Bryn Rosenfeld

Cornell University | CU · Department of Government

Existing literature recognizes growing threats to press freedom around the world and documents changes in the tools used to stifle the independent press. However, few studies investigate how independent media respond to state pressure in an autocracy, documenting the impact of tactics that stop short of shuttering alternatives to state media. Do in...

This commentary on Belarus’ 2020 uprising discusses the symposium’s contributions to understanding public opinion, protest, and regime crisis in countries like Belarus, and the case of Belarus itself.

Existing literature recognizes growing threats to press freedom around the world and documents changes in the tools used to stifle independent press. However, few studies investigate how independent media respond to state pressure. Do independent outlets comply, orienting coverage to favor regime interests? Or does repression encourage more negativ...

This chapter studies the vocabulary and practice of state-led, middle-class growth in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country whose post-independence development has been shaped by both Soviet legacies and the experience of its East Asian neighbors. It suggests how the argument about Kazakhstan might travel beyond the post-communist region and speak to...

This chapter uses survey data to investigate the political orientations and career aspirations of students who intend to join Russia's public-sector. It examines a range of factors highlighted by existing cross-national research on public employment in established democracies and developing states. It also emphasizes how the pre-existing networks a...

This chapter constructs individual-level measures of class, career trajectories, and democracy support, using a large cross-national survey dataset. It provides detailed evidence on individual employment histories from twenty-seven post-communist countries selected for their common history of state employment and communism. It also shows that state...

This chapter raises micro-foundational questions about the expectation that a rising middle-class will lead a democratic civic revolution. It focuses on political behavior and examines observed patterns of mobilized contention during Russia's 2011–2012 electoral cycle by nesting a unique series of protest surveys within detailed data on the populat...

This chapter concludes with implications of the evidence presented for the literatures on development and democratization, resource states, and protest mobilization. It demonstrates that the logic of middle-class state dependency holds not only in states where the economy is based on extractive industries. It also places the argument in a broader c...

This chapter clarifies the variation in middle-class regime preferences and details the individual-level logic of state dependency. It discusses key concepts and descriptive data on the middle-classes and state economic engagement in the countries under study. It also captures the distinction between highly educated white-collar and professional st...

This chapter seeks to expand the grasp of authoritarian resilience and bottom-up pressures for democratization in states where economic growth is increasing the size of the middle-class. It explains why and under what conditions growth of the middle-class may not increase popular pressure on regimes to democratize. It also looks at a wide array of...

This chapter provides a background on Ukraine when it was struggling to consolidate democracy. It examines existing theories that expect human capital formation and a growing middle-class to enhance the autocratic middle-class prospects for democratization. By focusing on the case of Ukraine, it also explores whether dependence on the state for eco...

Scholars have long viewed the middle class as an agent of democratization. This article provides the first rigorous cross-national analysis of middle class regime preferences, systematically investigating the importance of an authoritarian state’s economic relationship with the middle class. Using detailed survey data on individual employment histo...

This chapter investigates the political orientations and career aspirations of students who intend to join the state sector in Russia, using original survey data from three elite Russian universities. The analysis focuses on whether and how Russia’s future public servants differ from others in their views of the importance of political freedom, ord...

While a large literature recognizes that economic crises threaten the stability of electoral autocracies, we know relatively little about how citizens form economic perceptions and how they attribute blame for worsening conditions in these regimes. To gain traction on these questions, I exploit subnational variation in economic performance across R...

Scholars increasingly rely on indirect questioning techniques to reduce social desirability bias and item nonresponse for sensitive survey questions. The major drawback of these approaches, however, is their inefficiency relative to direct questioning. We show how to improve the statistical analysis of the list experiment, randomized response techn...

A large literature expects rising middle classes to promote democracy. However, few studies provide direct evidence on this group in nondemocratic settings. This article focuses on politically important differentiation within the middle classes, arguing that middle-class growth in state-dependent sectors weakens potential coalitions in support of d...

When studying sensitive issues, including corruption, prejudice, and sexual behavior, researchers have increasingly relied upon indirect questioning techniques to mitigate such known problems of direct survey questions as underreporting and nonresponse. However, there have been surprisingly few empirical validation studies of these indirect techniq...