About Me

I am a Doctoral Researcher in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute. I am working at the intersection of authoritarian governance, subnational institutions, and public attitudes in non-democratic contexts. My research combines quantitative methods, quasi-experimental designs, surveys and interviews to examine how institutional design, elections, and elite strategies shape governance outcomes and citizens’ perceptions of political authority and legitimacy. Substantively, my work focuses on post-communist countries, with a particular emphasis on Russia and Kazakhstan.

From January to May 2025, I was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Prior to my doctoral studies, I held research and teaching positions at the European University at St. Petersburg and Perm State University.

I am currently on the 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Current Projects and Working Papers (Unpublished)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]
  Autocrats often replace elected local officials with appointed administrators, prioritizing vertical loyalty over downward accountability. Yet little is known about how citizens interpret such changes. Do local elections still shape perceptions of legitimacy when they no longer ensure meaningful representation? This study examines how Russians evaluate mayors under institutional centralization, using a nationally representative vignette experiment. I test how citizens respond to four elite cues: local embeddedness, selection mode, professional background, and leadership style. The findings show that citizens meaningfully differentiate among local officials, even in the absence of programmatic politics or real autonomy. Electoral selection and local origin significantly boost perceived trust, effectiveness, and representativeness—especially among regime skeptics and protest participants. Loyalist citizens, by contrast, tend to favor appointed, administrative, and compromise-oriented profiles. These results highlight two distinct pathways through which local elections matter: as signals of democratic inclusion for some, and as proxies for managerial competence for others.

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

Co-authored

• 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)
• 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.) [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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Methods and Expertise

• Quantitative analysis of panel and cross-sectional data
• Quasi-experimental designs
• Survey research and survey experiments
• Qualitative interviews
• Subnational administrative, electoral and protest data
• Research on public attitudes, elite strategies, authoritarianism and technocracy

Research Projects and Collaborations

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

I am a researcher in the international project Maidan Revolutions, the War in Ukraine, and Civil Society Responses, which examines the social and political consequences of revolutions and war in post-Soviet societies. 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 (ERC Advanced Grant)
(Project link)

I am an associated researcher 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

Journal Publications (Selected)

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.

Online Publications

1. Rogov, K., & Minaeva, E. (2022). The Journey from 1945 to 1941.
2. GIS Technologies in Ethno-Political Studies: Spatial Localization of Ethnic Groups.

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.