Work

Public opinion polls do more than measure what people think. They have become an institution through which democratic societies represent themselves to themselves. My dissertation, The Politics of Polls: Representation and Democracy in the Age of Public Opinion Polling, reconstructs how this institution emerged and how it has transformed democratic representation.

The project challenges Jürgen Habermas’s genealogy of public opinion by reconstructing a different intellectual tradition. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau and James Bryce through Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Joseph Schumpeter, public opinion emerges as a fundamentally plebiscitarian concept: an expression of the people’s judgment that can authorize political power without requiring their continuous political participation. Scientific polling gave this idea a new institutional form, transforming public opinion into a permanent numerical representation of the people. Against the assumption that polls simply reveal an opinion already present in society, I draw on the agonistic tradition, particularly Antonio Gramsci and Jacques Rancière, to develop an account of public opinion as constituted through political struggle—over which opinions become visible, who is able to speak, and ultimately who counts as part of the public.

This theoretical and historical account also offers a new explanation for the striking polling mispredictions of recent elections. Polling errors are usually treated primarily as methodological problems. I argue that they can also reveal a political problem built into polling as an institution of representation: the people least likely to participate in politics are also increasingly likely to refuse participation in polls. As political disengagement becomes socially structured, nonresponse can systematically distort the public that polls make visible.

The return of strongman politics is usually described as democratic backsliding: democracy weakens and authoritarianism takes its place. I am exploring a different possibility. What if some of the institutions now sustaining highly personalized power developed within democracy itself?

The project revives an old political category—electoral monarchy—to describe monarchical rule grounded in democratic legitimacy. Modern democracy did not simply abolish the rule of one: elections, plebiscites, opinion polls, and other technologies of popular authorization made it possible to combine extraordinary personal power with a claim to speak directly for the people. I trace this combination historically, from Bonapartism and the emergence of mass suffrage to contemporary elected leaders, and ask what it tells us about the limits of electoral democracy—and about institutional alternatives that give citizens a more active role in governing themselves.

What would it mean not simply to democratize Russia’s existing political institutions, but to redesign them around active self-government? This project developed an experimental constitutional model drawing on recent innovations in participatory democracy and political theory. It proposed a radically decentralized federation, sharply limited presidential power, and institutions intended to make political participation part of everyday life rather than something citizens do only at elections. The draft was conceived less as a prediction of Russia’s future than as an experiment in institutional imagination: an attempt to expand the range of democratic arrangements that can be seriously discussed.

Role: Project Co-Lead · Institution: Institute for Global Reconstitution · Support: Private funding

Why do people accept economic inequalities, and what happens to political equality when economic inequalities become very large? This theoretical and empirical project studied the ways inequality is justified and the consequences those justifications have for democratic life. Rather than treating inequality only as a question of income distribution, we approached it as a political problem: unequal resources can become unequal capacities to speak, participate, and exercise power.

Role: Project Co-Lead

How should we judge the quality of political representation? This project compared electoral systems and forms of representation in Russia and internationally, asking not only whether votes are accurately translated into seats but whether political institutions allow different groups in society to make themselves politically present. The resulting expert report examined alternative mechanisms of representation and developed proposals for electoral reform.

Role: Principal Investigator · Commissioned by: Assembly of Russian Municipal Representatives

Can people divided by radically different understandings of the past nevertheless decide together what should be done about it? This project used deliberative groups to move beyond conventional surveys of historical attitudes. Participants with conflicting perspectives on twentieth-century political violence discussed concrete questions of commemoration and public policy and tried to formulate positions they could support together. The experiment suggested that agreement about how to live with a difficult past does not necessarily require agreement about what that past means.

Role: Principal Investigator · Support: Foundation of Presidential Grants · Methods: Deliberative groups and survey research

The 2020 vote on constitutional amendments in Russia posed an unusual methodological problem. Voting was stretched across a week and included electronic, workplace, home, and other forms that made conventional election observation—and conventional exit polling—extremely difficult. I led the methodology for an independent exit poll in Moscow and St. Petersburg that deliberately concentrated on the final day and modeled what the vote looked like under traditional, observable election conditions. The results differed dramatically from the official outcome and revealed a deep divide between ordinary polling-station voters and the result produced by the plebiscite as a whole.

Role: Methodology Lead · Commissioned by: Consortium of opposition political organizations · Locations: Moscow and St. Petersburg

Societies emerging from political violence have dealt with their pasts in radically different ways: trials, truth commissions, amnesties, public apologies, deliberate silence, and combinations of these approaches. This project began by comparing experiences across countries and then asked which approaches resonated with different parts of Russian society. Instead of searching for a single national attitude toward the past, we identified five distinct groups with different ideas about truth, responsibility, punishment, forgiveness, and the role of the state.

Role: Principal Investigator · Commissioned by: Transfiguration Foundation · Output: Interactive research website and analytical report

What kind of society do young people want to live in? This four-country comparative study examined how younger generations perceive inequality and which social and political problems they consider most urgent. One of its most striking findings was the priority respondents placed on strengthening social solidarity.

Role: Principal Investigator · Commissioned by: Boris Nemtsov Foundation · Supported by: German Federal Foreign Office and Friedrich Ebert Foundation

Official memory is only one way a society relates to its past. This qualitative project studied grassroots historical initiatives across Russia—local museums, commemorative practices, family histories, and civic projects that preserve memories outside the dominant state narrative. We described this phenomenon as a form of “second memory”: less monumental and ideological, more local and horizontal.

Role: Project Co-Lead · Commissioned by: Congress of Civic Initiatives · Methods: Qualitative research on grassroots historical activism

Why do people borrow from banks even when borrowing from people they know may be cheaper and safer? This project studied household debt not simply as a financial problem but as a social relationship. Through more than one hundred interviews in different kinds of communities, we examined how ideals of independence, obligations to others, gift exchange, and community ties shape borrowing.

Role: Principal Investigator · Support: Foundation for Development at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University · Fieldwork: 108 interviews

What makes a group of people a community? This multi-year research program studied small Russian towns to understand community not as something automatically created by living in the same place, but as something continuously produced through social relationships. We examined the practices that create dense ties, mutual obligations, and a sense of belonging—and the circumstances under which those ties weaken or disappear.

Role: Project Co-Lead · Support: Higher School of Economics and Russian Foundation for the Humanities