Reading Orwell in Moscow
Abstract
In this paper, I measure the effect of conflict on the demand for frames of reference, or heuristics that help individuals explain their social and political environment by means of analogy. To do so, I examine how Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 reshaped readership of history and social science books in Russia. Combining roughly 4,000 book abstracts retrieved from the online catalogue of Russia’s largest bookstore chain with data on monthly reading patterns of more than 100,000 users of the most popular Russian-language social reading platform, I find that the invasion prompted an abrupt and substantial increase in readership of books that engage with the experience of life under dictatorship and acquiescence to dictatorial crimes, with a predominant focus on Nazi Germany. I interpret my results as evidence that history books, by offering regime-critical frames of reference, may serve as an outlet for expressing dissent in a repressive authoritarian regime.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.