This event is online only.
Join us for a meeting of the New York-Russia Public Policy Series, co-hosted by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and the New York University Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.
On March 17, Vladimir Putin is most likely to be reelected yet again. What will his fifth presidential term look like? Our panel of political scientists will discuss the evolution of Putin’s regime and its electoral and administrative machinery. In the wake of the tragic death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, do any domestic threats to the Kremlin remain or has Putin successfully eliminated all existing challenges? Can the continuing war on Ukraine finally undermine the regime’s stability? We will explore how Putin’s relationship with the Russian elites and the public will evolve in the coming years and what constraints his regime may encounter.
This event is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Speakers
Regina Smyth, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University
Samuel Greene, Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA); Professor in Russian Politics at King’s College London
Brian Taylor, Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University; Director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs
Irina Busygina, Research Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University
Moderated by:
Alexander Cooley, Clair Tow Professor of Political Science; Vice Provost for Research, Libraries, and Academic Centers, Barnard College
Joshua Tucker, Director of the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University
Biographies
Regina Smyth is a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. She is particularly interested in how state strategies to sustain the Putin regime influence Russian foreign policy decisions and international behavior. Since 1993, her research has relied on original data and extensive fieldwork to examine the interactions between the state, society, and opposition forces. Her recent book Elections, Protest, and Authoritarian Regime Stability: Russia 2008–2020 examines how much electoral competition matters to the Putin regime and how competition leaves Russia more vulnerable to opposition challenges. Her previous book Candidate Strategies and Electoral Competition in the Russian Federation: Democracy Without Foundation was published in 2006. Her research has been published in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, and many other journals. She received her PhD from Duke University in 1997.
Samuel Greene is Director for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). Sam is also a Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London. Before joining CEPA, he founded and directed the King’s Russia Institute for ten years. Prior to moving to London, Sam lived and worked for 13 years in Moscow, as Director of the Center for the Study of New Media & Society at the New Economic School and as Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. He is the author of Moscow in Movement: Power & Politics in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, 2014) and Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia (Yale, 2019, with Graeme Robertson), as well as numerous academic and policy papers. An American and British citizen, Dr. Greene holds a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and a BSJ from Northwestern University and is an elected fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences.
Brian Taylor is a Professor of Political Science at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University and the director of the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs. His research is focused on the development of the Russian state, with particular attention to state coercive organizations, such as the military and the police, and Russian elite politics. He is the author of several books on Russian politics: The Code of Putinism (2018), in which he examines how Putin has shaped Russia in the past 20 years, State Building in Putin’s Russia: Policing and Coercion After Communism (2011), Politics and the Russian Army: Civil-Military Relations,1689-2000 (2003), and the upcoming Russian Politics: A Very Short Introduction (2024). His work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, Problems of Post-Communism, and various other journals. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998.
Irina Busygina is a Research Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Till 2022 she worked as Professor of Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and International Relations (Higher School of Economics at Saint Petersburg, Russia) and headed the Center for Comparative Governance Studies. She has also taught a course “Russia and the European Union” at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. Her research interests include comparative federalism and decentralization, Russian domestic and foreign policy, and Russia-EU relations. Her latest publications include “Center-Regional Relations in Russia” in Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society (2023); “Ready to Protest? Explaining Protest Potential in Russian Regional Capitals” in Regional and Federal Studies (2023); “Pandemic Decentralization: COVID-19 and Principal–Agent Relations in Russia” in Problems of Post-Communism (2022), and “Russia – EU Relations and the Common Neighborhood: Coercion versus Authority” (UK: Routledge, 2018). Her most recent book is “Non-Democratic Federalism and Decentralization in Post-Soviet States” (together with Mikhail Filippov, Routledge, 2023).
