Joint seminar on Diversity and Development

Another session of the joint seminar on Diversity and Development was held at HSE on March 13.  Professor Andrei Markevich from the New Economic School presented his research on "Democratic Support for the Bolshevik Revolution: An Empirical Investigation of 1917 Constituent Assembly Elections".  

Abstract: Scholars have long-debated the causes of popular support for the Russian Revolution and how this support translated into successful regime change. We systematically investigate cross-district and cross-city variation in popular support for the Bolsheviks using voting outcomes of the All Russian 1917 Constituent Assembly elections, occurring right after the Bolsheviks seized power. We find that the Bolsheviks managed to mobilize more popular support in districts with more of a presence of industrial workers, Russian-speaking peasants and soldiers. However, we show that politics rather than fundamentals explain the variation in pro-Bolshevik voting and the policies that supported this coalition was hardly stable, forewarning the command economy to come (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3059131).