PPE Research Fellow Focus: Maria Snegovaya

Dr. Maria Snegovaya, currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, made significant progress with two research projects that were part of her PPE Research Fellowship: “Populist Parties’ Impact on Economic Policies after the Cold War” and “Re-Authoritarization in Neopatrimonial Regimes of African and Post-Soviet States.”

Both of these projects explore the political economic foundations of the regimes that have emerged in Europe and post-Soviet space over the last decades and are highly relevant for the interdisciplinary field of PPE that aims to understand social phenomena through the lenses of politics and economics. Under the PPE Fellowship, Dr. Snegovaya was able to involve research assistants to build two datasets related to these projects.

(1) A dataset quantifying overall degrees and patterns of populist redistributive policies under governments in which European populist parties have participated since the end of the Cold War. In particular, Dr. Snegovaya hired research assistants to add the various measures of social spending and globalization policies into the analysis, as well as to compile the dataset of European populist parties in power over the last thirty years.

(2) A dataset compiling attempted violations of term limits in a comparative context meant to extend an executive leader’s ability to stay in office, as well as corresponding characteristics of those polities such as measures of the socio-economic dynamic and institutional indicators. A particular emphasis of this project is the economic resource availability (such as oil rent), which facilitates political leaders’ ability to stay in power beyond their constitutional terms.

The datasets were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods and became the basis of two scholarly manuscripts.

Furthermore, Dr. Snegovaya was able to use her PPE funding to attend and present this research at several academic conferences and workshops, including:

American Political Science Association Conference; Midwestern Political Science Association Conference; Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Conference on “Still the Age of Populism,” University of Florida Center for European Studies; International Workshop “Electoral Integrity and Malpractice in Russia and Beyond: New Challenges and Responses,” Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki; Conference on “How Does Political Equality Affect Economic Equality?,” Center for Ethics in Business and Governance at Saint Anselm College; and Workshop on “Populism and Foreign Policy Workshop,” Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies.

To learn more about the Kellogg Center’s research fellowships, please visit this link.