Can Black Tulips stop Russia again?

Dinissa Duvanova, Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy and Olha Zadorozhna

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2023, vol. 51, issue 4, 1274-1288

Abstract: Do the human costs of Russia’s war in Ukraine undermine the popular support for the Russian government? Although there is little evidence that the poor performance of the Russian military forces in Ukraine erodes domestic support for the government, region-specific war casualties may help fuel anti-war sentiment. The paper hypothesizes that publicly announced military deaths and obituaries published in the local news and social media groups can incite anti-war sentiment because they bring the human cost of the war into peoples’ homes. To evaluate this hypothesis, we use a hand-collected dataset of obituaries, published on the most popular social network in Russia, and analyze statistical connections between the announcements of war casualties and instances of various forms of political protests. The data support the casualties-protest connection, but find that obituaries of military servicemembers with non-Russian-sounding names are uncorrelated with protests even in their home regions, while the opposite is true for similar announcements with Slavic names. We speculate that the observed differences might reflect the intentional government policy of capitalizing on ethno-nationalist sentiment that has been cultivated for the support of Putin’s regime.

Keywords: Ukraine; Russia; War; Casualties; Obituaries; Protests (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 F51 F54 H56 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596723000616
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:51:y:2023:i:4:p:1274-1288

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2023.06.009

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().