Henry E. Hale's research while affiliated with George Washington University and other places
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Publications (80)
New information technologies increasingly allow autocrats to shape public opinion outside their borders. Regimes like Russia and China spend millions on such efforts, raising concerns that they may be swaying foreign publics through their illiberal nationalist appeals. We know little, though, about the actual impact of such endeavors. We ask here:...
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced governments worldwide—many that previously prioritized austerity—to approve large relief packages. Political economy tells us that politicians will try to profit from this electorally, but much remains unknown about precisely how pandemic relief might influence voting intentions. Then-President Donald Trump foregrou...
This article analyses the changing relevance of ethnolinguistic characteristics as predictors of political attitudes in Ukraine, drawing on surveys conducted before and after the Euromaidan revolution and Russian aggression. We argue that the usefulness of certain characteristics as measures of ethnic identity reflects their cognitive and social us...
When international conflict causes an authoritarian leader’s popularity to soar, extant theories lead us to treat such “rallying” as sincere preference change, the product of surging patriotism or cowed media. This study advances a theory of less-than-fully sincere rallying more appropriate for nondemocratic settings, characterizing it as at least...
Do populist leaders tend to win support from the same kinds of people abroad as they do at home? Since we know public opinion can shape foreign policy, the answer is important for understanding populists' potential to carry out their typically anti-establishment international agendas. We address this question through original surveys in three South...
A new wave of scholarship has made major advances in how we understand the politics of civilizational identity by drawing powerfully from conceptual tools developed over the years to study other forms of identity. What unites this wave is treating civilizations not as distinctive “things” that might “clash” but as meaningful social imaginings. This...
The sudden onset of COVID-19 has challenged many social scientists to proceed without a robust theoretical and empirical foundation upon which to build. Addressing this challenge, particularly as it pertains to Eurasia, our multinational group of scholars draws on past and ongoing research to suggest a roadmap for a new pandemic politics research s...
“Civilization” is surely among those concepts that are the most widely used in world political discourse but taken least seriously by contemporary social science. We argue for jettisoning this concept’s Huntingtonian baggage, which has led scholarship into a dead end, and developing a new body of theory on a different foundation, one grounded stron...
Observers frequently link Donald Trump’s rise to a global wave of populism that includes everything from Brexit to the election of far-right leaders in Brazil and Austria. The extent and sources of foreign support for Trump, however, have yet to be subjected to systematic public opinion research. This omission is important: Since we know public opi...
How does ethnicity influence mass support for radical reforms? Treating ethnicity as a set of cognitively useful categories serving both ethnocentric and inclusive ends, we argue people can strive toward civic visions for their state yet interpret obstacles through “ethnic” lenses. We label this phenomenon aspirational identity politics, prominent...
We explore the influence of autocratic endorsements by studying Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s influence in Europe. Populists often praise Putin as an avatar of what they consider to be “strong leadership,” but we know little about Putin’s effect outside Russia (Goscilo 2013, Hale 2011). Existing studies outside Russia, to the extent...
Do international economic sanctions backfire politically, resulting in increased rather than decreased domestic support for targeted state leaders? Backfire arguments are common, but researchers have only recently begun systematically studying sanctions’ impact on target-state public opinion, not yet fully unpacking different possible backfire mech...
We know from prior research that non-democratic regimes can become vulnerable when elites anticipate succession at the top, but we know little about what shapes these elites’ expectations. This study examines connections between such expectations and Russia’s relationships to the outside world. Analysis of elite opinion data from the 2016 Survey of...
Brancati and Lucardi’s findings on the absence of “democracy protest” diffusion across borders raise important questions for the future of protest studies. I argue that this subfield would benefit from a stronger engagement with theory (in general) and from a “patronal politics” perspective (in particular) when it comes to researching protest in no...
Russia’s political system must be understood as inherently dynamic, with constant regime change being essential to how the regime operates and survives. This regime change does not proceed monotonically toward ever tighter authoritarianism, but can move in both liberal and repressive directions at different times. While on aggregate the trend has b...
The Regional Roots of Russia's Political Regime. By William R. Reisinger and Bryon J. Moraski. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. ix, 268 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Figures. Tables. Maps. $75.00, hard bound. - Volume 77 Issue 3 - Henry E. Hale
How do people form beliefs about the factual content of major events when established geopolitical orders are violently challenged? Here, we address the tragic events of 2 May 2014, in Odesa, Ukraine. There, Euromaidan protest movement supporters and opponents clashed following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the onset of the Donbas conflict, cul...
Why do some countries with presidentialist constitutions feature more political closure than others at a given time? A quantitative study of post-Soviet countries since independence finds that much of the observed variation in political closure reflects timing, or the particular point at which a country happens to be within a regime cycle, rather t...
Building on past survey-based studies of ethnic identity, we employ the case of Ukraine to demonstrate the importance of taking seriously the multidimensionality of ethnicity, even in a country that is regarded as deeply divided. Drawing on relational theory, we identify four dimensions of ethnicity that are each important in distinctive ways in Uk...
Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics. By Way Lucan . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 274p. $44.95. - Volume 15 Issue 2 - Henry E. Hale
Under what conditions do individuals withdraw support from dominant parties in nondemocratic regimes? Employing an original panel survey, we measure the same individuals’ support for Russia's dominant party first at the peak of its dominance in 2008 and again shortly after it suffered a cascading defection of regime supporters in 2011–12. This allo...
Russian politics from the tsars through Vladimir Putin has been shaped by patronalism, a social equilibrium in which personal connections dominate, collective action happens primarily through individualized punishments and rewards, and trends in the political system reflect changing patterns of co-ordination among nationwide networks of actual acqu...
Our failure to come to consensus on the causes of ethnic conflict stems in part from disagreement on the field’s most basic concept, ethnicity. Yet surprisingly little research directly addresses the fundamental question of what ethnicity is, including whether it inherently involves conflictual behavior. New research is increasingly redressing this...
This book examines the prospects for advancing reform in Ukraine in the wake of the February 2014 Euromaidan revolution. It examines six crucial areas of reform: identity-memory divides, corruption, constitution, judiciary, patrimonialism and the oligarchs, and the economy. On each of these topics, the book provides one chapter that focuses on Ukra...
The concluding chapter by Henry Hale and Robert Orttung identifies several common threads running through the chapters in the volume. Among these are the importance of taking into account that formal institutions will not work the same way they do in Western countries thanks to local informal practices, the difference between deeply embedded obstac...
A quarter century after the USSR’s breakup, the region it occupied has become more rather than less authoritarian on average. The rise has been neither steep nor steady, however, and the dominant regional pattern has been regime cycling, with movement both toward and away from authoritarianism at different points in time. Key causes are the tenacio...
This chapter analyses and compares the results of the 2013 and 2014 NEORUSS surveys. It finds that attitudes regarding such typically ‘nationalist’ issues as ethnic pride and ethnocentrism had changed very little after Russia’s annexation of Crimea–possibly because Russians had scored high on these issues already prior to the Crimean annexation. Wh...
Nationalism is featuring increasingly in Russian society and public discourse; not least as a reaction to what many Russians see as the uncontrolled influx of labour migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Russian nationalism, previously dominated by ‘imperial’ tendencies–pride in a large, strong and multi-ethnic state able to project its infl...
Nationalism has attracted scholarly attention in part because of the strong emotive power it displays; yet research on nationalism has tended not to engage with findings from psychology in much depth. The field is thus divided into three main theories. A rational choice approach finds that psychological phenomena like attachment and emotion tend to...
Democratic Theory and Causal Methodology in Comparative Politics. By Lichbach Mark I. . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 245p. $85.00 cloth, $32.99 paper. - Volume 13 Issue 1 - Henry E. Hale
Despite the tumult associated with the national elections of 2011 and 2012, Putin's regime retains broad and deep connections with the electorate, but ominous signs of erosion portend bigger problems despite the coercive force and other resources at the authorities' disposal.
This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have...
The dramatic Russian winter of 2011–12, featuring the largest street protests Moscow has seen since the 1990s, gave new vigor to speculation on the future of Russia’s regime, and the prospect of major democratizing change suddenly came to appear more imminent.1 The present chapter addresses this question by discussing the internal logic of Russia’s...
Works on the 1848 revolutions, 1989 collapse of European communism, 1998–2005 postcommunist color revolutions, and 2011 Arab uprisings frequently cross-reference each other, implying what is called here the concept of a “regime change cascade.” Research on these “Big Four” events shows that cascading can occur in protest calling for regime change a...
How do formal constitutions impact prospects for democratization? Most answers focus on how rules of the game in place during a transition process guide behavior in ways facilitating democratic stability, progress, or breakdown. At the same time, a growing body of work calls this entire enterprise into question by arguing that formal institutions r...
The article presents new survey research, sensitive to local understandings of key terms, that helps resolve a longstanding debate on whether Russian public opinion generally supports democracy or authoritarianism. The central conclusion is that while Russians differ amongst themselves, they are best understood not as autocratic but as generally su...
How do formal constitutions impact the prospects for democratization in hybrid regimes, where corruption is typically high and rule of law weak? It is often assumed either that they set “rules of the game,” having effects by being followed, or that they do not matter, being overwhelmed by informal politics. In fact, a logic of collective action rev...
Measuring Democracy: A Bridge Between Scholarship and Politics. By MunckGerardo L.. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 200p. $ 28.00. - Volume 9 Issue 2 - Henry E. Hale
The 2010 presidential election shows that Ukraine is both a surprisingly stable electoral democracy and a disturbingly corrupt one. The corruption, moreover, may have a lot to do with the stability.
During the 2007-2008 election cycle, the victorious United Russia Party and Dmitri Medvedev pledged to continue the status quo, but voters also genuinely hoped that it would be Medvedev rather than Putin at the helm.
Most Eurasian countries' political systems are not accurately described as some version of either democracy or authoritarianism. Nor does it advance social science to study each of these countries' political systems as being completely unique, sharing no significant commonalities with those of other countries. Instead, it is more fruitful to unders...
After the Orange Revolution, Ukraine has become the only post-Soviet country since the mid-1990s to transition clearly to democracy and one of only two cases worldwide where a true “electoral revolution” actually produced a democratic breakthrough. At the same time, Ukraine has experienced exceptionally unruly political competition and low-quality...
What leads people to vote for incumbent presidents in hybrid regimes -political systems that allow at least some real opposition to compete in elections but that greatly advantage the authorities? Here, the case of Russia is analyzed through survey research conducted as part of the Russian Election Studies (RES) series. The RES has queried national...
Stephen Kotkin is surely right that Russia cannot be understood fully through the lens of its elections and that it is conceptually risky for political scientists to treat U.S. democracy as its analytical point of departure. He also makes a good point that governance, institutional quality, and actual state performance need to be studied along with...
Why would elites or masses in an ethnically distinct region ever opt for “alien rule” over national independence? While separatist movements tend to create the most drama and make the most headlines, mass media and most scholarly accounts pay far less attention to ethnic groups opting to stay in a union state dominated by other groups. Yet such uni...
Ethnofederalism has been blamed for secessionism in the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, yet it is also touted as an important way of preventing ethnic conflict. Indeed, ethnofederalism is a double-edged sword, potentially generating both centrifugal and centripetal dynamics. Which way it ultimately cuts depends not only on context and institu...
Despite implicating ethnicity in everything from civil war to economic failure, researchers seldom consult psychological research when addressing the most basic question: What is ethnicity? The result is a radical scholarly divide generating contradictory recommendations for solving ethnic conflict. Research into how the human brain actually works...
Why do some countries emerging from autocratic rule feature competition between strong programmatic parties while others become preserves of clientelism? The present chapter contributes to an answer in several ways. First, it urges social scientists to think of clientelistic electoral competition not only in terms of clientelistic parties but also...
What impact have Eurasia's 2003e2005 ''colored revolutions'' had on the state of democ-racy and autocracy in the region? The logic of patronal presidentialism, a set of institutions common to post-Soviet countries, suggests that the revolutions are at root succession struggles more than democratic breakthroughs generated by civic activists and fore...
Russia poses a major puzzle for theorists of party development. Virtually every classic work takes parties to be inevitable and essential to electoral competition, but Russia remains highly nonpartisan more than fifteen years after Gorbachev first launched his democratizing reforms. The problem is that theories of party development lack a –control...
Research on regime change has often wound up chasing events in the post-Soviet world because it has frequently assumed that regime change, if not simple instability, implies a trajectory toward a regime-type endpoint like democracy or autocracy. A supplemental approach recognizes that regime change can be cyclic, not just progressive, regressive, o...
Why do some ethnofederal states survive while others collapse? The
puzzle is particularly stark in the case of the former Soviet Union: the
multiethnic Russian Federation has managed to survive intact the
transition from totalitarian rule, whereas the multiethnic USSR
disintegrated. The critical distinction between the USSR and Russia lies
in...
Political party development in transitional polities can usefully be understood to emerge from imperfect competition in a market for electoral services in which candidates are consumers. The roots of weak party development are potentially to be found not only in institutional design and social cleavages, but also in the possible presence of strong...
Comparative political science has developed a number of perspectives by which one can understand the emergence of different kinds of party systems in different countries. The dominant school of thought argues that party systems are the product of deep social cleavages as mediated, channeled and influenced by political (especially electoral) institu...
Three experts on Russian elections analyze the surprising degree to which Russian voters supported their leaders, especially Putin, in the December 2003 Duma elections and the March 2004 presidential election. Drawing on the results of surveys of a nationally representative sample of Russians of voting age made between December 19, 2003, and Februa...
Although scholars often treat “ethnicity” as one of the most important phenomena in politics, nothing close to a consensus has emerged about not only what its effects are but also what it is. Theorists typically divide this debate into two camps, usually dubbed “primordialism” and “constructivism,” but these categories are unhelpful and actually ob...
The United Russia Party, burst onto the political scene with a strong second-place showing in the late 1999 elections to Russia's parliament (Duma), and then won a stunning majority in the 2003 elections. Most accounts have treated United Russia as simply the next in a succession of Kremlin-based "parties of power," including Russia's Choice (1993)...
Federal states in which component regions are invested with distinct ethnic content are more likely to collapse when they contain a core ethnic region, a single ethnic region enjoying pronounced superiority in population. Dividing a dominant group into multiple federal regions reduces these dangers. A study of world casesfindsthat all ethnofederal...
A political scientist and specialist on Russian electoral and ethnic politics provides an explanation of machine politics in Russia's regions that accounts for the great variation in the power of these machines. The focus is on distinguishing among the economic and ethnic legacies of the Soviet period, the effects of the transition itself, and the...
This essay seeks to assess (1) the likelihood that the Russian Federation will collapse in the foreseeable future and (2) the possible forms that such a dissolution might take. The latter question is extremely important, since it may determine whether a fragmented Russia would join the EU or bring the world its second nuclear war. Finally, we seek...
The collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s taught the world that ethnic separatism can pose a grave threat even to the most powerful of countries. Canada’s flirtation with breakup in 1995 illustrates that this danger is not limited to new or postcommunist democracies. In each of these ethnic “hotspots, ” however, one also finds ethn...
This article asks why some ethnically distinct regions fight fiercely to secede while others struggle to save the same multinational state. It tests competing explanations using a new dataset containing forty-five cases, significantly more than any previous study in the Soviet setting. The empirical results confirm arguments that the most separatis...
A detailed, focused comparison of six single‐mandate Duma election contests in the Russian republic of Bashkortostan in 1993 reveals that state executive power, campaign quality and ‘institutionalized electorates’ best explain which candidates emerged victorious. Every candidate backed by the republic's top authorities won, but by methods better de...
This paper develops the concept of a “regime change cascade” as it has been nascent in works on the 1848 revolutions, the 1989 collapse of European communism, the 1998-2005 postcommunist color revolutions, and the 2011 Arab uprisings--events that are frequently cross-referenced as points of comparison by analysts of each and thus dubbed the “Big Fo...
One might be tempted to call President Vladimir Putin's victory in the March 14, 2004 presidential election a cakewalk. But in a real cakewalk everybody has an equal chance to win. Instead, in Russia, biased state-controlled media blatantly reinforced the ratings of a candidate who had regularly been polling between 70 and 80 percent among likely v...
Citations
... Perioden studert her (2015-2020) var preget av forsterket autoritaert styre internt i Russland, tiltagende selvhevdelse eksternt, og et frysepunkt i forholdet til Vesten, Russlands «Andre» i uminnelige tider. Da Putin kom tilbake som president i 2012 markerte dette et autoritaert, konservativt og skarpt anti-vestlig skifte på hjemmebane, som for alvor spredte seg til den internasjonale arena med militaeroperasjonene i Ukraina og Syria fra henholdsvis 2014 og 2015 (Laruelle, 2016;Morozov, 2015;Neumann, 2016;Sharafutdinova, 2014;Wilhelmsen, 2019;Østbø, 2017). Foreliggende artikkel viser hvordan hjemlig undertrykkelse og internasjonal selvhevdelse har forsterket hverandre gjennom diskursiv avpolitiseringen i denne perioden. ...
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... Довоєнний фінансовий сектор України був відносно недорозвиненим і значною мірою спирався на банки. Фінансова нерозвиненість країни зумовлена як досвідом постсоціалістичного переходу, так і низькою якістю її ринкових інститутів (Pivovarsky, 2016). На початку 1990-х років багато українців втратили більшу частину своїх накопичених рублевих заощаджень через розпад Радянського Союзу та подальшу гіперінфляцію. ...
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... year history, Nations and Nationalism has only published a handful of articles by Ukrainian scholars (Szporluk 1998;Kulyk 2011;Mokrushyna 2013;Kozachenko 2021;Kulyk and Hale 2021). For example, Kulyk (2011) exposed through Ukraine the importance of understanding what a linguistically diverse society looks like as a new and important way to study political attitudes by disaggregating between "language practice" (i.e. ...
... A striking example is the popularity boost enjoyed by George W. Bush after 11 September 2001 whose approval rating increased from 51% on 10 September to 86% on 15 September (Hetherington and Nelson, 2003). Similarly, according to official Russian polls, Vladimir Putin enjoyed a substantial boost to his popularity following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 (Hale, 2022). One common explanation for the rally effect is the public's desire for national unity in the face of a common external threat. ...
... Given the importance of civilization as a point of reference for both domestic and global actors, a more extensive investigation of its place in far-right politics should interest an array of scholars (Chebankova and Dutkiewicz 2021;Hale and Laruelle 2021). By focusing on the role of elite discourse in creating civilizational identity, this article contributes to the growing scholarly literature that treats civilizations as socially constructed, supranational forms of identification (Hale and Laruelle 2021). ...
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... If civilizationism does resonate among the public, to what extent do individuals' understandings of civilization correspond with those constructed by leaders? Initial research in this area finds that multiple situational factors influence citizens' adoption of a civilizational identity and their understanding of it, suggesting this is a valuable direction for future research (Hale and Laruelle 2020). Data from social media, surveys, and in-depth interviews promise to provide a wealth of information. ...
... Their potential ineffectiveness may relate to rally-around-the-flag effects, where populations in sanctioned countries refrain from demanding accommodating responses (Seitz and Zazzaro, 2020). This may also occur for 'smart' sanctions in the aftermath of the Crimea annexation, targeting predominantly wealthy individuals (Alexseev and Hale, 2020). Low political costs for leaders in sanctioned economies, especially in autocratic countries, may further restrict sanctions' effectiveness to spur the desired change. ...
... Another intriguing possibility is that civilizational identity might influence how people expect their own polity to behave. Drawing on 2016 data from the Survey of Russian Elites, Hale (2019) finds that Russian elites who see their country as part of "European civilization" are more likely than are others to expect their dominant regime party (the United Russia Party) to leave power earlier. ...
... While there is no general theory of electoral revolutions to draw on, analysis of the Belarusian "revolution without a name" (Wilson 2021) can benefit from valuable theoretical insights and models that have grown out of the lively debate on the color revolutions and subsequent protest events in post-Soviet space. Three emerging perspectives, or "paradigmatic tendencies," can be distinguished (Hale 2019). ...
... Figures 1 and 2 show the geographic distribution of the cities in our dataset, with darker Figure 3 shows how the number of mayoral arrests in Russia has changed over time. In 2015, there was significant discussion among political commentators about an uptick in repression against regional elites (Hale et al., 2019). This pattern is borne out by our data and arrests have remained elevated since then. ...
