Bureaucratic Discrimination in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes: Experimental Evidence from Russia

Michael Rochlitz, Evgeniya Mitrokhina and Irina Nizovkina

No 2010, Bremen Papers on Economics & Innovation from University of Bremen, Faculty of Business Studies and Economics

Abstract: Are investors in electoral authoritarian regimes discriminated against for political activism? In this paper, we implement a simple experiment to test whether affiliation with the ruling party or the political opposition affects the probability that investors receive advice from investment promotion agencies in Russian regions. Between December 2016 and June 2017, we sent 1504 emails with a short question and a number of randomized treatments to 188 investment promotion agencies in 70 Russian regions. Although investment promotion agencies are nominally depoliticized in Russia, we find that switching the political affiliation of a potential investor from the opposition party "Yabloko" to the government party "United Russia" on average increases the chances to receive a reply by 30%. The effect strongly depends on regional levels of political competition, with higher levels of discrimination in regions that are less politically competitive.

Keywords: Electoral authoritarianism; bureaucratic discrimination; investment; conjoint experiment; Russia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 O38 P16 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2020-04
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Published in European Journal of Political Economy, 66, p.101957.

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:atv:wpaper:2010

DOI: 10.26092/elib/49

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