Kirill Kalinin

University of Michigan | U-M · Department of Political Science

Over the 2000s Russian elections have become increasingly unfree and unfair, characterized by suppression of electoral competition, rising levels of administrative interference and drastic growth of electoral frauds. In this paper I propose that the pattern of fraudulent elections in Russia can be explained by combining an idea about federalism wit...

The consistency and effectiveness of Russia’s assertive foreign policy has earned Putin, both domestically and internationally, the image of a powerful and ambitious leader with a strategic plan to re-establish the Russian empire and defend Russia’s core national interests. Speculation among scholars and practitioners regarding the existence of suc...

This study sheds new light on whether responses to public opinion polls, namely, preference falsification, can affect the level of election fraud by employing Kuran’s model of preference falsification, which is empirically tested on the data collected from the most recent presidential campaign in Russia (2012). My research findings reveal the prese...

Using data from a nearly comprehensive set of the world’s electoral democracies, 1992–2014, this article empirically evaluates the impact of presidentialism upon legislative fragmentation. The analysis demonstrates that the impact is strong, consistent across a wide variety of political contexts, and conditioned by the type of presidential regime,...

In authoritarian regimes, election polls can be vastly polluted by measurement error, namely the social desirability bias, which can contribute to substantial inflation in the publicized estimates of an autocrat's electoral support and voter turnout, seeming to validate falsified election outcomes that match the inflated estimates. This study provi...

This paper introduces a novel theoretic approach towards understanding election fraud under autocracies, by suggesting a signaling model of election fraud and testing its basic implications on unique datasets from Russian and cross-national settings. According to the theory, the heads of subnational units can send their signals about loyalty to the...

Vladimir Putin's skyrocketing approval ratings originate from current political developments involving the annexation of Crimea, the para-military conflict in South-Eastern Ukraine, and the rapid elevation of political tensions between Russia and the West. The hearts and minds of Russians are also affected by a mighty state propaganda machine, whic...

This study throws new light on whether public opinion polls, namely, preference falsification, can affect the level of election fraud by employing Kuran's model of preference falsification, which is empirically tested using the data collected from the most recent presidential campaign in Russia (2012). My research findings reveal the presence of st...

We argue that the phenomenon of fraudulent elections in Russia can be explained by combining a theory of federalism with a formal signaling game model. The growth of electoral frauds from the mid-1990s to the 2000s can be explained by changes in rational strategies of the governors tied to the evolution of Russian federal relations. If in the mid-1...

Growing authoritarian tendencies in Russian politics pose the problem of widespread electoral fraud designed to boost electoral support for Kremlin presidential candidates and parties, and to suppress political competitors. We use tests based on the second-digits of polling station level data from the Russian Duma elections of 2007 and presidential...

Elections in Russia are widely believed to be fraudulent in various ways, a claim some support especially by looking at voter turnout, others by looking at vote counts' digits. We use polling station level data from the Russian Duma elections of 2003 and 2007 and presidential elections of 2004 and 2008 to examine how several methods for diagnosing...

Popularity of using quantities of interest in political research relies on the fact that these are substantively easier to interpret and enable to assess the uncertainty surrounding any quantity of interest. Since there are multiple estimation techniques to derive the quantities of interest – a researcher faces dilemma which one to use. In my resea...