strategy into major and sustainable successes on the ground in Ukraine. It appears, moreover that Moscow may be reaching a point of diminishing returns in continuing a strategy that relies in part on its unexpectedness in Ukraine. Yet the same doctrine of reflexive control has succeeded in surprising the West in Syria. The West must thus awaken itself to this strategy and to adaptations of it.

In her essay on Russia, Maria Snegovaya identifies three distinctive features of the Russian government’s system for media control. The first is a combination of selectivity and “strategic uncertainty” in the censorship regime, which offers a number of clear advantages over traditional mass repression. For example, it is less expensive to maintain, and it allows the regime to backtrack in case of overreach. The second feature is the authorities’ efforts to modify key narratives rather than trying to fully control them. Russia’s modern propaganda system has come to depend in part on the dissemination of falsehoods to sow confusion, especially beyond its borders. Finally, the authorities use a mix of economic pressure and arbitrary legal restrictions to cow or cripple domestic and international media outlets—as well as civil society groups—that threaten regime interests.

ABSTRACT: We focus on basic institutional and cultural obstacles for development of the BRICs countries. We argue that the tradition of authoritarianism and bureaucracy that provides the main support of an authoritarian leader, corruption, legal nihilism, disrespect for law (most notably by the authorities), and clientelism (most Russians believe that the best way to achieve something in life), in particular, prevent Russia’s transition to an innovative development stage.
Book · Jan 2009

Scholars on “rally ’round the flag” often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign policy preferences among respondents exposed to negative economic priors in Russia. In line with the earlier findings on this topic, my analysis shows that participants who encounter negative economic primes report significantly less support for assertive foreign policy narratives. These results suggest that continuing economic strain may limit the Kremlin’s ability to divert public attention from internal problems through the use of assertive rhetoric.