Timothy Frye
Biographic Data
| ID | 1084804 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timothy Frye |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timothy |
| FAMILY NAME | Frye |
| SIGNATURE | FRYE T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8633-2046 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 830 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 18 |
What Moves Public Support for Aid to Ukraine? Issue Attention, Partisanship, and Normative Appeals
Since 2022, the United States has provided more aid to Ukraine than to any other country, but this policy has become increasingly contentious. Identifying the nature of public support for this aid is critical for public policy, but it also raises central issues for scholars studying foreign policy preferences. I conducted a preregistered survey experiment that varies partisan cues and the content of appeals to support aid to Ukraine. I find that …
Do Violations of Democratic Norms Change Political Attitudes? Evidence From the January 6th Insurrection
How do citizens respond to extreme violations of democratic institutions, such as the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol? Using an online survey of 900 employed respondents conducted January 5–9, 2021, I find that those interviewed just hours after the insurrection were about 10% points less likely to identify as Republicans, reported greater dislike for Donald Trump, and expressed less attachment to conservatism even controlling fo…
The autocratic middle class: How state dependency reduces demand for democracy. By BrynRosenfeld, Princeton. 2022
Is Putin’s popularity (still) real? A cautionary note on using list experiments to measure popularity in authoritarian regimes
Opinion polls suggest that Vladimir Putin has broad support in Russia, but there are concerns that some respondents may be lying to pollsters. Using list experiments, we revisit our earlier work on support for Putin to explore his popularity between late 2020 and mid-2022. Our findings paint an ambiguous portrait. A naive interpretation of our estimates implies that Putin was 10 to 20 percentage points less popular than opinion polls suggest. How…
Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia
Response to Stephen Crowley’s Review of Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia
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Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia
Roundtable on Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s the red mirror: Putin’s leadership and russia’s insecure identity
Timothy Frye1In this roundtable, we bring together a distinguished group of academics to discuss Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s excellent new book, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure
Who Reports Crime? Citizen Engagement with the Police in Russia and Georgia
What factors affect citizens’ engagement with the state? We explore this question through a study of victims’ and bystanders’ willingness to report crimes to the police, using data from survey experiments conducted in Russia and Georgia. We find that citizens’ willingness to report in both countries is strongly influenced by the nature of the crime, but not generally by instruments that the state might use to encourage greater reporting. Our resu…
The Price of Loyalty
Vote Brokers, Clientelist Appeals, and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Russia and Venezuela
Modern clientelist exchange is typically carried out by intermediaries—party activists, employers, local strongmen, traditional leaders, and the like. Politicians use such brokers to mobilize voters, yet little about their relative effectiveness is known. The authors argue that broker effectiveness depends on their leverage over clients and their ability to monitor voters. They apply their theoretical framework to compare two of the most common b…
Elections, Protest, and Trust in Government: A Natural Experiment from Russia
How do elections and postelection protest shape political trust in a competitive autocracy? Taking advantage of largely exogenous variation in the timing of a survey conducted in Moscow in 2011, we find that with few exceptions the election had little systematic effect on political trust, perhaps because vote improprieties were not new information. In contrast, the unexpected protest that followed increased trust in government. In this case, heig…
Economic Sanctions and Public Opinion: Survey Experiments From Russia
Do economic sanctions turn the public against the target government or cause it to rally around the flag? How do sanctions affect attitudes toward the sanctioner? How does bad economic performance under sanctions shape support for the target government? Despite their importance, these questions have rarely been explored with survey data. Results from two surveys in Russia find that exposure to information about economic sanctions does not generat…
Hitting Them With Carrots: Voter Intimidation and Vote Buying in Russia – Corrigendum
Hitting Them With Carrots: Voter Intimidation and Vote Buying in Russia
Scholars have identified many ways that politicians use carrots, such as vote buying, to mobilize voters, but have paid far less attention to how they use sticks, such as voter intimidation. This article develops a simple argument which suggests that voter intimidation should be especially likely where vote buying is expensive and employers have greater leverage over employees. Using survey experiments and crowd-sourced electoral violation report…
Bringing Kitschelt back in: A comment on “Rethinking Structure and Agency in Post-Soviet Regime Dynamics
Now is a good time to revisit the role of structure and agency in the post-communist transformation. During the 1990s and early 2000s, scholars exploited evidence from the emergence of new regimes
Property Rights and Property Wrongs: How Power, Institutions, and Norms Shape Economic Conflict in Russia
Secure property rights are central to economic development and stable government, yet difficult to create. Relying on surveys in Russia from 2000 to 2012, Timothy Frye examines how political power, institutions, and norms shape property rights for firms. Through a series of sophisticated survey experiments, Property Rights and Property Wrongs explores how political power, personal connections, elections, concerns for reputation, legal facts, and …
Is Putin’s popularity real
Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters? We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is…
Cooperating with the State: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Policing
We examine cooperation with the state using a series of survey experiments on policing conducted in late 2011 in Moscow, Russia, where distrust of the state is high and attempts to reform the police have been ineffective. Through various vignettes that place respondents in situations in which they are the witness or victim of a crime, we experimentally manipulate crime severity, identity of the perpetrator (whether the crime is committed by a pol…
Elections and Property Rights: A Natural Experiment From Russia
The relative bargaining power of rulers and right holders is thought to be a key determinant of property rights, but because it both shapes and is shaped by property rights, it is difficult to estimate the impact of bargaining power on property rights. We take advantage of a natural experiment by comparing the responses of managers interviewed just before and just after a surprising parliamentary election in Russia that weakened the relative barg…
Property Rights and Development
There is a strong consensus that secure property rights are critical for economic development, but tricky issues about the direction of causation and measurement have made it difficult to demonstrate this relationship empirically. In recent years, scholars have made progress on these issues. In the future, scholars can profitably turn their attention to four issues: (i) why privatization is so unpopular, (ii) how politics shapes property rights, …
What Do Voters in Ukraine Want: A Survey Experiment on Candidate Ethnicity, Language, and Policy Orientation
Language, ethnicity, and policy orientation toward Europe are key cleavages in Ukrainian society, but there is much debate about their relative importance. Based on a survey experiment of 1000 residents of Ukraine that manipulated three features of a fictional candidate running for parliament, I find that a candidate’s ethnicity and language had little impact on reported vote choice, whereas economic policy orientation toward Europe was strongly …
The Political Economy of Russian Gubernatorial Election and Appointment
Political and economic outcomes depend, in part, on the quality of the officials making policy. Some argue that free elections are the best method for selecting competent officials. Others argue that elections lead to the selection of amateurs and demagogues. We use original data on the biographies of Russian regional governors to examine the backgrounds of elected and appointed governors. Elected governors are more likely to be locals. Appointed…
Legality and violence in Russia: An introduction
Political Machines at Work Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace
The authors explore how modern autocrats win elections by inducing employers to mobilize their employees to vote for the regime and thereby subvert the electoral process. using two original surveys of employers and workers conducted around the 2011 parliamentary elections in russia, they find that just under one-quarter of employers engaged in some form of political mobilization. they then develop a simple framework for identifying which firms en…
A Politics of Institutional Choice: Post-Communist Presidencies
This work uses incomplete contracting theory to account for variation in the specific and residual powers of post-Communist presidencies. It uses evidence from 24 post-Communist countries to test theories of institutional choice that link presidential powers to economic reform, institutional legacies, party systems, and social cleavages. It argues that two factors can account for variation in presidential powers: the bargaining power of the elect…
Is Putin’s popularity real
Vladimir Putin has managed to achieve strikingly high public approval ratings throughout his time as president and prime minister of Russia. But is his popularity real, or are respondents lying to pollsters? We conducted a series of list experiments in early 2015 to estimate support for Putin while allowing respondents to maintain ambiguity about whether they personally do so. Our estimates suggest support for Putin of approximately 80%, which is…
Political Machines at Work Voter Mobilization and Electoral Subversion in the Workplace
The authors explore how modern autocrats win elections by inducing employers to mobilize their employees to vote for the regime and thereby subvert the electoral process. using two original surveys of employers and workers conducted around the 2011 parliamentary elections in russia, they find that just under one-quarter of employers engaged in some form of political mobilization. they then develop a simple framework for identifying which firms en…
The Perils of Polarization: Economic Performance in the Postcommunist World
Perhaps the most striking feature of the postcommunist transformation is the tremendous variation in rates of economic growth across countries. To account for these differences, this article develops an alternative to the J-curve and partial reform views that currently dominate discussions of the politics of economic reform. This approach treats economic performance as a political struggle between excommunist and anticommunist factions engaged in…
Economic Sanctions and Public Opinion: Survey Experiments From Russia
Do economic sanctions turn the public against the target government or cause it to rally around the flag? How do sanctions affect attitudes toward the sanctioner? How does bad economic performance under sanctions shape support for the target government? Despite their importance, these questions have rarely been explored with survey data. Results from two surveys in Russia find that exposure to information about economic sanctions does not generat…
Hitting Them With Carrots: Voter Intimidation and Vote Buying in Russia
Scholars have identified many ways that politicians use carrots, such as vote buying, to mobilize voters, but have paid far less attention to how they use sticks, such as voter intimidation. This article develops a simple argument which suggests that voter intimidation should be especially likely where vote buying is expensive and employers have greater leverage over employees. Using survey experiments and crowd-sourced electoral violation report…
Credible Commitment and Property Rights: Evidence from Russia
Few dispute that secure property rights are critical to economic development. But if secure property rights are so beneficial, then why are they so rare? More precisely, what factors promote secure property rights? Do rightholders view private or state agents as a greater threat to property? Do they value bureaucratic commitment or discretion? I use evidence from two original surveys of company managers in Russia to assess the institutional, soci…
Elections, Protest, and Trust in Government: A Natural Experiment from Russia
How do elections and postelection protest shape political trust in a competitive autocracy? Taking advantage of largely exogenous variation in the timing of a survey conducted in Moscow in 2011, we find that with few exceptions the election had little systematic effect on political trust, perhaps because vote improprieties were not new information. In contrast, the unexpected protest that followed increased trust in government. In this case, heig…
Capture or Exchange? Business Lobbying in Russia
tween business and the state. This redefinition has been particularly difficult in Russia, where policy makers and scholars alike have cited an incestuous relationship between business and the state as a key impediment to an orderly market economy.1 However, we have few empirical studies of business lobbying in Russia.2 Views about lobbying are extensively coloured by writings about the oligarchs-a small group of powerful industrialists and finan…
Fragmenting Protection: The Political Economy of Trade Policy in the Post-Communist World
Scholars and policy makers have displayed a longstanding interest in the politics of economic reform, particularly over the 1990s as former Communist countries struggled to develop market economies. Yet remarkably little systematic research has been conducted on the political economy of commercial reform in the post-Communist world. We argue that the fragmentation of power within post-Communist countries has been a potent force for trade liberali…
Vote Brokers, Clientelist Appeals, and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Russia and Venezuela
Modern clientelist exchange is typically carried out by intermediaries—party activists, employers, local strongmen, traditional leaders, and the like. Politicians use such brokers to mobilize voters, yet little about their relative effectiveness is known. The authors argue that broker effectiveness depends on their leverage over clients and their ability to monitor voters. They apply their theoretical framework to compare two of the most common b…
What Do Voters in Ukraine Want: A Survey Experiment on Candidate Ethnicity, Language, and Policy Orientation
Language, ethnicity, and policy orientation toward Europe are key cleavages in Ukrainian society, but there is much debate about their relative importance. Based on a survey experiment of 1000 residents of Ukraine that manipulated three features of a fictional candidate running for parliament, I find that a candidate’s ethnicity and language had little impact on reported vote choice, whereas economic policy orientation toward Europe was strongly …
Is Putin’s popularity (still) real? A cautionary note on using list experiments to measure popularity in authoritarian regimes
Opinion polls suggest that Vladimir Putin has broad support in Russia, but there are concerns that some respondents may be lying to pollsters. Using list experiments, we revisit our earlier work on support for Putin to explore his popularity between late 2020 and mid-2022. Our findings paint an ambiguous portrait. A naive interpretation of our estimates implies that Putin was 10 to 20 percentage points less popular than opinion polls suggest. How…
Original Sin, Good Works, and Property Rights in Russia
Are property rights obtained through dubious means forever tainted with original sin, or can right holders make their ill-gotten gains legitimate by doing good works? This is a critical question for developing and transition countries, where privatization is often opaque and businesspeople may receive property, but remain unwilling to use it productively due to concerns about the vulnerability of their rights to political challenge. Using a surve…
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
Timing is Everything: Elections and Trade Liberalization in the Postcommunist World
In the wake of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, various postcommunist countries rushed to gain greater access to foreign markets. Many of them have made substantial progress in liberalizing commerce, but the movement toward free trade has been by no means universal. One prominent view is that the establishment of democratic institutions has stimulated economic reform in thepostcommunist world. The authors conduct one of the first studies on this topic…
The Political Economy of Russian Gubernatorial Election and Appointment
Political and economic outcomes depend, in part, on the quality of the officials making policy. Some argue that free elections are the best method for selecting competent officials. Others argue that elections lead to the selection of amateurs and demagogues. We use original data on the biographies of Russian regional governors to examine the backgrounds of elected and appointed governors. Elected governors are more likely to be locals. Appointed…
Private Protection in Russia and Poland
protection against rival protection organizations. Second, private pro? tection thrives where shops are inspected frequently by many agen? cies, indicating that disorganized regulation increases informal activity and promotes private protection. In addition, businesses that renovate their shops are more likely to have contact with a private protection organization, indicating that PPOs prey on shops that reveal that their wealth. Thus, demand fro…
In From the Cold: Institutions and Causal Inference in Postcommunist Studies
Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standing concerns in political science. This is in itself a sign that a…
Markets, Democracy, and New Private Business in Russia
A political scientist examines the relationship between private property and elections, using a survey of 500 business elites in Russia. Specific attention is paid to how the type of property held by company managers influences their support for promarket parties and the holding of elections
Who Wants To Revise Privatization? The Complementarity of Market Skills and Institutions
Using survey data from 28 transition countries, we test for the complementarity and substitutability of market-relevant skills and institutions. We show that democracy and good governance complement market skills in transition economies. Under autocracy and weak governance institutions, there is no significant difference in support for revising privatization between high- and low-skilled respondents. As the level of democracy and the quality of g…
Elections and Property Rights: A Natural Experiment From Russia
The relative bargaining power of rulers and right holders is thought to be a key determinant of property rights, but because it both shapes and is shaped by property rights, it is difficult to estimate the impact of bargaining power on property rights. We take advantage of a natural experiment by comparing the responses of managers interviewed just before and just after a surprising parliamentary election in Russia that weakened the relative barg…
Governing the Russian Equities Market
Before the names of Just and Unjust can have place there must be some coercive force to compel men equally to abide by their covenants by the terrour of a punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant... So that the nature of Justice consisteth not in keeping of valid covenants: but the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the Constitution of a Civill power sufficient to compel men to keep them. Thomas Hobbe…
Who Reports Crime? Citizen Engagement with the Police in Russia and Georgia
What factors affect citizens’ engagement with the state? We explore this question through a study of victims’ and bystanders’ willingness to report crimes to the police, using data from survey experiments conducted in Russia and Georgia. We find that citizens’ willingness to report in both countries is strongly influenced by the nature of the crime, but not generally by instruments that the state might use to encourage greater reporting. Our resu…
Cooperating with the State: Evidence from Survey Experiments on Policing
We examine cooperation with the state using a series of survey experiments on policing conducted in late 2011 in Moscow, Russia, where distrust of the state is high and attempts to reform the police have been ineffective. Through various vignettes that place respondents in situations in which they are the witness or victim of a crime, we experimentally manipulate crime severity, identity of the perpetrator (whether the crime is committed by a pol…
Activities and Appointments
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Governing the Russian Equities Market
Before the names of Just and Unjust can have place there must be some coercive force to compel men equally to abide by their covenants by the terrour of a punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant... So that the nature of Justice consisteth not in keeping of valid covenants: but the Validity of Covenants begins not but with the Constitution of a Civill power sufficient to compel men to keep them. Thomas Hobbe…
A Politics of Institutional Choice: Post-Communist Presidencies
This work uses incomplete contracting theory to account for variation in the specific and residual powers of post-Communist presidencies. It uses evidence from 24 post-Communist countries to test theories of institutional choice that link presidential powers to economic reform, institutional legacies, party systems, and social cleavages. It argues that two factors can account for variation in presidential powers: the bargaining power of the elect…
The Political Institution of Private Property
Capture or Exchange? Business Lobbying in Russia
tween business and the state. This redefinition has been particularly difficult in Russia, where policy makers and scholars alike have cited an incestuous relationship between business and the state as a key impediment to an orderly market economy.1 However, we have few empirical studies of business lobbying in Russia.2 Views about lobbying are extensively coloured by writings about the oligarchs-a small group of powerful industrialists and finan…
The Perils of Polarization: Economic Performance in the Postcommunist World
Perhaps the most striking feature of the postcommunist transformation is the tremendous variation in rates of economic growth across countries. To account for these differences, this article develops an alternative to the J-curve and partial reform views that currently dominate discussions of the politics of economic reform. This approach treats economic performance as a political struggle between excommunist and anticommunist factions engaged in…
Private Protection in Russia and Poland
protection against rival protection organizations. Second, private pro? tection thrives where shops are inspected frequently by many agen? cies, indicating that disorganized regulation increases informal activity and promotes private protection. In addition, businesses that renovate their shops are more likely to have contact with a private protection organization, indicating that PPOs prey on shops that reveal that their wealth. Thus, demand fro…
Markets, Democracy, and New Private Business in Russia
A political scientist examines the relationship between private property and elections, using a survey of 500 business elites in Russia. Specific attention is paid to how the type of property held by company managers influences their support for promarket parties and the holding of elections
Fragmenting Protection: The Political Economy of Trade Policy in the Post-Communist World
Scholars and policy makers have displayed a longstanding interest in the politics of economic reform, particularly over the 1990s as former Communist countries struggled to develop market economies. Yet remarkably little systematic research has been conducted on the political economy of commercial reform in the post-Communist world. We argue that the fragmentation of power within post-Communist countries has been a potent force for trade liberali…
Timing is Everything: Elections and Trade Liberalization in the Postcommunist World
In the wake of the Soviet bloc’s collapse, various postcommunist countries rushed to gain greater access to foreign markets. Many of them have made substantial progress in liberalizing commerce, but the movement toward free trade has been by no means universal. One prominent view is that the establishment of democratic institutions has stimulated economic reform in thepostcommunist world. The authors conduct one of the first studies on this topic…
Credible Commitment and Property Rights: Evidence from Russia
Few dispute that secure property rights are critical to economic development. But if secure property rights are so beneficial, then why are they so rare? More precisely, what factors promote secure property rights? Do rightholders view private or state agents as a greater threat to property? Do they value bureaucratic commitment or discretion? I use evidence from two original surveys of company managers in Russia to assess the institutional, soci…
Original Sin, Good Works, and Property Rights in Russia
Are property rights obtained through dubious means forever tainted with original sin, or can right holders make their ill-gotten gains legitimate by doing good works? This is a critical question for developing and transition countries, where privatization is often opaque and businesspeople may receive property, but remain unwilling to use it productively due to concerns about the vulnerability of their rights to political challenge. Using a surve…
Vladimir Putin and the Succession Dilemma
What happens in a "managed democracy" when the manager's term expires
Who Wants to Revise Privatization and Why? Evidence from 28 Post-Communist Countries
The "Other" Russian Economy: How Everyday Firms View the Rules of the Game in Russia
We report results from two original surveys of 500 firms conducted in 2000 and 2007 in eight regions in Russia that explore the business environment for manufacturing and service sector firms. We find that the formal and informal rules of the game for everyday firms in Russia have changed dramatically in the Putin years. Most importantly, while the informal and formal rules of the game in 2000 were quite similar for firms that were investing and …
Who Wants To Revise Privatization? The Complementarity of Market Skills and Institutions
Using survey data from 28 transition countries, we test for the complementarity and substitutability of market-relevant skills and institutions. We show that democracy and good governance complement market skills in transition economies. Under autocracy and weak governance institutions, there is no significant difference in support for revising privatization between high- and low-skilled respondents. As the level of democracy and the quality of g…
Building States and Markets after Communism: The Perils of Polarized Democracy
Does democracy promote the creation of market economies and robust state institutions? Do state-building and market-building go hand in hand? Or do they work at cross-purposes? This book examines the relationship between state-building and market-building in 25 post-communist countries from 1990 to 2004. Based on cross-national statistical analyses, surveys of business managers, and case studies from Russia, Bulgaria, Poland, and Uzbekistan, Timo…
Everyone Hates Privatization, but Why? Survey Evidence from 28 Post-Communist Countries
Everyone hates privatization, but why? Survey evidence from 28 post-communist countries
Belarus and Its Implications for The Study of Transition Economies: An Introduction
(2011). Belarus and Its Implications for The Study of Transition Economies: An Introduction. Eurasian Geography and Economics: Vol. 52, No. 6, pp. 747-749
My Perestroika and Russian Politics
Through discussions with five Muscovites, the film My Perestroika shows the effects of social class on Russian politics and attitudes toward the West
In From the Cold: Institutions and Causal Inference in Postcommunist Studies
Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standing concerns in political science. This is in itself a sign that a…
Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin
The Political Economy of Russian Gubernatorial Election and Appointment
Political and economic outcomes depend, in part, on the quality of the officials making policy. Some argue that free elections are the best method for selecting competent officials. Others argue that elections lead to the selection of amateurs and demagogues. We use original data on the biographies of Russian regional governors to examine the backgrounds of elected and appointed governors. Elected governors are more likely to be locals. Appointed…
Legality and violence in Russia: An introduction
Political science (43 works) · Law (34 works) · Politics (30 works) · Law (28 works) · Economics (27 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Russia and Soviet political economy (18 works) · Business (12 works) · Democracy (12 works) · Psychology (12 works)