Graeme Robertson

Decentralization is often promoted as a means of improving public service delivery, strengthening accountability, and enhancing citizen engagement. However, its effects vary widely across contexts. This paper examines how decentralization reforms shaped attitudes toward public service provision in Ukraine. Using a unique panel survey from nearly 200 Ukrainian communities, we show that decentralization increased satisfaction with healthcare and education. Investigating the mechanisms behind this result, we demonstrate that in the Ukrainian case, decentralization improved public service provision not by promoting cleaner governance (i.e., less corruption) or greater spending, but rather because reformer communities – particularly in urban areas – used funds more effectively. Cross-national analysis of 28 European countries confirms that citizens in more decentralized systems report higher satisfaction with locally provided services. Our findings highlight the importance of local administrative capacity in realizing the benefits of decentralization, offering insights for both democratic reformers and post-conflict reconstruction efforts.

Climate change will shape the future of Russia, and vice versa, regardless of who rules in the Kremlin. The world's largest country is warming faster than Earth as a whole, occupies more than half the Arctic Ocean coastline, and is waging a carbon‐intensive war while increasingly isolated from the international community and its efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Officially, the Russian government argues that, as a major exporter of hydrocarbons, Russia benefits from maintaining global reliance on fossil fuels and from climate change itself, because warming may increase the extent and quality of its arable land, open a new year‐round Arctic sea route, and make its harsh climate more livable. Drawing on the collective expertise of a large group of Russia‐focused social scientists and a comprehensive literature review, we challenge this narrative. We find that Russia suffers from a variety of impacts due to climate change and is poorly prepared to adapt to these impacts. The literature review reveals that the fates of Russia's hydrocarbon‐dependent economy, centralized political system, and climate‐impacted population are intertwined and that research is needed on this evolving interrelationship, as global temperatures rise and the international economy decarbonizes in response.This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy Trans‐disciplinary Perspectives > National Reviews Trans‐disciplinary Perspectives > Regional Reviews

A growing literature focuses on the role of political partisanship in shaping attitudes and behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We provide a different perspective, by developing a theory of how partisanship interacts with another important factor that shapes how people think and behave in the context of the pandemic—local norms. Using a combination of survey data and a survey experiment, we demonstrate the importance of norms in shaping both support for social distancing and reported social-distancing behavior, particularly amongst independents and Republicans. We then confirm that perceptions of norms are indeed tied to what is actually happening around people—that their partisanship does not blind them to reality. Our analysis is the first to examine how partisanship and norms interact with each other and helps to explain why partisan differences matter more in some places than in others.

Despite nationwide mass protests in August 2020, the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenka remains in power in Belarus. In this essay, I discuss three articles focusing on the origins of the protests, the role of social media platforms and the strategies and results of state repression. Together they provide new insights on the events in Belarus and deepen our understanding of contemporary urban revolutions.

Significance: We advance our understanding of changes in polarization over time and across space by highlighting how the nature and structure of social interactions shape changes in attitudinal polarization. We show how including geographical information in adaptive voter models improves their predictive accuracy for both individual-level attitude change and for aggregate patterns of spatial polarization. By applying the model to panel survey data from Ukraine, we address the dearth of empirical applications with real-world data in the agent-based modeling literature. This article also demonstrates the importance of a key mechanism underlying earlier findings about the importance of local effects in shaping individual attitudes, namely the role of political discussion in locally rooted networks.

Our understanding of modern authoritarianism lacks a satisfying explanation for the genuine popularity of autocrats. While most of the literature on authoritarianism focuses on coercion, institutional manipulation, or clientelism, many contemporary autocrats clearly enjoy enthusiastic support even in times of economic stagnation or decline. We argue that part of the solution lies in unpacking the role of emotions in building support for rulers. Drawing on a unique panel survey conducted shortly before and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, we discover that the resulting “rally” around the authoritarian flag involves much more than simply support for the leader or a simple increase in nationalism. Rather, we witness a broad shift in respondents’ emotional orientation. Driven by the shared experience of the Crimean “moment,” this shift improves people’s evaluation of their social, political, and economic surroundings in the present, the future—and even the past. The result is a new explanation of the nonmaterial means through which autocrats may succeed in bolstering their legitimacy.

Taking advantage of a panel survey in Ukraine before and after the Euromaidan, we analyze the relationship between ethnicity, language practice, and civic identities on the one hand and political attitudes on the other. We find that while ethnic identities and language practices change little on the aggregate level over the period, there has been a significant increase in the proportion of people thinking of Ukraine as their homeland. There has also been a large fall in support for a close political and economic relationship with Russia and some increase in support for joining the European Union. Nevertheless, we find that identities in general, and language practice in particular, remain powerful predictors of political attitudes and that people are more likely to shift attitudes to reflect their identities rather than modify their identities to match their politics.

Personality research is a growing field in political behavior, but most research to date is confined to democracies. We expand the scope to Russia, an authoritarian regime, and find that the impact of personality is substantial but different from the existing literature. We find that agreeableness, a personality trait associated with a desire to maintain positive relations with others that is usually peripheral to politics, becomes the single most important and consistent trait affecting attitudes. This perspective helps us to understand why individuals who are socioeconomically and demographically similar can have quite different attitudes to the regime. Our analysis also helps us to understand the mechanisms through which personality works and how it shapes attitudes to such important elements as religion and state propaganda. Our findings suggest a new, and empirically testable, mechanism behind situations in which regimes rapidly dissolve, including revolutions.