Book Project: The State and Support in Electoral Autocracies

A large literature emphasises the threat political and economic crises pose for the stability of electoral autocracies, regimes that combine authoritarian practices with multiparty elections. However, the empirical evidence shows that electoral autocracies, and the popular support illiberal incumbents enjoy, are often resilient. Leveraging evidence from Putin’s Russia, this book argues that to better understand contemporary autocracies, we need to examine the political conditioning of public opinion in these regimes. The book’s central contention is that the disconnect between poor government performance and resilient support for illiberal incumbents may be attributed to power holders’ ability to manage public opinion, interchangeably using tactical redistribution, propaganda and targeted repression. Bringing together new data on government responses to economic downturns, political protests, and security threats with over 60,000 responses from surveys of Russian voters, the book illustrates why times of threat are often associated with resilient support for the state and disengagement from politics, not the weakening of authoritarian rule or the onset of democratization.  

Publications

Tertytchnaya, K. Protests and Voter Defections in Electoral Autocracies: Evidence from Russia. Forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies.

Tertytchnaya, K., & Lankina, T. 2019. Electoral Protests and Political Attitudes under Electoral Authoritarianism. Forthcoming in the The Journal of Politics. PDF | Appendix

Tertytchnaya, K., De Vries, C. E. Solaz, H., & Doyle, D. 2018. When the Money Stops: Fluctuations in Financial Remittances and Incumbent Approval. American Political Science Review. 112(4): 758-774.  Replication materials

Tertytchnaya, K., & De Vries, C.E. 2018. The political consequences of self-insurance: Evidence from Central Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Political Behavior. Replication materials

Working Papers 

Remittances and corruption (with Catherine de Vries, Hector Solaz and David Doyle)

Protests in electoral autocracies: A new Russian dataset (with Tomila Lankina)

‘This rally is not sanctioned’: Pre-emptive repression and protests in electoral autocracies