Research

This paper examines the influence of subnational representative institutions on fiscal outcomes and public goods provision, leveraging an understudied large-scale institutional innovation: the introduction of elected self-government in the cities of the Russian Empire from the 1870s. Applying a staggered difference-in-differences design to novel city-level panel datasets, I find that the reform had a large positive impact: it increased revenues and expenditures by 20–50%, enabling an expanded allocation of funds to education, healthcare, fire protection, and other areas, and significantly increased the number of primary schools. The effect size depended on the presence of commercial classes in the city population. Disaggregated budgets suggest that the outcomes were shaped by the preferences of both state authorities and local communities. These results demonstrate that in an authoritarian setting, a reform bringing even limited representation and autonomy at the local level can empower new social groups and promote development.

This paper examines the long-term effect of past compulsory labor institutions on conflict, considering the case of serfdom in the Russian Empire. A village-level analysis of rural conflict in Kursk province during the revolutionary period of 1905--1906, based on a novel rich dataset and employing matching and difference-in-differences methods, shows that half a century after the 1861 abolition of serfdom, former serfs were about three times more likely to participate in disturbances than non-serf peasants. The unrest was typically associated with disputes over land and other agricultural assets. The effect of serfdom is partly driven but cannot be fully explained by uneven land distribution or underdevelopment. There is a positive relationship between the size of land allotments lost by former serfs as a result of emancipation and unrest. The perceived unfairness of post-emancipation land division set the ground for unrelenting peasant discontent, reinforced by conducive institutional and economic environment.

What drives violent confrontation between groups in multi-ethnic and multi-confessional societies? Why do some communities in such societies experience conflict, while others remain peaceful? We explore these questions in the context of the 1905 Russian Revolution, which triggered numerous anti-Jewish pogroms. Using newly digitized data on the religious composition of all Jewish and non-Jewish settlements with more than 500 inhabitants in the Pale, we examine the relationship between the size of the Jewish population and change in pogrom incidence in 1905, after publication of the October Manifesto, which promised an elected legislature and granted basic civil and political rights. The appearance of the Manifesto was accompanied by antisemitic propaganda and increased feelings of political threat among many non-Jews. We show that the sharp increase in pogroms after October 1905 was smaller in settlements with relatively large Jewish populations, which means that the relative size of minorities can play a role in insulating communities from the violence that often accompanies momentous political change.

Military defeat abroad results in most cases in two conflicting developments in modern autocracies: the collapse of their political institutions and the rise of a reactionary ideological movement to restore the old regime, purifying it from those elements and groups thought to be behind its demise. This project focuses on the causes of the rise and the nature of Russia's far right during the first breakdown of autocracy in 1905-07, concomitant with its defeat at the hands of Japan in the 1904-05 war.  We take advantage of previously untapped published archival data on the local organizational presence of monarchist far-right parties and organizations in the Russian Empire in 1907. Russian reactionaries appealed to the values of tradition and nation, understood around the principles of religious Orthodoxy and the preeminent position of the Russian nation in the empire, and aimed to restore order at home and the status of great power abroad.  They embraced modern politics, establishing parties and competing in elections, and mobilized those sectors that felt threatened by liberalism, the socialist movement, and ethnic minorities: landowners facing rural disturbances, Orthodox populations in regions with significant non-Orthodox minorities, and Russian nationalists.

This is a companion project to my job market paper. I develop a theory arguing that autocratic regimes might be interested in the introduction of representative institutions not because of pressures from below, but due to a desire to promote development and state capacity by entrusting local dwellers with the management of their affairs. In that case, the authorities would first grant elected self-governance to more developed localities with already high fiscal and informational capacity, which are better prepared for the extraction of additional revenues via taxation and other channels and provision of public goods. They are also more likely to democratize in places with weaker potential opposition, which could otherwise take advantage of democratic institutions, using them for coordination, propagation of anti-government messages, and channeling resources for subversive purposes. I test this theory with the help of survival analysis, showing that cities that collected more taxes per capita before the reform and had a lower share of potentially disloyal non-Orthodox minorities were more likely to receive self-governance earlier (or at all). 

This paper studies the determinants of the choice of religious identity in an authoritarian setting, taking advantage of a rarely observed exogenous shock--the legalization of previously prohibited religious conversions. It demonstrates how repressive assimilationist policies can provoke a backlash in the form of a radical identity shift among a subset of the targeted population, which exacerbates polarization. It examines the case of a mass conversion from Eastern Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism in a diverse Chełm (Kholm) Land region of the Russian Empire, populated by Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, after the issuance of the April 1905 Decree of Religious Toleration by the Russian Emperor. Applying a difference-in-differences strategy to the newly collected settlement-level data on religious composition, I document the impact of a battery of demographic, geographic, and institutional factors, which reflect the exposure to Catholicism and Orthodoxy, on the conversions. The non-Catholic population of the formerly Orthodox region used to be predominantly Uniate (Greek Catholic) from the late 18th century until 1875, when all the Uniates were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy. I provide quantitative evidence supporting historical accounts claiming that post-April 1905 converts largely consisted of ``persisting'' Uniates unwilling to accept the Orthodox identity. In addition, a comparison of statistical estimates of conversions originating from rival political camps helps identify the limits of knowledge about a highly contested issue.