Murphy Seminar in Political Science: Bryn Rosenfeld (Cornell)

The Murphy Institute Spring Seminar Series in Political Science

Each semester The Murphy Institute sponsors a series of seminars organized by the Tulane Department of Political Science that provides an opportunity for faculty, researchers, and practitioners to present their latest research and pressing issues related to topics in political economy. Research presented covers all aspects of contemporary politics science, including comparative politics, public policy, international relations, American politics, and normative theory. Papers are distributed beforehand to the participants who read the paper and prepare discussion questions for the presenter.

Bryn Rosenfeld is an Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and a co-Principal Investigator of the Russian Election Study, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Her research interests include comparative political behavior, with a focus on regime preferences and voter behavior in nondemocratic systems, development and democratization, protest, post-communist politics, and survey methodology.

Her first book, The Autocratic Middle Class (Princeton University Press, 2021), explains how middle-class economic dependence on the state impedes democratization and contributes to authoritarian resilience. It won the 2022 Best Book award from the APSA's Democracy & Autocracy section, the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and an Honorable Mention for the APSA's William H. Riker award for best book in political economy. Her articles appear in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Annual Review of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Sociological Methods & Research, among other outlets.

Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, she was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. She is also a former editor of The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and has worked for the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Opinion Research, where she designed and analyzed studies of public opinion in the former Soviet Union. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Abstract: 

Citizens’ choices—whether to protest, vote against incumbents, or support risky policy gambles—reflect their approach to risk-taking. Yet risk attitudes have seldom been studied in autocracies, where political participation entails far greater risks than in the democracies where most risk research is done. This project examines how citizens in autocracies process information about risky political choices and behavior, drawing on original survey and experimental data collected in Russia, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and panel survey data, spanning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The project explains how political rhetoric and events—from repression to revelations of electoral fraud and corruption—can increase, via common affective mechanisms, citizens’ tolerance for taking the risks that catalyze political change. It also makes sense of divergent phenomena and puzzling patterns like the sudden emergence of dissent, where the strong organizational ties and progressive recruitment emphasized by existing literature on high-risk activism are lacking, and the risk preference reversals that underpin citizen support for an autocrat’s high-risk military aggression.