Research

I am a comparative politics scholar interested in women’s representation and political participation, political parties, post-Communist states, and authoritarian politics. My research focuses on exploring the intricate relationships between gender, authoritarian institutions, and political economy. I employ a diverse array of quantitative and qualitative methods in my work, including survey experiments, archival research, interviews, and econometric analysis of large panel and longitudinal datasets. My current book project delves into the connections between authoritarianism and women’s representation. Additionally, I am motivated by questions related to institutions that facilitate authoritarian transitions, gendered violence, and political parties.

Book Project

Political Participation of Women in the Soviet Union and Russia

Why do authoritarian political elites recruit women? I examine the political engagement of women in the Soviet local councils from the 1950s until the collapse of the USSR and also their Russian municipal representation today. I argue that in both the USSR and contemporary Russia, women’s representation is instrumental in the regime’s survival. First, women have a sense of responsibility to their municipal constituencies’ everyday needs that motivates them to participate. Second, it is more challenging for women to get a private job as private employers prefer to avoid hiring women due to pregnancy and childcare discrimination. As a result, they are more reliant on public employment, making them disproportionately dependent on the state. For these reasons, women are critical for an authoritarian regime’s survival because they are responsive at the municipal level and their compliance can be ensured through their employment dependence.
My research challenges existing explanations of why authoritarian states implement policies that engage women, such as such as attempts to enhance their international reputation or the willingness of autocrats to compromise their stance on women’s rights to receive international aid and inducements. Instead, I propose an argument based on the domestic needs. By using extensive and unique Soviet archival data, interviews with former Soviet and Russian representatives, and contemporary Russian electoral data, I show that in contrast to the national level, women are widely represented at the municipal level. Moreover, they show consistent and reliable responsiveness to the tasks related to everyday issues relevant to municipal politics. Thus, by examining these dynamics in both historical and contemporary contexts, my book project sheds light on the crucial role of women in maintaining political stability within authoritarian regimes.

Publications

Proportional Representation and Party Fragmentation in Electoral Autocracies. Democratization (2024): 1-21.

What is the relationship between the type of electoral system and the degree of party fragmentation in electoral autocracies? According to Duverger’s hypothesis, proportional representation (PR) is positively associated with party fragmentation. This study investigates whether this hypothesis holds true in non-democratic political systems that hold elections. I propose that, unlike in democracies, PR is negatively correlated with the level of party fragmentation in electoral autocracies. To test this hypothesis, I utilize panel data encompassing 37 non-democratic nations that held elections from 1975 to 2010. The effective number of parties (ENP) is employed as a measure of party fragmentation, estimating the weighted size and quantity of political parties. My findings suggest that PR has a consistent significant negative correlation with the effective number of political parties across all models and samples. It shows that in contrast to democracies, in electoral authoritarian regimes, PR systems do not create electoral conditions that stimulate the development of many effective political parties. These findings contribute to the future research in uncovering what may or may not help parties to occupy the entire “playing field.”

Russia: Muddling Through Populism and the Pandemic. In: Renno, Lucio, and Nils Ringe (eds.). Populists and the Pandemic: How Populists Around the World Respond to COVID-19. Routledge, 2022. With Anton Shirikov and Yoshiko M. Herrera.

The pandemic did not fundamentally alter Russia’s political trajectory. The country remained an authoritarian regime. While the leadership appears to have used the pandemic to reinforce existing patterns of governance and consolidate authority, the broader institutional framework remained largely unchanged. Similarly, the government’s communication strategy regarding COVID-19 was broadly consistent with preexisting practices. Official messaging tended to emphasize successes while downplaying or limiting attention to shortcomings. At the same time, responsibility for positive outcomes was often attributed to the central government, whereas challenges were more frequently associated with regional authorities or external actors, including the so-called “collective West.”

Other

Book Review (2025). Erasing History by Jason Stanley.

Work in Progress

When Silence Creates Violence: Understanding the Role of Identity-Based Dynamics and Highly Visible Events in Assessing Domestic Violence (with Yulia Khalikova and Marcy Shieh)

Gender-based violence remains a global issue, with public responses often shaped by identity dynamics. In Kazakhstan, the 2023 high-profile trial of former Economy Minister Quandyq Bishimbaev for the murder of Saltanat Nukenova sparked national outrage and led to a landmark 2024 law criminalizing domestic violence. Against this backdrop, our study examines how identity and political behavior interact to shape attitudes toward domestic violence. Using a vignette experiment, we find that most Kazakh respondents view domestic violence as unacceptable and are willing to support victims through policy-oriented actions. Moreover, we find that respondents are more likely to trust allegations of domestic violence when the perpetrator was part of their in-group, regardless of the victim’s ethnicity. These findings highlight the complex dynamics between normative disapproval and civic engagement in addressing gendered violence.

Gender and Law-making in Nondemocracies: The Case of Russia (with Sarah Hummel)

From gender-washing to gender-bashing, authoritarian leaders pursue diverse policies related to female representation and empowerment. Legislatures are one arena in which these dynamics play out, with some authoritarian countries closing in on gender parity and some lagging far behind. Other countries, like Russia, pursue a middle path: women are not barred from political office, but neither is their presence actively promoted. In such contexts, the onus is on individual female deputies to prove their worth and, like many of their democratic counterparts, they do so by working harder and delivering better results than their male colleagues. Drawing on extensive bill sponsorship data from the Russian State Duma (2000-2020), we demonstrate that female deputies are more productive and effective lawmakers across a wide-range of issues.

Why Minority Women have the Edge in Many Parliaments Worldwide (with Aili Tripp)

Although minority women are often expected to face a “double disadvantage,” they frequently achieve legislative representation equal to or exceeding that of minority men and women from dominant groups. Using evidence from democracies and authoritarian states, we argue that party nomination strategies are the key mechanism explaining this pattern. Parties recruit minority women to signal both gender and ethnic inclusion through different institutional arrangements, including proportional representation, reserved seats, and quotas. Despite these varying pathways, minority women often attain similar political outcomes. We further show that in Russia, minority women sponsor and pass legislation at rates comparable to or higher than those of the dominant group. These findings demonstrate how party strategies, institutional design, and intersectional identities shape minority women’s political representation.

Who Gets the Bin? Agency, Responsiveness, and Public Goods Allocation in Kazakhstan (with Dima Kortukov, Dmitrii Kofanov, and Raushan Zhandayeva)

This study examines perceptions of political responsiveness and self-efficacy in an authoritarian context, focusing on Kazakhstan. Building on the literature on representation, accountability, and political efficacy, it investigates how citizens evaluate public service provision and state responsiveness outside the context of elections and voting. Specifically, we examine whether evaluations of the allocation of a scarce public good vary depending on the role of citizen agency in the allocation process. Using a vignette-based survey experiment fielded in Kazakhstan, the study contributes to broader debates on political self-efficacy by examining how citizens perceive their capacity to make claims and receive responsiveness through available institutional channels under authoritarian rule, and by identifying the conditions under which activating citizen voice shapes those perceptions.

Playing Electoral Rules by Ear: Autocratic Decision-Making

This study draws attention from the idea of the existence of a “grand authoritarian plan” to the role of small and incremental changes in transitional states. By comparing electoral reforms in the 1990s and the 2000-2010s in Eurasia, I examine the self-enforcing democratic equilibrium and show that it was disturbed not by a long-term grand authoritarian plan, but a series of small broken rules lead to the incremental slipping into authoritarianism. In this paper, I trace how various gradual electoral reforms and leadership’s ability to be flexible and adjust the rules “by ear” enabled him to change electoral competition in Eurasia.

The Puzzle of Women’s Quotas in Eurasia

This project about female labor participation in transitional market economies of authoritarian regimes aims to investigate the consequences of implementing women’s electoral quotas and the gap in the female labor force participation rate in former Soviet authoritarian states. It compares the cases that implemented women’s quotas and used the topic of gender equality to improve its international reputation (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) with the case of Russia that actively resisted the implementation of women’s quotas and did not pursue tactics to improve its international reputation in terms of gender equality since the collapse of the Soviet Union.