Research

When do anti-regime messages persuade people living in authoritarian regimes to update their political attitudes? The literature on authoritarian politics has devoted considerable attention to understanding how pro-regime propaganda affects citizens' attitudes, but far less to the converse: when and how anti-regime messaging is effective at bursting the regime's information bubble. We argue that source credibility helps explain why some kinds of anti-regime messages influence opinions while others do not. To illustrate this argument, we draw on observational and experimental survey data collected in Russia after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We pair time-series data with three survey experiments, which together indicate that messages criticizing the regime and its policies are more persuasive when they come from people with subject-matter expertise.

Nation-building has been studied across a diverse set of cases and temporal contexts ranging from the advent of nation states and mass education to the integration of new immigrants in recent waves of displacement. Most research on nation-building is limited by the scope of the policy, its non-random implementation, or data availability, rendering causal identification rare and therefore the broader effects of such policies opaque. This study leverages both the opportune timing of a monolingual education policy and the selective inclusion of some adjacent grade cohorts and not others to shed light onto the real time repercussions of a large-scale nation-building policy in Estonia. Data from pre- and post-implementation waves of an original survey will be leveraged in a triple difference-in-differences design and coupled with rich qualitative data to probe theories of identification, backlash, and assimilation as well as their underlying mechanisms.

As Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many projected that public support for the war would only last until the number of casualties grew to an intolerable level. So far this backlash has not occurred, but as the war drags on and casualties mount, this prediction becomes increasingly relevant. A substantial literature on the relationship between casualty perceptions and war support suggests that perceptions of casualties should attenuate war support. However, the empirical evidence that supports this conclusion is drawn almost entirely from the United States and other Western democracies. Additionally, existing research provides little insight into how personal exposure to casualties affects attitudes toward military action. In this paper, we use high-frequency survey data to analyze the direct effect of experiences with casualties on wartime attitudes in Russia. We show that the death of a friend radicalizes Russians, making them more supportive of the war. The death of a family member does not affect war support, but does reduce their evaluation of how successfully the war is going. We then investigate the mechanisms underlying these effects -- namely, the role of loss ``sense-making,'' changes in exposure to state-sponsored information, and perceptions of economic well-being.