When and how does an environmental protest cycle affect election outcomes under electoral authoritarianism? Drawing on the case of the Bashkortostan republic, a Russian ethnic region, I leverage the spatial proximity to the protest site to identify its effects on parliamentary elections. The environmental protest cycle peaked in the Bashkortostan around the regional government’s decisions to extract minerals from shikhans – mountains composed of limestone. Employing a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, I show that precincts exposed to the environmental protest cycle experienced a significant drop in United Russia vote share, while voting for systemic opposition increased in the affected precincts. To explain the dynamics, I propose treating non-political protests, such as environmental ones, as an information revelation mechanism. The mechanism identified through a causal mediation analysis indicates that the environmental protest cycle conveys information on regional malperformance to voters. Their updated preferences, in turn, heavily undermine the electoral mobilising capacity of local elites.

Increased public awareness of environmental problems and the strengthening of diverse identities may lead to the emergence of “ethnic environmentalism.” These are movements that make environmental claims associated with the interests of an ethnic community. We develop this concept by examining protests in the Russian regions. Our findings suggest that ethnic identity facilitates environmental activism under the following conditions: the ethnic group claims a special cultural relationship to the natural environment; environmental concern and ethnic identity are linked to the unfair distribution of resources; and blame is directed toward regional actors, rather than the federal government.

This article examines the attitudes of contemporary Russian conservatives toward “the green agenda.” Although the topic of ecology was originally considered a priority of left-wing parties and movements, in recent years right-wing European politicians have been increasingly discussing and using environmental issues to boost their popularity. While the left-wing green agenda largely focused on global issues, such as climate change, cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and energy transition, right-wing populists, denying the importance of the declared environmental policy, proposed focusing on local problems – preserving local nature and national control over natural resources. This trend can now be observed in Russia: domestic politicians actively discuss the green agenda, offering their evaluations and ways to solve environmental problems. This article pursues a twofold aim. First, to show that the Western and Russian conservative discourses have more similarities than differences, the Russian green political discourse tracing its roots both to the Russian environmental movement and to European populists. Secondly, we investigate whether the views of conservatives influence environmental policies in Russia. To this end, we studied data on presidential environmental grants supported for 2018-2022. A total of more than 4,000 applications were analyzed. The results show that the majority of projects have a local character. Patriotic organizations are getting more involved in environmental issues, with several environmental organizations deliberately starting to use patriotic rhetoric. The results seem to indicate traces of conservative attitudes in environmental policy.
 

In this paper, we study a division between market corruption—impersonal bribery— and network corruption that operates through social connections. We provide a thorough theoretical discussion of this division, compare it with other categorizations of corruption, and also demonstrate diferences between market and network corruption existing in practice. Using data from the World Economic Forum in the period from 2007 to 2016 we measure market and network corruption across about 150 countries all over the globe and show that network corruption is more related to countries’ cultural backgrounds and more harmful to investments than market corruption. Overall, our paper argues that the market-network dimension, unfairly abandoned in the literature, may be useful for better understanding of such a complex phenomenon as corruption.

Why do citizens choose not to use e-government services even if the latter look promising? This issue has been in question for more than two decades and it is especially acute in developing countries. Current research is mostly focused on adoption factors using quantitative metrics and surveys to assess citizens’ satisfaction and further e-services adoption. In this paper we argue that using qualitative approach to assess citizens’ willingness to utilize e-services is required. Using previously developed models and empirical evidence found in both methodological approaches, we construct a simple framework to assess why citizens are reluctant to use the services provided by the government. To do so, we conducted 3 focus groups in St. Petersburg, Russia, with 6 to 7 people, totaling 20 surveyed citizens. We establish that while previously discovered factors also confirm themselves in our setting, it is the discrepancies between what the government thinks the citizens need against what they actually want to see in e-services. Thus, as other authors argue, we advise practitioners to facilitate more stakeholder participation when the services are designed to ensure they fit their demands.

Value polarization is one of the key factors in societal development. This research focuses on whether opinions concerning gender roles in the domestic and public spheres are polarized in European societies, a topic still under-investigated. Based on the fifth wave of European Values Study data (2017–2020), the study shows that gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere are more polarized than those in the public sphere. Polarization by education, level of income, migration background, and degree of religiosity is stronger for gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere, whereas polarization by gender is stronger for gender role attitudes in the public sphere. Both gender role attitudes in the public and domestic spheres are most strongly polarized by education. At the same time, belonging to a social group with higher education, higher income, and lower religiosity can promote more progressive views towards gender roles. Opinions in Eastern European countries tend to seem more polarized than in Western European countries, even if with some exceptions. In countries with a higher level of gender equality, the level of polarization is a bit lower, while in countries where there is a remarkable rise of anti-gender narratives, opponent and conflictual views are higher.

Belief systems are core organizing factors of social attitudes and behaviors, and their study has highlighted the role of conservatism as a contributing mechanism in mitigating concerns associated with change avoidance, as well as the reduction of uncertainty and ambiguity in life. Moreover, these aspects seem to be consistently used as powerful tools in the political and social discourse of the far-right. Life and death ethics are an example of issues that deal with the need for stability and control over personal and social life that people endorsing conservative values seek to attain. There is a rich line of studies on the individual and social explanatory factors of political conservatism, but less attention has been dedicated to moral conservatism as an autonomous and meaningful concept. The current research follows a multilevel approach to disentangle the individual and contextual correlates of conservative attitudes toward life and death. Thus, besides looking at the influence of individual choices related to religion and political orientation, this study also seeks to analyse the impact of the context, introducing in the model variables measuring economic performance, social and gender inequality, religious diversity and the prevalence of materialism and post-materialism values. Multilevel models using data from the 34 countries that participated in the last wave of the European Values Study (2017–2020), revealed an association between far-right orientation and conservative attitudes toward life and death, and that this relationship is moderated by materialism/post-materialism values, economic performance, and social inequality. Our findings reinforce the role of democracy as an environment where freedom of choice and thought are indisputable rights, cherished by most of the populations, regardless of their political position or their stance on moral issues.

This study provides new evidence on how historical patterns of household formation shape the present-day level of trust. We test two distinct features of historical family arrangements that might be harmful to trust towards out-groups: (a) family extendedness in terms of the number of household members, and (b) generational hierarchy and gender relations within the household. To conduct our study, we compiled a historical database that reflects family structure and socio-economic development, mostly in the 19th century. The analysis was performed on a sample of 94 historical subnational units within eight contemporary Western and Eastern European countries that participated in the Life in Transition Survey in 2010. We find that cohabitation of several generations within the historical family and power of older generations over the younger are detrimental for out-group trust today. By contrast, family extendedness per se was revealed to have no impact on trust.

Wellbeing levels have been a global concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is a lack of attention to  invariance questions that allow a robust examination of wellbeing dynamics across cultures. Questions of temporal stability that are crucial for examining the impact of the pandemic on wellbeing have received even less attention. Some studies suggested that measures may not be stable after the onset of the pandemic. We examine invariance  parameters, the factorial structure and variability of wellbeing variables (life satisfaction, pandemic worries, anxiety and depression screenings) across five different cultural contexts from 2020 to 2022 (N = 4387, total observations = 13,161). A three-factor model separating life satisfaction, worry, and distress performed best in terms of model fit and parsimony. We observed scalar invariance across times and identified little variability of wellbeing measures during the pandemic, suggesting that wellbeing levels remained stable during the pandemic in each of the countries sampled. In contrast, we only identified metric invariance across countries at each time point, and found a weakening of correlations between life satisfaction and a depressive/anxious symptoms scale in lower income countries. We discuss implications of our findings for discussions of wellbeing dynamics.