Month: November 2020

On the 28th of November, Margarita Zavadskaya participated in the discussion “Is the society ready for the elections? Opportunities and restrictions for civic movement”, which was part of All-Russia Civil Forum 2020. The participants discussed how similar are the elections 2021 to the previous ones held in 2011, 2016 and whether there is a chance for a new broad movement for fair elections. The experts also suggested ways of stimulating populations’ participation in the election process – campaigning, voting, and election observation.

The recording of the event is available below:

On 19-21th of November, EU SPb organised the annual conference VDNKh (Exhibition of the Academic Research Achievements), and Margarita Zavadskaya participated in the VDNKh’s roundtable discussion “Good and Bad Governance in Russia: Actors and Institutions”, moderated by Vladimir Gel’man on 20th of November.

Numerous assessments of various organizations show that the quality of public administration is much worse than can be predicted based on the level of socio-economic development of our country. At the same time, this sad picture has significant variations at the level of various sectors of the economy, municipalities, as well as individual government projects and programs. What explains these variations, and why have a number of attempts to improve the quality of public administration in Russia yield modest results at best? The search for answers to these and other questions will be the subject of a special issue of the Europe-Asia magazine, which is being prepared for publication in 2021. During the round table, the authors of the articles of this special issue – EUSP employees and alumni – will present their works, which are planned for publication and which touch upon various aspects of the problem of good and bad governance in modern Russia in a theoretical and comparative context. During the round table, the general framework of the analysis, as well as specific approaches of research will be discussed.

Yesterday our project held its first seminar “In the Eye of the Beholder:  Misperceptions of Electoral Integrity in Central-Eastern Europe”. Margarita Zavadskaya presented the early results of the empirical analysis, Elena Gorbacheva chaired the seminar, and Emilia Palonen, leader of the Helsinki Hub on Emotions, Populism & Polarisation, acted as a discussant.

At the seminar, Margarita Zavadskaya discussed the differences between expert and mass perceptions of electoral integrity in Central-Eastern Europe. In some post-communist states, people tend to overestimate the quality of elections while in other citizens are more critical to conducted elections even if they are assessed as democratic by experts. To a certain extent, it happens due to the experience of the authoritarian rule in communist times and the current evolution of emancipation values. In her presentation, Margarita argued that people with preferences for authoritarian leadership and a strong national identity are more likely to overestimate the quality of elections in their country. In contrast, people holding post-materialist values with a higher level of education can be regarded as critical citizens. This contribution brought up by the research varies depending on the context. Margarita compared how these factors differ in cases of Russia, Poland, and Hungary. As such, the role of post-materialist values is more important in the case of Hungary and Russia compared to Poland and in Hungary, the role of nationalism is the strongest. The case of Belarus where people unexpectedly massively went to protests after the unfair presidential elections can be explained by the increased level of education among the population and knowledge about politics, Zavadskaya considers.

Because the seminar was organised through Zoom, residents of different cities and countries could attend it. We would like to thank all the participants for their excellent questions and especially the discussant Emilia Palonen for her insightful comments.