Books
Social Media and Democracy: The State of the Field, Prospects for Reform
Cambridge University Press, 2020
Social media platforms have become a major channel for political communication, yet their effects on democracy remain contested. This edited volume brings together leading scholars to examine how social media is reshaping political engagement, polarization, misinformation, and democratic discourse.
Communism's Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes
Princeton University Press, 2017 · Princeton Studies in Political Behavior
It has long been assumed that the historical legacy of Soviet Communism would have an important effect on post-communist states. However, prior research has focused primarily on the institutional legacy of communism. Communism's Shadow instead turns the focus to the individuals who inhabit post-communist countries, presenting a rigorous assessment of the legacy of communism on political attitudes. Post-communist citizens hold political, economic, and social opinions that consistently differ from individuals in other countries. Grigore Pop-Eleches and Joshua Tucker introduce two distinct frameworks to explain these differences, the first of which focuses on the effects of living in a post-communist country, and the second on living through communism. Drawing on large-scale research encompassing post-communist states and other countries around the globe, the authors demonstrate that living through communism has a clear, consistent influence on why citizens in post-communist countries are, on average, less supportive of democracy and markets and more supportive of state-provided social welfare. The longer citizens have lived through communism, especially as adults, the greater their support for beliefs associated with communist ideology—the one exception being opinions regarding gender equality.
Reviews: Reviewed in: Foreign Affairs, Slavic Review, The Journal of Politics, Democratization, TRT World Research Centre
Regional Economic Voting: Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, 1990-1999
Cambridge University Press, 2006
This book examines the effect of economic conditions on election results in five post-communist countries--Russia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic--in the first decade of post-communist elections. It is the first book length study of economic voting outside of established democracies, as well as one of the few comparative studies of voting in post-communist countries generally. The study relies on an original database composed of regional level economic, demographic, and electoral data, and the analysis features a broadly based comparative assessment of the findings across all twenty elections as well as more focused case study analysis.
Reviews: Reviewed in: Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Political Studies, The Journal of Politics, Foreign Affairs, Slavic Review