Tomila Lankina

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · Department of International Relations

This report summarises the proceedings of a conference held at LSE IDEAS in June 2023, summarising each contributor on the historical context and current state of competitive politics within four authoritarian or strong man-led powers: President Erdogan’s Turkey, Prime Minister Modi’s India, Ayatollah Khamenei’s Iran, and President Putin’s Russia.

This essay reflects upon the consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine on the sub-field of Russian studies in political science. I argue that the war has exposed some blind spots in our knowledge. Notably, it has left us struggling to understand the historically deprived communities in Russia whose values, sentiments, and vulnerabilities may be...

This chapter dissects the institution of estate (sosloviye) as pivotal to understanding long-lasting patterns of social stratification in Russian society and, relatedly, the contours, networks, and divisions within the resultant estatist public and political sphere. It focuses on the legal-policy underpinnings of the estate to understand how it fou...

In this chapter I extend insights about the channels of professional continuity discerned in Chapter 4 to focus on the institutions that socialized the next generation of Soviet citizens. I first present Russia-wide data on resilience in education as related to the estates and follow this data analysis with a qualitative account of imperial schooli...

The chapter summarizes the book’s main argument. It explains post-communist Russia’s social stratification and relatedly its democratic fortunes with reference to the social structure that predated communism. It locates the genesis of the bourgeoisie-cum-middle class, conventionally regarded as broadly supportive of democratic institutions, in the...

Stalinist repressions, epitomized by the Gulag, and grand industrialization projects warrant exploration of their implications for the social fabric of a place. I find social reproduction not only despite of but in some ways because of the communist industrial strategy. Whether inside or outside of the Gulag, Soviet industry appropriated both the h...

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist est...

This chapter discusses how the preceding analysis has wider, portable, comparative implications for understanding the drivers of variations in shades of authoritarianism and illiberalism in other communist legacy countries. I structure the chapter as follows. I first sketch out an analytical framework for a comparative analysis of two new cases: Hu...

This chapter’s analysis of post-revolutionary professional continuities is sensitive to the logics of the expertise-derived autonomy, leverage, and agency of the professional, the scholar, and the torchbearer of the enlightenment that are characteristic of modern societies, broadly and narrowly, of a totalizing revolutionary order, where those very...

This chapter engages with theories of democratic origin and persistence, late developing states (following Gerschenkron), and workforce dependencies in post-communist settings to suggest how understanding the genesis of the middle class/bourgeoisie in imperial Russia, and distinguishing it from a middle class that is state-fabricated rapidly as par...

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist est...

This chapter demonstrates that, before the Revolution, Russia had a vibrant public sphere. The institutionalization of society into dense webs of autonomous or semi-autonomous public and private institutions followed the contours of society. One’s estate continued to matter in the consolidation or extension of social networks. The Bolsheviks decima...

This chapter breaks with the typical detachment of chroniclers of Russian politics from the social wavelengths that in so many ways defy conventional periodization. Stalin may have proclaimed a classless society, and inconvenient memories were “frozen” out of discourse, yet social distinctions continued to be cognitively programmed among future gen...

If we can discern resilience not only in one’s position within estatist society but also in practices intrinsically at odds with Marxist-Leninist dogma, we would have greater confidence in the plausibility of the account of social autonomy presented here. The chapter locates this possibility in the market-reproducing values and networks among the m...

A devastating challenge to the idea of communism as a 'great leveller', this extraordinarily original, rigorous, and ambitious book debunks Marxism-inspired accounts of its equalitarian consequences. It is the first study systematically to link the genesis of the 'bourgeoisie-cum-middle class' – Imperial, Soviet, and post-communist – to Tzarist est...

We contribute to research on the democratic role of middle classes. Our paper distinguishes between middle classes emerging autonomously during gradual capitalist development, and those fabricated rapidly as part of state-led modernization. To make the case for a conceptual distinction between these groups within one national setting, we employ aut...

The chapter analyzes how state media in authoritarian states manipulate information on protest. The authors develop a Russian-language dictionary and leverage the Latent Semantic Scaling (LSS) electronic content analysis technique to identify periods during which the media are more likely to portray protests as contributing to public disorder and t...

Can economic development retard democracy, defying expectations of classic modernization theorizing? If so, under what conditions? Our article addresses the puzzle of poor democratic performance in highly urbanized and industrialized postcommunist states. We assembled an original dataset with data from Ukraine's local and national elections and con...

A growing literature explores the causes and consequences of dramatic political protests in autocracies. Yet, we know comparatively little about other forms of protests in these regimes. The Lankina Russian Protest-Event Dataset (LAruPED) facilitates the investigation of protest in Russia, a classic example of an electoral authoritarian regime. The...

Do opposition protests affect citizens’ attitudes in electoral autocracies? While existing research expects that as protests unfold in illiberal regimes support for the protesters will increase, there are only a few empirical tests of this hypothesis. Combining an original author-assembled protest event dataset with two nationally representative pu...

We analyse Russian state media’s framing of the Euromaidan protests using a novel Russian-language electronic content-analysis dictionary and method that we have developed ourselves. We find that around the time of Crimea’s annexation, the Kremlin-controlled media projected media narratives of protests as chaos and disorder, using legalistic jargon...

This report explores the processes of decentralization and reform of local government currently underway in Ukraine. After a brief introduction in Part 1 laying out the objectives of the study and the scope of the work Part 2 presents an overview of the state of play of recent reforms highlighting key dimensions of the reform as well as the wider p...

Does electoral fraud encourage post-electoral protests? To explore the likelihood that citizens would pick up on electoral irregularities perpetrated in their region and engage in post-electoral protest we analyse regional protest event data and voting results for 95,415 precincts in Russia's 2012 presidential elections. We find that regional fraud...

We extend the “fraud forensics” research to systematically explain precinct-level and regional variations in electoral manipulations in Russia’s March 2012 presidential election. Parametric last-digit frequency tests (a multivariate extension of last-digit tests) are employed to analyze fraud heterogeneity during the vote count stage. We also utili...

Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism in Europe, few scholars disagree that the past continues to shape the democratic trajectories of postcommunist states. Precommunist education has featured prominently in this literature’s bundle of “good” legacies because it ostensibly helped foster resistance to communism. The authors propose a dif...

There is a rich body of theorizing on the diffusion of democracy across space and time. There is also an emerging scholarship on authoritarian diffusion. The dynamics of the interaction between external democratic and autocratic diffusion processes and their effects on national and sub-national political regime outcomes have received scant attentio...

This essay situates Boris Nemtsov as an individual in the broader sweep of Russia’s regional—and national—history. To what extent is the democratic development of particular regions a result of the force, drive, and charisma of particular transformational leaders? And, to what extent is Nemtsov himself a product of the particular social milieu cond...

The paper analyzes the regional dimension of Russia’s protests and its links to recent nationwide contentious politics based on an analysis of an author-constructed protest dataset for the period 2007-2012. The data indicate high levels of civic activism and a growing trend of the politicization of the Russian citizenry. Nevertheless, the analysis...

Much of the commentary on Russia’s recent interventions in the near abroad, most notably the March 2014 annexation of the Crimea, has focused on Russia’s hard power — its geopolitical designs in the post-Soviet neighbourhood, ostensible security vulnerabilities to NATO’s eastward expansion, strategic objectives and military capabilities. These ques...

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with All-Russia People’s Front activists in his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, 10 April 2014. EPA/MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV / RIA NOVOSTI / KREMLIN POOL MANDATORY CREDIT

Volunteers of a self-defense group lean on their shields while waiting to attend the swearing in of the first unit of a pro-Russian armed force, dubbed the “military forces of the autonomous republic of Crimea” in the Crimean central city of Simferopol. (Vadim Ghirda/ AP)

This article explores the influence of Protestant missionaries on male–female educational inequalities in colonial India. Causal mechanisms drawn from the sociology and economics of religion highlight the importance of religious competition for the provision of public goods. Competition between religious and secular groups spurred missionaries to p...

The article explores imperial human capital affects on current human capital and democracy variations in Russia's regions based on author-constructed datasets with imperial and post-communist statistics. Pre-communist education is a significant predictor of modernisation, which in studies of Russian regions explains a large share of regional democr...

Why are some former colonies more democratic than others? The British Empire has been singled out in the debates on colonialism for its benign influence on democracy. Much of this scholarship has focused on colonialism's institutional legacies; has neglected to distinguish among the actors associated with colonialism; and has been nation-state focu...

Historical legacies, particularly imperial tutelage and religion, have featured prominently in recent scholarship on political regime variations in post-communist settings, challenging earlier temporally proximate explanations. The overlap between tutelage, geography, and religion has complicated the uncovering of the spatially uneven effects of th...

Historical legacies, particularly imperial tutelage and religion, have featured prominently in recent scholarship on political regime variations in post-communist settings, challenging earlier temporally proximate explanations. The overlap between tutelage, geography, and religion has complicated the uncovering of the spatially uneven effects of th...

Since 1991, Russia has received a large volume of funding from Western donors to aid its political and economic transformation. The European Union accounts for a substantial share of this funding, amounting to over 2.6 billion euros. Therefore, it is surprising that virtually no systematic scholarship exists on the pattern of aid choices and alloca...

This article investigates the working of the 1999 Act of Parliament in relation to the electoral process. One of the more controversial measures in the 1999 Act was the preservation of the representation of the hereditary element in the House of Lords. In the 2007-2008 session of Parliament, Lord Avebury introduced the House of Lords (Amendment) Bi...

The article looks at the the regional developments of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, focusing on how territories have become fragmented. Implications for the political and economic futures of the country are considered. The center-regional dynamics and hyper-federalism of Russia during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin pro...

The number of social protests in Russia is growing, though the absolute number of participants remains relatively small. Overall, the authorities are suppressing a smaller number of protests now than they were two years ago. Political protests are more numerous than economic ones and protesters are increasingly targeting national leaders, though pr...

Exposure to democratic values has been regarded as a significant factor in the diffusion of democracy, and has also been linked through conditionality to assistance from Western agencies. Diffusion and the targeting of such assistance in a country of the size of Russia is likely to be uneven, however, implying uneven effects, as public authorities,...

There is now a considerable body of literature on decentralization in diverse national contexts. Ascertaining factors that drive local accountability and performance have been the key concerns of these studies. Diverse ethodological instruments and approaches have been used—from large-n statistical analyses to in-depth case study techniques. And ye...

Two political scientists address questions posed by the puzzling survival of the institution of elected city mayors in Russia despite the efforts of the national government to abolish it. Based on datasets not only of local government reforms across all the regions but also of the regional component of European Union aid, statistical analysis is us...

After decades of central planning, decentralization has been made a centrepiece of political reforms in post-communist states. Despite all the normative hype and rhetoric, we still know very little about the impact of decentralization on local populations. This study, which examines local social services and economic promotion in the Czech Republic...

The previous chapters have suggested that socioeconomic or formal institutional intergovernmental arrangements only partly explain performance variations in our eight cases. This chapter investigates political influences on local performance focusing on the role of political parties. The chapter is structured as follows. First, we discuss the impor...

When we set out on our research voyage to explore municipal performance in Central and Eastern Europe, we were struck by enormous within-country variation in local outcomes. These patterns defied conventional wisdom about the role of the structural ‘givens’ and broader national or regional institutional frameworks in charting a town’s developmental...

Three fields of activity feature prominently in the developmental programmes of post-communist municipalities. First, local governments in the post-communist states strive to attract direct investment, national or foreign. The main responsibility for attracting direct investment lies with the national level. Within this general national framework,...

The social policy areas that we chose to investigate are families in crisis and childcare services. The social transitions in post-communist settings resulted in a chain reaction of unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, family breakdowns or abuse, and abandoned or neglected children. These problems are not limited to, but are much more widespread in t...

The eight cities have variable structural conditions and regional development disparities. These range from their geographic location, through the proximity of dynamic urban centres, to the availability of transportation links, and the economic infrastructures and industries inherited from the Soviet period. Although on the face of it, the high rat...

In Chapters 2 and 3 we have demonstrated that there are considerable local government performance variations in Central and Eastern Europe. Not only are there significant differences between countries, but also between towns located in the same state. Moreover, even within one municipality there may be discrepancies between the quality of economic...

"What are the democracy effects of decentralisation reforms and projects? Most developing countries have launched decentralisation reforms for the purpose of improving service delivery, local development and management. In these reforms and projects, however, governments, international development agencies and large non-governmental organisations (...

"Karelia is a forestry-rich region on Russias northwestern frontier. This article shows how institutional arrangements for local government were a product of contending efforts of western donors and other transnational actors, the federal and regional governments, and the municipalities. Russias re-centralising reforms and broader authoritarian con...

Why do some newly-established democratic institutions survive while others perish? The authors of the article turn to the problem of answering this question using the example of election of city mayors in Russia. They address themselves to the puzzle of the survival of the institution of elected city mayors despite the efforts of the national gover...

"Karelia is a forestry-rich region on Russia's Northwestern frontier. This article shows how institutional arrangements for local government were a product of contending efforts of Western donors and other transnational actors, the federal and regional governments, as well as municipalities. Russia's federal recentralizing reforms and broader autho...

The article examines the impact of geographical proximity to the West and of Western aid on democracy in Russia's regions and advances a geographic incrementalist theory of democratization. Even when national politicians exhibit authoritarian tendencies, diffusion processes and targeted foreign aid help advance democratization at the subnational le...

An expert on local government in Russia analyzes patterns of aid allocation that are a key component defining the relationship between the EU and Russia. In an analysis of donor intentions and choices based on a dataset of all EU projects conducted in Russia's regions during 1991-2005, as well as interviews with EU and Russian officials involved in...

An expert on local government in Russia analyzes patterns of aid allocation that are a key component defining the relationship between the EU and Russia. In an analysis of donor intentions and choices based on a dataset of all EU projects conducted in Russia's regions during 1991–2005, as well as interviews with EU and Russian officials involved in...

Governing the Locals demonstrates that with the exception of a brief period in 1990-92 when the local soviets fostered mass mobilization, local governments in post-Soviet Russia have actively constrained grass-roots activism. Rather than serving as instruments of the 'schooling in civil society,' or of 'making democracy work'_as the conventional wi...

Local government has been a central item on the reform agendas of the two trailblazers of democracy in post-socialist Central Eastern Europe — Poland and Hungary (Cielecka and Gibson 1995; Coulson, 1995: 24); (Davey 1995: 57).2 Hungary is known to have gone the furthest in both ideas and practice in this respect — a fact made possible due to a stro...

This article is structured as follows. The first section is a comparative discussion of the impact of local governments on social activism. It identifies the peculiar features of local government, not just in the Soviet Union and Russia but also in other settings, which make local governments potentially crucial instruments of mass mobilisation. Th...

Томила Ланкина ставит проблему местного самоуправления в титульных республиках Российской Федерации в контексте взаимоотношений этих республик и федерального центра. Автор считает, что усилия федерального центра по поддержке гражданских институтов и местного самоуправления в этих республиках наталкиваются на препятствия, выражающиеся в существовани...

Russia's policy towards the Cossacks may prove detrimental to the development of federalism in Russia. Their rehabilitation is important for the rebirth of Russian culture. Yet, the Cossacks as a social‐military institution, may further harm the relations between ethnic Russians and non‐Russians in the Caucasus, which may revive the dispute over th...

Thesis (D. Phil.)--University of Oxford, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 314-325).