Bryn Rosenfeld discusses how citizens approach political risks in repressive environments like Putin’s Russia

In nondemocracies, such varied political acts as protest participation, voting for the opposition and abstaining from supporting regime candidates entail risks. Yet citizens' attitudes toward risk-taking have seldom been studied directly in authoritarian settings. This talk considers how citizens’ attitudes toward risk shape political participation under authoritarian rule. It proposes a theory of how affective factors interact with an individual’s baseline tolerance for risk to explain risky political behavior—even when the strong organizational ties emphasized by exiting literature on high-risk participation are absent. I test this argument using survey data from Russia on expressions of regime support (and evasive responding), voting behavior (including non-voting and opposition voting); and a survey experiment on willingness to protest after regime repression. This research on which this talk is based is the first to benchmark the predictive power of risk attitudes relative to other known determinates of regime support and voting in an autocracy. It also contributes to our understanding of how ordinary citizens in repressive environments overcome their baseline aversion to political risk-taking. 

Bryn Rosenfeld is an Assistant Professor of Government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology. Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. She is also the recipient of a Frances Rosenbluth best paper prize, as well as a Best Article Award honorable mention and Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation, both by the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section. Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research, among other outlets. Previously, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and has worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

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