I am a comparative politics scholar drawing from interdisciplinary social sciences to ask and answer research questions. My primary work is characterized by interests in comparative politics and the political economy of development with an empirical focus on postcommunist Eurasia and Russia and the application of causal identification methods. For my book-length dissertation project, I am investigating the emergence and persistence of the state patriarchy in postcommunist Eurasia through forced labor system in the late Russian Empire and U.S.S.R., and its effects in their successor states. My individual and collaborative research agendas investigate fiscal redistribution, sanction effects, inclusive governance, public administration and accountability reforms, and citizen engagement in countries with limited electoral accountability. In this research statement, I provide an overview of my research agenda as organized across three major themes.

1. The Political Economy of Development

In this research agenda, I leverage natural experiments in recent historical and contemporary settings to study variation in comparative and historical political economy of development. I achieve this through two major works in progress.

In my book-length dissertation project, I examine the institutionalization of forced labor and its long-run effects in Eurasian authoritarian spaces between the 1870s to 2020. This extensive period captures different political regimes: the Russian Empire, U.S.S.R., and periods in post-communist transition. First, I reconstruct the mechanisms of adoption and persistence of forced labor in the region as a response to labor reorientation from agriculture to industrialization in the Slavic Core - the Imperial heartland following the emancipation of serfs, global trade shocks that spurred demand for labor-intensive crops, and the Soviet economic challenges that incentivized labor extraction while maintaining the centrality of the Russian core-centered development. I provide comparative evidence for previously not studied Soviet colonial management institutions that regulated and significantly impacted labor and gender outcomes, hence conceptualizing communist colonialism. Second, I analyze how forced labor policies helped produce three major social legacy claims of the Soviet Union - weakened household patriarchal norms, mass progressive public goods provision, and the legacy of communist colonial institutions - that together continue impacting present day political and socioeconomic outcomes. I causally test its legacy effects on gender outcomes by designing a natural experiment and operationalizing exogenous variation in soil suitability to grow labor-intensive and politically salient crops.

My book project makes multiple contributions to social sciences. First, my project investigates an understudied research question on the adoption and persistence of forced labor in a large geographic space in Eurasia, which is demographically, socially, and culturally diverse. Unlike the instances of serfdom, gulag (forced labor and political prisons), or mass construction projects involving forced labor, civilian forced labor in agriculture was more widespread, gender indiscriminate, socially and ethnically diverse, and recent. In many post Soviet territories, forced labor continued well beyond the Soviet regime's collapse in 1991. While Uzbekistan was recognized as state-sponsored and systemic forced labor free only in 2022, the issue is still pertinent in Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. Second, in a significant discussion with existing literature, I empirically demonstrate why socialist-communist ideology cannot explain the regime's progressive gender and public goods policies, instead highlighting the importance of the Communist Party's labor needs. Thus, I intend to improve our understanding of authoritarian progress by tracing the consequences of a particularly pernicious form of unfreedom — mixed-gender forced labor in exchange for public goods provision. 

Third, my book project contributes novel theoretical frameworks that help explain (1) how some of the signature Soviet-era progressive public goods were established through forced labor needs in agriculture, even though significantly falling short of broad inclusion, and (2) why short-term authoritarian economic rationale for forced labor mutated into an instrument of political violence akin to labor extraction in market economies much despised by the Soviet propaganda. I argue that the origins of women’s labor force participation and greater socioeconomic emancipation did not always come as a direct result of enfranchisement and their active voting rights. While these frameworks find evidence through rigorous archival research, I additionally test my theory by applying quantitative content analysis (over 12,000 files containing nearly 20 million words from the Communist Party of the USSR and its government bodies), an original dataset with primary surveys among local public administrators (n=4,500 assistant mayors) and households (n=1,200) in Uzbekistan, and 180 oral history interviews from Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, in addition to secondary household panel and agricultural data. I find that such authoritarian progressive public goods suffer in quality and fail to last. 

Next, in addition to contributing to a growing body of literature on comparative politics, history, sociology, and the political economy of development in authoritarian and totalitarian states, my research makes a stronger case for analyzing countries and semi-autonomous provinces within the Soviet Union as within-case units drawing rationale from settler colony research approaches previously applied on Western European colonies, thus bringing attention to overlooked instances. I posit important political implications and that women in such places still significantly depend on the state, demand the state’s presence, and likely constitute an important support base for authoritarian regimes. The outcomes of my book project would be relevant to literature on comparative politics, the comparative and historical political economy of development, state-sponsored political violence, gender politics in authoritarian regimes, postcommunist and authoritarian studies, as well as history, sociology, and interdisciplinary area studies. 

My fieldwork in 2021-2023 included extensive and immersive research in multiple archives, fielding original surveys, analyzing retrospective quantitative data, and conducting qualitative research. Since 2023, I have been working on my book proposal at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University.

In a series of three collaborative research papers with Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili (University of Pittsburgh), I explore pertinent issues of external political economy shocks and environmental governance in Central Asia. In Do Russia-Sanctions Affect Government Perceptions among Dependent Allies? Evidence from Central Asia, we operationalize a unique household-level survey from Tajikistan in 2013 and 2016, with an unexpected event during survey design (UESD). While the effects of a functioning foreign labor market and resultant remittances on the labor migrants’ places of origin are well studied, there is a lack of understanding of the immediate effects when such markets experience sanction shocks. Using the Crimean Annexation shock in 2014, we identify how the economic crisis stemming from sanctions in Russia forced the return of primarily male labor migrants and closed off the arrival of many more to one its principal and dependent allies. We then test how sanction-induced return from and limited labor migration to Russia affect local governance perceptions. We extend our analysis with surveys in other Central Asian states. Our research has important implications for understanding the long-term political effects of Russia’s war on Ukraine and punitive sanctions on Russia for states and societies with close economic ties to Russia. In two other research projects, funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, we will be implementing a survey and a field experiment in two countries in Central Asia through fall 2024 to spring 2025, testing how outgroup sustainability solutions might affect local community acceptance and communal collaboration, improving critical natural resource use and governing deep divisions. 

2. Political Accountability and Public Service Reforms in Non-Democratic Regimes

I plan to inform the present research with my works in historical political economy. To this account, I co-founded and co-coordinate the Local Economic and Administrative Performance (LEAP) Research Project with Temirlan Moldogaziev (Indiana University – Bloomington) and Cheol Liu (Korea Development Institute School).

Leveraging my previous pro-bono research appointment at Uzbekistan's Ministry of Economy and Finance as an independent Research Associate, I co-founded and am a co-PI for a research program with primary field access in Uzbekistan. The LEAP project secured $85,000 in international seed grant from the Korea Development Institute (for 2022-2024, renewed for 2024-2025). We study public administration reforms, poverty reduction policies, participatory politics, and fiscal policymaking in Central Asia – the areas significantly affected by extractive institutions of the past. We are the first social science research team to gain such field access to Uzbekistan for a steady pipeline of theoretically well-grounded, empirically rich, and substantially useful research output.

As of summer 2024, we submitted one article for journal review (Policy Entrepreneurship Under Extreme Uncertainty: Adoption and Implementation of Participatory Budgeting in “Thawing” Authoritarian Contexts) and completed four surveys with pre-registered list and conjoint experiments - three at elite public service level and one nationally representative sample. In our paper under review, we investigate the Citizens’ Initiative Open Budget policy – a unique application of participatory budgeting and policy innovation as a platform for limited substantial representation, fiscal redistribution, and policy signaling in authoritarian settings based on our interviews and focus groups with high ranking officials. 

In three elite-level studies, which are in preparation for journal submission, we analyze the results of the pioneering local administrative workforce survey to capture Uzbekistan’s China-inspired top-down developmental policy through central bureaucratic conscription of 7,200 plus district mayor assistants who administer micro-districts. We causally estimate the responsiveness of unelected municipality heads to citizen suggestions, their preferences on decentralization and autonomy, and their decision making on foreign investment projects that can harm environment. In the fifth paper under preparation to submission, we test the implications of local administrative performance and reforms among public in Uzbekistan, using an original 1,200-household survey with the Central Asia Barometer, one of Central Eurasia's leading survey firms. 

Finally, in my individual research paper project, I deploy a survey experiment to test if empathetic and relatable perspective-taking (varied in emotional and informational input) can affect redistribution in favor of largely under-represented disabled people in post-socialist Eurasia. I theorize that due to concealing data on social needs and often politically rigged assignment of state-guaranteed social benefits for vulnerable groups (unemployed, disabled, single parents, or large families), many civilians do not realize the extent to which they interact with their fellow citizens in need and breadth of their impact on them. In my pilot survey, I find that when people are primed to recognize and then reflect on the potential breadth of incidence of commonly accepted disability, they are able to empathize with disabled people and support costly redistributive policies favoring them. This research is particularly useful since, in authoritarian environments, citizens lack a voice in electoral institutions. They cannot directly affect legislation through widely televised or distributed platforms and tools, such as parliamentary hearings. Nevertheless, citizens can leverage media accountability and effectively petition for policy changes if they are mobilized through cost-efficient and empathetically informative interventions.  

3. The Politics of Culture in Post-Communist and Post-Totalitarian Spaces

In a collaborative research paper and dataset work with Marika Olijar (UW-Madison) and Khabiba Ubaydullaeva (ICAPHE), we challenge the literature on the role of Islam by adding a crucial variable of totalitarian state control and its legacies. Scholars have varying opinions about what influences gender attitudes in post-Soviet Eurasia. Some scholars point to the enduring legacy of the Soviet gender-egalitarian policies, while others point to a widespread backlash against such policies after the Soviet Union's fall. We advance that the variation in gender attitudes (Y) can be moderated by the foundational political constraints imposed on religious institutions (X) on women's access to them. In Central Asia, the Soviet repression and regulation of Islam led to a parallel system of formal and informal religious practices that remain in place today. Ironically, through forced secularization and controlling women’s religious participation, the authoritarian institutions created a more gendered formal religious institutions with conservative vertical cultural transmission, while less regulated and more inclusive informal institutions allowed for comparatively more gender-egalitarian horizontal value transmission. We argue that informal religious institutions known as public shrines encourage women’s participation in Islam, positively impacting the importance of women’s rights and respondents’ beliefs regarding the existence of equal rights, whereas formal religious institutions like state-controlled mosques reify conservative gender attitudes. We explore a counterintuitive causal mechanism of the state-mandated forced secularization in Central Asia: how the state-imposed secularization resulted in women’s ban from formal religious institutions such as mosques and its modern-day effects. We exploit quasi-exogenous exposure to formal and informal religious institutions, where survey responses to gender attitudinal questions in the Life in Transitions Survey Wave 3 diverge by institutional exposure. Our work shows that variation in gender attitudes arises from institutional metrics rather than from 'Islam,' challenging previous studies that uniformly associate traditionally practiced Abrahamic religions in general and Islam in particular with patriarchal gender views. In the process, we present a novel dataset on all formal (state-regulated) and informal (indigenous, unorganized, and civil society regulated) religious institutions in Central Asia.