Abstract
How might public policy changes affect electoral support for authoritarian regimes? Missing from the existing scholarship, which focuses mostly on regimes generating political budget cycles and manipulating electoral rules, is an exploration of how non-fiscal and non-electoral policies may impact incumbent support. We examine this issue with electoral and census data from one of the world's most prominent authoritarian regimes - Russia - to evaluate the regime's 2017 change to the policy governing native language instruction, which curtailed minority students' ability to learn their native languages and faced opposition in some ethnic regions. Examining panel data on presidential elections using fixed effects models, our results reveal that the regime's support decreased in titular minority areas in 2018. The results also indicate that some of these patterns emerged in previous national legislative elections and thus cannot be solely attributed to the policy change.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 427-446 |
| Journal | Journal of Public Policy |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 24 Sept 2023 |
| MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Funding
The authors would like to thank the editor, three anonymous reviewers, and Youngsung Kim for their helpful comments that greatly improved the manuscript. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2021 APSA Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, and the authors would like to thank the panel participants for their valuable comments. Inga Saikkonen’s portion of this research was funded by Academy of Finland (Grant 316897). 1