Maria Snegovaya
Biographic Data
| ID | 4376744 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Maria Snegovaya |
| GIVEN NAMES | Maria |
| FAMILY NAME | Snegovaya |
| SIGNATURE | SNEGOVAYA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Johns Hopkins University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7979-5672 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 139 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Russia’s unresolved identity problem from Yeltsin to Navalny
Intent to Destroy
Dissecting Putin’s regime ideology
Does the Putin regime have an ideology? This question has attracted renewed attention since Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars claim that the war is directly linked to the Putin regime's ideological aspirations to restore Russia's greatness and challenge the West internationally, while others argue that contemporary regimes in the "Putinist mold" have limited need for ideology and use wars instrumentally for survival purpos…
Reclaiming what is ours
What explains the revanchism of (post-)imperial states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we conceptualise revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasises elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling pol…
Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began
Scholars often blame Russia”s recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders: Yeltsin or Putin. This essay casts doubt on such accounts. It argues instead that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced not a democratic transition but a temporary weakening of the state (incumbent capacity). This is evidenced by a lack of elite rotation and the preservation of the same type of formal and informal institutions that char…
Nomenklatura Roots of the Russian Elite
The article is devoted to understanding the origins of the Russian political elite. Relying on the empirical material of 2021, the authors study whether social ties in the Soviet managing class called “nomenklatura” is an important factor determining the position within the top echelon of the Russian political elite. In order to explore the genesis of the Russian political elite, we used a cross-methodological approach as well as the research met…
Fellow travelers or Trojan horses? Similarities across pro-Russian parties’ electorates in Europe
Scholarship analyzing Russia’s influence in Europe has focused primarily on the supply-side of this relationship, especially on the links between the Kremlin and specific parties. Surprisingly few studies have focused on the demand-side. My paper fills in this gap. First, I compile a dataset of pro-Russian parties in the European Union and show that Russia-sympathizers are found across different (left and right) party families. Second, I demonstr…
How ex-Communist left parties reformed and lost
In the 1990s, many left-wing parties abandoned their traditional economic policies and adopted more pro-market economic stances. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context to explore the impact of these policies on the electoral fortunes of the left-wing parties that adopted them. Although rewarded at first with electoral victories, the adaptation of pro-market positions had a less straightforward impact on the left-wing parties’ electora…
Long Soviet shadows
Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1–3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approx…
Different Strokes for Different Folks
In this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as ‘populist’ in literature—namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. …
Guns to butter
On the concept of “rally around the flag, ” scholars often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign poli…
Voice or exit? Political corruption and voting intentions in Hungary
How does perceived political corruption affect electoral preferences? Scholarship of Eastern Europe addressed this question primarily through the study of observational data. This study contributes to the existing scholarship by addressing the endogeneity problem and allows to causally interpret effects of perceived corruption on voting intentions. It combines hypotheses tested in earlier studies to investigate the impact of perceived political c…
What Factors Contribute to the Aggressive Foreign Policy of Russian Leaders
This paper explores the correlates of Russia’s aggressive international policy and argues that rising oil revenues increase the aggressiveness of presidential foreign-policy rhetoric. Using content analysis and machine-learning techniques, I generate a measure of aggressive discourse as the share of anti-Western sentences in Russian presidential speeches delivered between 2000 and 2016. These are analyzed using OLS regression with lagged dependen…
Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy
Across Europe and many other parts of the world, traditional parties of the left seem to be in terminal decline. While there are many reasons for this, we argue that the most important was the left's shift to the center on economic issues during the late twentieth century. Although this shift made some sense in the short-term, over the long-term it had deleterious, perhaps even fatal, consequences: It watered down the left's distinctive historica…
Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy
Across Europe and many other parts of the world, traditional parties of the left seem to be in terminal decline. While there are many reasons for this, we argue that the most important was the left's shift to the center on economic issues during the late twentieth century. Although this shift made some sense in the short-term, over the long-term it had deleterious, perhaps even fatal, consequences: It watered down the left's distinctive historica…
Fellow travelers or Trojan horses? Similarities across pro-Russian parties’ electorates in Europe
Scholarship analyzing Russia’s influence in Europe has focused primarily on the supply-side of this relationship, especially on the links between the Kremlin and specific parties. Surprisingly few studies have focused on the demand-side. My paper fills in this gap. First, I compile a dataset of pro-Russian parties in the European Union and show that Russia-sympathizers are found across different (left and right) party families. Second, I demonstr…
Long Soviet shadows
Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1–3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approx…
How ex-Communist left parties reformed and lost
In the 1990s, many left-wing parties abandoned their traditional economic policies and adopted more pro-market economic stances. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context to explore the impact of these policies on the electoral fortunes of the left-wing parties that adopted them. Although rewarded at first with electoral victories, the adaptation of pro-market positions had a less straightforward impact on the left-wing parties’ electora…
Dissecting Putin’s regime ideology
Does the Putin regime have an ideology? This question has attracted renewed attention since Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars claim that the war is directly linked to the Putin regime's ideological aspirations to restore Russia's greatness and challenge the West internationally, while others argue that contemporary regimes in the "Putinist mold" have limited need for ideology and use wars instrumentally for survival purpos…
Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began
Scholars often blame Russia”s recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders: Yeltsin or Putin. This essay casts doubt on such accounts. It argues instead that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced not a democratic transition but a temporary weakening of the state (incumbent capacity). This is evidenced by a lack of elite rotation and the preservation of the same type of formal and informal institutions that char…
Guns to butter
On the concept of “rally around the flag, ” scholars often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign poli…
What Factors Contribute to the Aggressive Foreign Policy of Russian Leaders
This paper explores the correlates of Russia’s aggressive international policy and argues that rising oil revenues increase the aggressiveness of presidential foreign-policy rhetoric. Using content analysis and machine-learning techniques, I generate a measure of aggressive discourse as the share of anti-Western sentences in Russian presidential speeches delivered between 2000 and 2016. These are analyzed using OLS regression with lagged dependen…
Voice or exit? Political corruption and voting intentions in Hungary
How does perceived political corruption affect electoral preferences? Scholarship of Eastern Europe addressed this question primarily through the study of observational data. This study contributes to the existing scholarship by addressing the endogeneity problem and allows to causally interpret effects of perceived corruption on voting intentions. It combines hypotheses tested in earlier studies to investigate the impact of perceived political c…
Reclaiming what is ours
What explains the revanchism of (post-)imperial states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we conceptualise revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasises elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling pol…
Different Strokes for Different Folks
In this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as ‘populist’ in literature—namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. …
What Factors Contribute to the Aggressive Foreign Policy of Russian Leaders
This paper explores the correlates of Russia’s aggressive international policy and argues that rising oil revenues increase the aggressiveness of presidential foreign-policy rhetoric. Using content analysis and machine-learning techniques, I generate a measure of aggressive discourse as the share of anti-Western sentences in Russian presidential speeches delivered between 2000 and 2016. These are analyzed using OLS regression with lagged dependen…
Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy
Across Europe and many other parts of the world, traditional parties of the left seem to be in terminal decline. While there are many reasons for this, we argue that the most important was the left's shift to the center on economic issues during the late twentieth century. Although this shift made some sense in the short-term, over the long-term it had deleterious, perhaps even fatal, consequences: It watered down the left's distinctive historica…
Different Strokes for Different Folks
In this study, I look at two types of political actors commonly described as ‘populist’ in literature—namely, rightwing populists and technocratic leaders like France’s Emmanuel Macron and the Czech Republic’s Andrej Babiš. While both types of political actors tend to emerge as a response to a decline in trust in established parties and adopt platforms with anti-establishment and monist elements, they also possess noticeably different qualities. …
Guns to butter
On the concept of “rally around the flag, ” scholars often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign poli…
Voice or exit? Political corruption and voting intentions in Hungary
How does perceived political corruption affect electoral preferences? Scholarship of Eastern Europe addressed this question primarily through the study of observational data. This study contributes to the existing scholarship by addressing the endogeneity problem and allows to causally interpret effects of perceived corruption on voting intentions. It combines hypotheses tested in earlier studies to investigate the impact of perceived political c…
Nomenklatura Roots of the Russian Elite
The article is devoted to understanding the origins of the Russian political elite. Relying on the empirical material of 2021, the authors study whether social ties in the Soviet managing class called “nomenklatura” is an important factor determining the position within the top echelon of the Russian political elite. In order to explore the genesis of the Russian political elite, we used a cross-methodological approach as well as the research met…
Fellow travelers or Trojan horses? Similarities across pro-Russian parties’ electorates in Europe
Scholarship analyzing Russia’s influence in Europe has focused primarily on the supply-side of this relationship, especially on the links between the Kremlin and specific parties. Surprisingly few studies have focused on the demand-side. My paper fills in this gap. First, I compile a dataset of pro-Russian parties in the European Union and show that Russia-sympathizers are found across different (left and right) party families. Second, I demonstr…
How ex-Communist left parties reformed and lost
In the 1990s, many left-wing parties abandoned their traditional economic policies and adopted more pro-market economic stances. Central and Eastern Europe offers a useful context to explore the impact of these policies on the electoral fortunes of the left-wing parties that adopted them. Although rewarded at first with electoral victories, the adaptation of pro-market positions had a less straightforward impact on the left-wing parties’ electora…
Long Soviet shadows
Recent studies of Putin-era elites have focused primarily on the role of siloviki. We bring the focus back to an analysis of the elite continuity within the Soviet regime. By compiling a dataset of the Putin-regime elites, we track their professional and family backgrounds to discover that the proportion of Putin-regime elites with Soviet nomenklatura origin (which comprised only 1–3% of the population during the Soviet period) constitutes approx…
Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began
Scholars often blame Russia”s recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders: Yeltsin or Putin. This essay casts doubt on such accounts. It argues instead that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced not a democratic transition but a temporary weakening of the state (incumbent capacity). This is evidenced by a lack of elite rotation and the preservation of the same type of formal and informal institutions that char…
Reclaiming what is ours
What explains the revanchism of (post-)imperial states? This question has renewed salience amid Russia’s expanded war against Ukraine in 2022. In this article, we conceptualise revanchism as a foreign policy preference that involves reclaiming territory once controlled. We also advance a new explanation for revanchism that emphasises elite continuity in those states that experience territorial loss. Elite continuity matters because the ruling pol…
Dissecting Putin’s regime ideology
Does the Putin regime have an ideology? This question has attracted renewed attention since Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars claim that the war is directly linked to the Putin regime's ideological aspirations to restore Russia's greatness and challenge the West internationally, while others argue that contemporary regimes in the "Putinist mold" have limited need for ideology and use wars instrumentally for survival purpos…
Russia’s unresolved identity problem from Yeltsin to Navalny
Intent to Destroy
Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Economics (6 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (6 works) · Elite (5 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (5 works)