Join the Jordan Center at NYU for a discussion of how the cancellation of elections in Russia’s large cities has affected public attitudes toward the authorities.

One feature of democratic decline in Russia has been the cancellation of regional and local elections. Over the past 15 years, most Russian cities have replaced their directly elected mayors with chief executives that are, de facto, appointed.  How do voters react to these reforms.?  Does the cancellation of elections affect their approval of the regime? Why or why not? A new paper from Ora John Reuter utilizes the largest dataset on public opinion ever assembled in Russia–containing almost 2 million polling responses drawn from two decades of polling by Russia’s top polling agencies–to analyze how the cancellation of elections in Russia’s large cities has affected public attitudes toward the authorities. This data is combined with electoral results to further examine whether election cancellation affects ruling party vote totals in other elections.

Speaker

Ora John Reuter, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Senior Researcher, Higher School of Economics-Moscow