ALUMNI PRESENT PANEL AT CONFERENCE OF
SOCIETY FOR INSTITUTIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL ECONOMICS
June 28, 2024
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Workshop alumni Francisco Cavalcanti, Alexey Makarin, and Sergey Sanovich presented papers at a session on autocracy and public attitudes at the 2024 SIOE conference. Mary Shirley was the chair, and Paulo Furquim de Azevedo was the discussant.

ABSTRACTS BY THE PANEL

Natural Disasters Support Authoritarian Populism:
Evidence from the Brazilian Shrimp Vote
Francisco Cavalcanti
University of Pernambuco
Diogo Baerlocher, University of South Florida
Renata Caldas, University of South Florida
Rodrigo Schneider, Skidmore College

This research paper investigates the relationship between natural disasters and protests against autocratic regimes using data from the 1979-1983 Drought in the Brazilian semi-arid region. The study utilizes data from meteorological stations to compute deviations from historical means of water deficit and uses it as the primary explanatory variable. The results suggest a negative causal effect of adverse weather conditions on protests against the military regime. Additionally, the study finds that disaster relief provided by the government, income inequality, and social vulnerability measures do not seem to drive this effect. However, the effect is heterogeneous to the degree of economic vulnerability, as measured by the importance of cotton for local production, suggesting that this may be the relevant mechanism at play. The study also puts forth a probabilistic voting model that reconciles mixed findings in the literature and guides the empirical exercise.

Conflict and Nation-Building: The Case of the 2014 Russia-Ukraine War
Alexey Makarin
MIT Sloan School of Management
Serhii Abramenko, EIEF and LUISS
Vasily Korovkin, UPF

How does conflict shape national identity? While wars may consolidate a nation, common past and ethnolinguistic ties with the aggressor may instead cause greater polarization. We study these forces in the context of the 2014 Russia-Ukraine armed conflict. Using a series of high-frequency nationally representative surveys from 2008 through 2020, we analyze the conflict's impact on ethnic self-identification and language use among residents of non-occupied Ukrainian territories. The findings reveal a large increase in the share of individuals identifying as solely Ukrainian, rather than solely Russian or of mixed identity. Similarly, we observe a decline in the use of the Russian language during surveys. Contrary to a polarization hypothesis, the shift toward Ukrainian identity was more pronounced in districts with a greater share of ethnic Russians. These findings remain similar after accounting for respondent demographics and refugee flows. These patterns are further supported by social media data on self-reported language proficiency on VK and the language of posts on Twitter, with the latter allowing for individual-level analysis. Overall, these results suggest that conflict serves as a catalyst for nation-building processes, even in contexts with a significant initial risk of conflict-induced polarization.

Language Identity and Foreign Propaganda: Evidence from the Russia-Ukraine War
Sergey Sanovich
Stanford University
Andrey Simonov, Columbia University

Since before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia sought to use its capabilities in cyberwarfare and digital propaganda to divide and destabilize Ukraine. We measure the ability of the Russian government to spread its propaganda in Ukraine, leveraging the popularity of news on the Telegram app in the country. Historically, most Ukrainian Telegram news channels have been in the Russian language, due to the bilingual Ukrainian population living in the south and east of the country. Since February 2022, these proportions have reversed to 70% of news in Ukrainian, due to a strong preference for the Ukrainian identity. Using detailed Telegram API data on news production and readership, we show that this language transition has decreased the engagement of news readers with the content, presumably since it is harder for traditionally Russian-speaking Ukrainians to switch their news consumption to the Ukrainian language. We then measure the substitution patterns of these readers, checking if some of this substitution happened to Russian propaganda news groups focused on Ukraine and measuring the unintended consequence of helping Russian propaganda to reach more Ukrainians.