About Me

I am a quantitative political scientist studying autocracies, governance, and public attitudes, with a regional focus on post-Soviet countries.

I am a Doctoral Researcher at the European University Institute, and was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University.

My research examines how subnational institutions and elite management strategies shape accountability, public service provision, and citizens’ evaluations of government performance.

Methodologically, I specialize in causal inference with observational data, quasi-experimental designs, and survey experiments.

I am currently on the academic job market and open to academic, policy-oriented, and applied research positions.

Current Projects and Working Papers (Unpublished)

Solo-authored

• Citizens’ Perceptions of Local Government under Centralized Rule: A Survey Experiment in Russia [Abstract]
  Authoritarian rulers often weaken or abolish local elections while reframing municipal governance as a technocratic problem of “efficiency” rather than politics. But how do citizens evaluate local executives when the same reforms also reshape who governs—replacing locally rooted politicians with appointed bureaucrats whose careers run through the administrative vertical? Do citizens accept the managerial bargain, or do they continue to value signals of local autonomy? I address this puzzle in Russia using a nationally representative survey vignette experiment. Respondents evaluate fictional mayors whose profiles randomly vary institutional and biographical cues: selection, embeddedness, professional background, and interaction style with other elites. I argue that citizens read the same cues through different political orientations and prior political experience: trust in the regime leader, beliefs about elite motivation, and exposure to contentious political mobilization. Among citizens who distrust the president and view elites as self-serving, elections and confrontational behavior carry a clear autonomy premium, boosting evaluations and strengthening resident-oriented interpretations. Those who trust Putin and perceive authorities as acting in the public interest are more receptive to technocratic profiles: electoral cues add little, while compromise is rewarded and confrontation penalized. Embeddedness is broadly valued, but prior protest experience can reshape its meaning, sometimes turning local ties into a signal of elite capture rather than community accountability. Centralization therefore does not simply raise or lower support -- it polarizes the meaning of local authority and reshapes the criteria citizens use to judge it.

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• Why Autocrats (De)centralize Electoral Authority: Explaining the Introduction and Cancellation of Subnational Elections

Co-authored

• Surveillance as Governance: Policing Effectiveness and Political Control in the Moscow AI Experiment
  (with Dmitriy Serebrennikov and Sergey Ross) [Abstract]
  This article examines the political logic of digital surveillance deployment in contemporary authoritarian governance through the case of Moscow’s AI Experiment. We ask whether the expansion of facial recognition–enabled CCTV reflects a logic of performative legitimacy—improving policing effectiveness—or a logic of infrastructural political control, whereby surveillance infrastructure is expanded in response to protest activity. Using original spatially and temporally disaggregated data on CCTV installation, district-level crime clearance, and protest events in which detentions occurred, we provide the first systematic empirical test of these competing logics in Russia. Empirically, we combine district-level panel models of crime clearance before and after the 2020 rollout of facial recognition with models predicting the expansion of public-space CCTV. The results reveal a sharp asymmetry. Facial recognition is only weakly and inconsistently associated with improvements in crime clearance, and only at the aggregate level. By contrast, the expansion of public-space surveillance is strongly and spatially linked to recent protest activity, independent of crime dynamics and prior surveillance density. These findings show that digital surveillance in Russia is deployed less to deliver measurable policing gains than to reorganize urban space in ways that lower the future costs of monitoring and intervention. More broadly, the study demonstrates how technocratic digitalization enables authoritarian regimes to translate episodes of protest into durable infrastructural capacity.

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• Mass Attitudes towards Russia’s Aggression against Ukraine: Tentative Support for Top-Down Opinion Formation
  (with Filip Kostelka et al.) — Accepted, European Journal of Political Research [Abstract]
  This paper studies variation in mass attitudes towards the Russo-Ukrainian War. Although most Europeans express dismay at Russia's aggression against Ukraine, more ambivalent or even pro-Kremlin positions are not rare. Drawing on the literature on foreign policy and wars, we hypothesize that support for the aggressor may reflect a quartet of factors: economic interests, ideological preferences, political cues, and disinformation. We probe the role of these factors using two types of survey data. The first is an original survey conducted in five countries (Czechia, France, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia) and spanning over 12,000 respondents. The other is the Solidarity in Europe survey with more than 24,000 respondents from seventeen countries. The results of three types of analyses reveal that neutral and pro-Kremlin attitudes, held by sizeable segments of European society, are most strongly linked to the positions of respondents’ preferred political parties, followed by disinformation and ideology. Overall, top-down models of public opinion seem to explain better within-country variations in attitudes towards the conflict than bottom-up models. These findings, which should be interpreted carefully, carry important implications for containing Russia's influence over Europe's public opinion and contribute to the literature on public preference formation in the field of foreign policy.

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• Local Elections and Elite Management in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Kazakhstan
  (with Kirill Melnikov and Thomas Hazell) [Abstract]
  This study examines the introduction of local executive elections in Kazakhstan, where rural executives (akims) were previously appointed through a centralized system. We analyze the impact of these elections on elite turnover and recruitment, leveraging a complete dataset of all subdistrict elections and a pilot study of akim biographies. Elections resulted in frequent leadership replacement. Nevertheless, we show that they did not result in inclusion of a broader group of local or the selection of more locally-embedded officials. The results suggest that elections may serve more to formalize the renewal of the same bureaucratic elite than to co-opt new groups or widen access to power.

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• The Governance Effects of Local Elections in Autocracies: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Kazakhstan
  (with Kirill Melnikov and Thomas Hazell)

Journal Publications (In English)

1. Minaeva, E., Rumiantseva, A., Zavadskaya, M. (2023). From local elections to appointments: How has municipal reform changed vote delivery in Russian municipalities? Electoral Studies, Vol. 85, DOI: 10.1016/j.electstud.2023.102657.
2. Minaeva, E. (2023). Policy Activism in Urban Governance: The Case of Master Plan Development in Perm. In Jeremy Morris, Andrei Semenov, and Regina Smyth (Eds.), Varieties of Russian Activism: State-Society Contestation in Everyday Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
3. Minaeva, E. (2022). Strategies for the Preservation and Cancellation of the Direct Election of Municipal Heads in Russia. Universe of Russia. Sociology. Ethnology, Vol. 31, Issue 2: 97-117. (In Russian).
4. Minaeva, E., Panov, P. (2021). Dense Networks, Ethnic Minorities, and Electoral Mobilization in Contemporary Russia. Problems of Post-Communism, DOI: 10.1080/10758216.2021.1974885.

Methods and Expertise

• Causal inference with observational data (panel and cross-sectional)
• Quasi-experimental designs (policy shocks, institutional reforms)
• Survey and vignette experiments
• Qualitative interviews
• Analysis of subnational administrative, electoral, and protest data
• Experience with large language models (LLMs) for data collection and validation
• Research on public attitudes, elite strategies, technocracy and authoritarian governance

Research Projects and Collaborations

Maidan Revolutions, the War in Ukraine, and Civil Society Responses
(Project link)

Within the project, I am responsible for the design and implementation of cross-national survey research in Armenia, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. My work includes developing research questions and hypotheses, designing questionnaires, coordinating with survey firms and reviewing pilot studies, analyzing survey data, and contributing empirical findings to academic publications.

GLOBAL — European Governance and Politics Programme
(Project link)

I am an assistant in GLOBAL, an ERC Advanced Grant project led by Daniele Caramani at the European University Institute. My contribution focuses on data collection and validation for research on global party networks and transnational political organizations. I work on collecting and systematizing data on party memberships and transnational party-linked NGOs, creating benchmark datasets for evaluating large language models, and validating generative AI outputs to construct high-quality datasets for the analysis of global political cleavages.

Teaching Experience

• Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
  Political Paths of Post-Soviet Countries (MA level, block seminar), 2024–2025
  Syllabus

• European University Institute, Italy
  Introduction to R (PhD level), 2023
  Course materials

• Perm State University, Russia
  Comparative Politics; Methodology of Political Science; R Programming; Regional Studies
  BA level (Political Science & International Relations), 2020–2022

Individual and Collective Grants

1. European University Institute, Early Stage Researchers grant (2024): Local elections and elite management in authoritarian regime: evidence from Kazakhstan.
2. Russian Science Foundation (2018 — 2023): Collective Grant for Russian Scholars: Mechanisms of Interests Coordination in the Urban Development Processes.
3. Oxford Russia Fellowship (2020 — 2021): Individual Grant for Young Russian Scholars: Political Consequences of the Implementation of Municipal Heads’ Appointments in Russia.
4. Russian Foundation for Basic Research (2019 — 2021): Collective Grant for Russian Scholars: Spatial Localization of Ethnic Minorities within the Framework of Political-Administrative Boundaries as a Factor of Politicization of Ethnicity on Sub-National Level: Russian Practices in the Context of World Experience.
5. Volkswagen Foundation (2019 — 2021): Collective Grant for Interdisciplinary and International Research: Shifting Paradigms: Towards Participatory and Effective Urban Planning in Germany, Russia and Ukraine.
6. Russian Science Foundation (2015 — 2017): Collective Grant for Russian Scholars: Securing a Balance in Interethnic Relations: Regional autonomies, the State Integrity and the Rights of Ethnic Minorities.