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Eduard Ponarin: "Seminars will be common!"

On March 10, 2011 the first LCSS seminar was held in Moscow. The first topic of discussion was the confrontation between Right and Left in Europe, the economist Alexei Zaharov was the first speaker. the Head of Laboratory, Prof. Eduard Ponarin, gave an assessment of the event.

On March 10, 2011 the first LCSS seminar was held in Moscow. The first topic of discussion was the confrontation between Right and Left in Europe, the economist Alexei Zaharov was the first speaker. the Head of Laboratory, Prof. Eduard Ponarin, gave an assessment of the event.

- How would you estimate the first LCSS workshop?

The first step is always the hardest. I wish more people would attend these seminars. I would like equal participation of Moscow and St. Petersburg employees in the seminars. In the meantime, unfortunately, this is impossible, since we have no communications equipment now. In view of all the bureaucratic procedures, which we are obliged to comply, we hope to buy it by the end of April.

In general workshop was successful. We had a strong speaker, Alexei Zaharov. He is an economist and mathematician, an employee of the HSE Faculty of Economics. His project is political science, and he examines how the confrontation between the left and right parties in Europe has changed over the past 30 years. Additionally, he explores the development of nationalism, xenophobia, and religious in an experimental area.

These phenomena were investigated in Russia mainly by qualitative methods. Pools are sometimes used as the quantitative tools. At the same time a lot of studies using experimental techniques exist in foreign countries. For instance, when people are asked to play in the so-called economic games to figure out how people of different nationalities will interact with each other, whether people of one nationality would punish each other less than people of different nationalities. You can check out many different hypotheses, and it is very interesting and promising.

- How do you evaluate the performance of Alexei Zaharov, given that he had to open seminar direction of the lab?

The report itself was perhaps not quite well construct. The speaker mostly spoke about previous foreign works, and only in the end of the report he began to tell what he plans to do within the bounds of the study. And it was the most interesting part of the speech, which caused a lot of questions, and a lively discussion. The next day we had a meeting with Alexei Belyanin (ICEF), who leads a team of researchers using experimental methods. But they are not engaged in issues of nationalism and xenophobia. We can have an interesting interaction with them. In general, I believe that the workshop was successful.

- Is the frequency of further workshops determined? Will they be carried out only in Moscow or in St. Petersburg too?

We plan that the workshops will be held once in 2 weeks. And as I said earlier, we now purchase telecommunications equipment, which will enable us to make these activities common to St. Petersburg and Moscow staff.