Description:

Speaker: Artyom Lipin

Title: Popular Support in Autocracies: How Soviet Industrial Workers Turned Away from Communists (with Andrei Markevich and Timur Natkhov)

Abstract: Autocratic regimes depend on support groups, but the reasons why support groups would ever withdraw their backing remain understudied. We address this question in the context of Soviet Russia in a panel setting, combining disaggregated district-level vote shares from the 1917 Constituent Assembly election and competitive presidential elections in 1991 and 1996, and exploring how voting for the communists was related to the spread of the proletariat. In 1917, more industrialized districts exhibited higher Communist vote shares, while in the 1990s, more industrialized districts displayed lower Communist vote shares. To address potential endogeneity of industrialization, we employ instrumental variables based on mineral endowments, WWII evacuation exposure, and a shift-share design constructed from pre-period industry composition. We show that the reversal is weaker in districts where Soviet workers earned higher relative wages and where the industrial workforce was concentrated in more privileged sectors, such as defense-related production and heavy industry. We do not find that higher exposure to state repression is associated with a stronger reversal. The results suggest that economic conditions, rather than state coercion, explain changes in the loyalty of key regime supporters in autocracies.