Quintin H. Beazer



ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY





qbeazer{at}fsu.edu



I am an associate professor of political science at Florida State University in Tallahassee, FL. I study comparative political economy, international political economy, and the politics of authoritarian regimes, particularly within Russia and the post-communist countries. My research examines how politics and economics interact in "messy" environments, where institutions are weak, in transition, or nondemocratic. My research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and ​International Studies Quarterly.​



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Academic Positions


Florida State University, Dept. of Political Science

Associate Professor, 2019 - present

Assistant Professor, 2012 - 2019


Higher School of Economics (Moscow), International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development

Associate Fellow, 2018 - 2022


Yale University, Leitner Program in International & Comparative Political Economy

Postdoctoral Associate, 2011-2012




Education


Ph.D., Political Science at The Ohio State University, 2011

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M.A., Economics at The Ohio State University, 2009

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M.A., Political Science at The Ohio State University, 2006

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B.A., International Studies and English, Utah State University, 2004




Publications


Beazer, Quintin H., Noah Buckley, and Ora John Reuter. "The Demand for Elections under Autocracy: Regime Approval and the Elimination of Local Elections in Russia." Forthcoming at the American Journal of Political Science.


Beazer, Quintin H. and Ora John Reuter. 2022. "Do Authoritarian Elections Help the Poor? Evidence from Russian Cities." Journal of Politics 84 (1): 437-454.


Beazer, Quintin H., Charles Crabtree, Chris Fariss, and Holger Kern. 2022. "When do Private Actors Engage in Censorship? Evidence from a Correspondence Experiment with Russian Private Media Firms." British Journal of Political Science 52 (4): 1790-1809.


Beazer, Quintin H. and Daniel J. Blake. 2021. "Risk is Relative: Heterogeneous Responses to Institutional Risks for Foreign Investment." International Studies Quarterly 65 (3): 594-605.


​Beazer, Quintin H. and Ora John Reuter. 2019. "Who's to Blame? Political Centralization and Electoral Punishment under Authoritarianism." Journal of Politics 81 (2): 648-662.


Beazer, Quintin H. and Daniel J. Blake. 2018. "The Conditional Nature of Political Risk: How Home Institutions Influence the Location of Foreign Direct Investment." American Journal of Political Science 62 (2): 470-485.

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Beazer, Quintin H. and Byungwon Woo. 2016. "IMF Conditionality, Government Partisanship & the Progress of Economic Reforms." American Journal of Political Science 60 (2): 304-321.

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Beazer, Quintin H. 2015. "Political Centralization and Economic Performance: Evidence from Russia." Journal of Politics 77 (1): 128-145.

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Beazer, Quintin H. 2012. "Bureaucratic Discretion, Business Investment, and Uncertainty." Journal of Politics 74 (3): 637-652.




PDF Version

Publications



"THe Demand for Elections UNder Autocracy: Regime Approval and the Elimination of Local Elections in RUssia." Forthcoming.



(Coauthored with Noah Buckley and Ora John Reuter) AMerican Journal of Political Science





Most contemporary autocracies hold elections. Does the public value these elections? If so, do they value them enough to punish incumbents that subvert elections? We examine this question in contemporary Russia, examining whether individuals withdraw support from regime leaders when local elections are eliminated. Over the past 25 years, most Russian cities have replaced their directly-elected mayors with appointed executives. This paper uses the largest dataset on public opinion ever assembled on Russia---over 400,000 responses drawn from two decades by Russia's top polling agencies---to analyze how the elimination of elections in Russia's large cities has affected public attitudes toward the authorities. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that election cancellation reduces support for President Vladimir Putin. This effect is stronger in settings with histories of robust electoral competition. This suggests that the public is more likely to punish incumbents for eliminating elections when individuals have experience with competitive elections.


Download: pre-publication version / appendix



"Do Authoritarian Elections Help the Poor? Evidence from Russian Cities." 2022.



(Coauthored with Ora John Reuter) Journal of Politics 84 (1): 437-454





How do local elections under autocracy affect pro-poor policies? Using geographic and temporal variation in the cancellation of mayoral elections in Russian cities (2003-2012), we investigate how mayoral appointments affect the condition of low-quality, Soviet-era housing maintained by local governments. Our results show that, compared to elected mayors, appointed mayors allow more of their aging housing stock to become dilapidated and unsafe. Consistent with our argument, dilapidated housing stock increases more in cities where appointees can deliver high vote shares to the ruling party in national elections. This suggests that fulfilling core regime political goals leaves appointed officials less attentive to local conditions.


Download: pre-publication version / appendix



"When do private actors engage in censorship? Evidence from a correspondence experiment with Russian private media firms." 2022.



(Coauthored with Charles Crabtree, CHris Fariss, and Holger Kern) British Journal of Political Science 52 (4): 1790-1809





In authoritarian regimes, repression encourages private actors to censor not only themselves but also other private actors, a behavior we call regime-induced private censorship. We present the results of a correspondence experiment conducted in Russia that investigates the censorship behavior of private media firms. We find that such firms censor third-party advertisements that include anti-regime language, calls for political or non-political collective action, or both. Our results demonstrate the significance of other types of censorship besides state censorship in an important authoritarian regime and contribute to the rapidly growing literature on authoritarian information control.


Download: pre-publication version / appendix



"Risk is Relative: Heterogeneous Perceptions of Institutional Risk to Foreign Investment." 2021.



(Coauthored with Daniel blake) International Studies Quarterly 65 (3): 594-605





Are economic actors equally sensitive to institutional conditions? While existing research recognizes that institutions can have varying affects on actors' interests, the implicit assumption is that actors are homogeneous in how sensitive they are to their institutional environment. We test this argument using survey data from a diverse group of managers-in-training at an international business school. We find that when asked to evaluate a potential foreign investment location, respondents from developing countries are significantly less sensitive to information about the host country's courts than their counterparts from developed economies. By contrast, we find that economic actors from both developed and developing countries respond similarly to information about the stability of economic policies. The findings suggest that sensitivity to the risks and safeguards of certain institutional conditions vary systematically across actors, depending upon both the home environment to which economic actors have been exposed and the type of host institution.


Download: pre-publication version / appendix



"Who's to Blame? Political Centralization and Electoral Punishment under Authoritarianism." 2019.



(Coauthored with Ora John Reuter) journal of Politics 81 (2): 648-662





How does centralization affect the way voters attribute blame for local economic outcomes? The question of whether political centralization ties regime leaders to local economic outcomes is particularly important in authoritarian regimes, where economic performance legitimacy is a key source of regime stability. Using political and economic data from large Russian cities for the period 2003-2012, we investigate how replacing direct mayoral elections with appointments affects the way voters attribute blame for economic outcomes. We find that the ruling party is more likely to be punished for poor economic performance in cities with appointed mayors than it is in cities with elected mayors. This research suggests that having locally-elected officials may help electoral authoritarian regimes deflect responsibility for some unfavorable outcomes.


Download: article / appendix



"The conditional Nature of Political Risk: How Home institutions influence the location of foreign direct investment." 2018.



(Coauthored with Daniel Blake) The American Journal of Political Science 62 (2): 470-485





What determines whether countries' institutions attract or deter investment? Existing theories predict that multinational enterprises (MNEs) will avoid locations where institutions cannot constrain the opportunistic behavior of public and private actors, but we argue that the attractiveness of host country institutions depends on the institutions that investing firms have encountered at home. Home country institutions help determine the institutional environment that firms are best prepared to deal with abroad. Applying this argument specifically to judicial independence, we test our predictions using multiple datasets at different levels of analysis: firm-level data on MNEs' foreign subsidiaries, data on bilateral foreign direct investment (FDI) positions, and longitudinal data on bilateral FDI flows. We find that states with independent judiciaries are particularly attractive to investment from countries also possessing independent courts. Similarly, FDI from countries with low judicial independence goes disproportionately to host countries lacking independent judiciaries.


Download: article / appendix



"IMF Conditionality, Government Partisanship, & the Progress of Economic Reforms." 2016.



(COAUTHORED WITH BYUNGWON WOO) THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE. 60 (2): 304-321





The International Monetary Fund (IMF) often seeks to influence countries' domestic public policy via varying levels of conditionality -- linking financial support to borrowing governments' commitment to policy reforms. When does extensive conditionality encourage domestic economic reforms and when does it impede them? We argue that, rather than universally benefiting or harming reforms, the effects of stricter IMF conditionality depend on domestic partisan politics. More IMF conditions can pressure left-wing governments into undertaking more ambitious reforms with little resistance from partisan rivals on the right; under right governments, however, more conditions hinder reform implementation by heightening resistance from the left while simultaneously reducing leaders' ability to win their support through concessions or compromise. Using data on post-communist IMF programs for the period 1994-2010, we find robust evidence supporting these claims, even after addressing the endogeneity of IMF programs via instrumental variables analysis.


Download: article / appendix



"Political Centralization and Economic Performance: Evidence from Russia." 2015.



JOURNAL OF POLITICS 77 (1): 128-145





What determines whether political centralization helps or hurts economic performance? This paper identifies pre-existing patterns of political competition as a critical factor in determining the impact of political centralization on subnational economies. In competitive regions, political centralization undermines economic performance by removing a functioning electoral mechanism that makes leaders responsive to wide range of economic concerns. In uncompetitive regions, however, centralization encourages economic improvement by reducing leaders' reliance on narrow interests and making previously-unassailable local leaders answerable to central political bosses. I test competing hypotheses about the economic effects of political centralization using a set of Russian regional reforms that removed the direct election of governors in favor of a system of centralized appointments. The data show that, on a number of different dimensions, economic performance suffered after centralizing reforms were adopted in Russia's politically-competitive regions; in contrast, political centralization improved economic performance in those regions where strong incumbent governors had previously depressed political competition.


Download: article / appendix



"Bureaucratic Discretion, Business Investment, and Uncertainty." 2012.



JOURNAL OF POLITICS 74 (3): 637-652





What determines whether policy environments attract or deter investment? Scholars worried about the vulnerability of market-supporting institutions to political manipulation have identified delegation to independent actors as way to increase policy environments' predictability. Extant arguments, however, risk overgeneralizing from the experience of developed democracies. I argue that investors' response to bureaucratic discretion -- agents' leeway to make decisions and act independently of political bodies -- depends upon the broader institutional context. Where robust political institutions are lacking, bureaucratic discretion acts as a source of unpredictability that deters investors; conversely, political institutions that share the cost of monitoring help to mitigate uncertainty about how bureaucrats will use discretion in applying regulatory rules. Using survey data from over 600 enterprises in Russia, I find that perceptions of bureaucratic discretion are negatively associated with firm managers' willingness to invest; this effect is particularly pronounced in regions where the institutional environment discourages political competition.


Download: article / appendix



Working Papers



research under review & selected works in progress



"Public Support for Patriotic Education under Authoritarianism: Evidence from Russia"



(Coauthored with Katerina Tertytchnaya, Olga Gasparyan, Holger Kern, Eugenia Nazrullaeva, Ksenia Northmore-Ball)





To what extent do citizens in autocracies support the politicization of mass education? Authoritarian regimes can attempt to increase their legitimacy and stifle dissent by redesigning educational content to emphasize patriotic values. The success of such efforts depends, in part, upon the support of society. However, existing studies provide no empirical insight into how citizens in autocracies perceive efforts to promote pro-regime narratives in the classroom. In this paper, we study Russians’ attitudes towards the dramatic expansion of patriotic education following the invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on three online survey experiments conducted as reforms to Russian education unfolded, we find strong support for expanding patriotic education, regardless of the justifications offered. This support remains unchanged even when respondents are presented with critiques of expanding patriotic education, with criticisms from opposition figures being less tolerated compared to those from parents or teachers. These results underscore that authoritarian deepening may enjoy the consent of the governed.



"Investigating the analytical robustness of the social and behavioural sciences"



(Part of Re-Analyst Team; Primary Authors -- Balazs Aczel and Barnabas Szaszi)





The same dataset can be analysed in different justifiable ways to answer the same research question, potentially challenging the robustness of empirical science. In this crowd initiative, we investigated the degree to which research findings in the social and behavioural sciences are contingent on analysts’ choices. To explore this question, we took a sample of 100 studies published between 2009 and 2018 in criminology, demography, economics and finance, management, marketing and organisational behaviour, political science, psychology, and sociology. For one claim (directional evidence accompanied by a positive statistical inference by the original authors) from each study, at least five re-analysts were invited to independently re-analyse the original data. The statistical appropriateness of the re-analyses was assessed in peer evaluations and the robustness indicators were inspected along a range of research characteristics and study designs. We found that 34% of the independent re-analyses yielded the same result (within a tolerance region of +/- 0.05 Cohen’s d) as the original report; with a four times broader tolerance region, this indicator rose to 57%. Regarding the conclusions drawn, 74% of analyses were reported to arrive at the same conclusion as in the original investigation; 24% to no effects/inconclusive result, and 2% to the opposite effect as in the original investigation. This exploratory study suggests that the common single-path analyses in social and behavioural research should not simply be assumed to be robust to alternative justifiable analyses. Therefore, we recommend the development and use of practices to explore and communicate this neglected source of uncertainty.



"Sore Spots: How Past Repression Shapes Present Responses to Autocratic Coercion"



(Coauthored with Noah BUckley and Holger Kern)





How does past repression affect communities' response to autocratic repression in the present day? Coercion is a fundamental autocratic tool to maintain political control, but existing research raises unsettled questions about whether repression leads to support or opposition from autocrats’ subjects. Within this discussion, we argue that the effect on public opinion from an authoritarian regime's contemporary repression depends in part upon the legacies of the past. Communities that experienced intense repression in the past remain sensitive to state violence and respond more negatively to present-day reminders of the state's repressive abilities. To test this idea, we examine public opinion responses in Russia following the repression of opposition-led, anti-corruption protests in March 2017. Using a unique survey dataset on Putin approval within dozens of Russian cities alongside rich historical data on the intensity of Stalin-era repressions, we use a difference-in-differences design to show that the effect of present-day repression on regime support is conditional on past violence: crackdowns on anti-corruption protestors increased support for Putin in places with lower levels of past repression and lowered Putin's approval rating in cities where Stalin's repressions were most intense. Our study suggests that historically-repressed communities harbor greater anxiety about and disapproval of autocratic repression, even when it is directed towards other targets.


"Geopolitics and the Location Strategy of Multinational Enterprises"



(Coauthored with Daniel Blake, Raphael Cunha, and Srividya Jandhyala)





We introduce the geopolitical liability of origin (LOR) whereby a multinational firm is perceived as a threat in a host country because its home country is a geopolitical rival. To reshape perceptions of origin, the firm can relocate control rights outside of the home country by: (a) moving its headquarters and senior leadership to a friendly country, (b) transferring ownership and control of host country operations to a local partner, (c) shifting the supply chain to the host market. Using a series of survey experiments among Indian consumers, we find that only the first two of these relocation strategies help overcome geopolitical LOR as they effectively decrease the firm’s association with its home country and increase willingness to buy the firm’s products in the host country.



"Directing Attention during Sensitive Times: Agenda-setting on Russian state-controlled television, 2003--2018"



(Coauthored with Dino christenson, Charles Crabtree, and Holger Kern)





How do authoritarian governments use media to shape perceptions during politically-sensitive periods? We argue that during periods when regime control is more vulnerable to challenge, authoritarian governments have incentives and the ability to set media agendas that enhance the regime's image and redirect attention towards regime-friendly topics. In this paper, we analyze 15 years of news broadcasts from a state-controlled television station in Russia, Channel One, to examine how the composition of state-run news coverage changes in response to upcoming elections and changing economic conditions. We identify several distinct categories of news segments that are used to address the specific regime concerns that arise during politically-sensitive periods: increased coverage of positive economic news, stories that reaffirm the regime's governing ability (regime competence), stories that promote patriotic themes (prime national identity), and distraction in the form of entertainment and human interest stories (filler).



"Authoritarian Control of Crisis Narratives in the Media: Learning from COVID-19 Coverage on Russian State-Owned TV"



(Coauthored with Holger Kern)





How do authoritarian governments use media control to shape the narrative around crisis events? In this paper, we study agenda-setting and propaganda in Russia’s most-watched news source, the state-owned Channel 1 television station, to investigate how information about a deadly health crisis — the COVID-19 pandemic — has been managed by the Putin regime. To test how crisis conditions affect the regime’s choice of manipulation strategies, we compare Channel 1’s coverage of COVID-19 to its coverage of other recent crises that differ on key dimensions: the 2008–9 global economic recession and the 2011–12 mass protests against the regime itself.



CONTACT INFO



qbeazer{at}fsu.edu



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