Did Industrialization increase support for the radical left? Evidence from the 1917 Russian revolution

Paul Castañeda Dower and Andrei Markevich

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2025, vol. 53, issue 4, 884-915

Abstract: We analyze the 1917 Constituent Assembly elections – the only free universal elections in Russia before the 1990s – to estimate the effect of industrialization on the radicalization of the electorate in a late industrializing economy. Our empirical strategy exploits IV estimation based on the proximity of Carboniferous strata and other initial conditions of industrialization. We find that a larger share of industrial workers increases voting for the radical left, and the effect is stronger in places that exhibited more pronounced features of late industrialization. We also show that industrialization increases electoral polarization rather than simply shifting the electorate to the left.

Keywords: Industrialization; Radical left; Elections; Russia; Political preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 N44 P26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596725000526
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:53:y:2025:i:4:p:884-915

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2025.07.001

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 ().