Credibility revolution and the future of Russian studies

ABSTRACT

The credibility revolution transformed quantitative social sciences and was both a curse and a blessing for Russian studies. On the one hand, Russia turned out to be an attractive field for experimentalist research, which allowed Russian studies to gain unprecedented recognition in the broader disciplines. On the other hand, a focus on causal identification could have contributed to insufficient attention to potentially important topics relevant for understanding Russia and to some aspects of the Russian setting able to augment the general social science discourse. The war in Ukraine makes many causal identification designs used for studying Russia (with the exception of natural experiments) difficult or impossible to implement. It may make the return to other approaches and de-emphasizing causal identification necessary, at least to some extent. At the same time, the question remains of how the general social science disciplines will perceive such shift in focus.

KEYWORDS:

• Credibility revolution
• causal identification
• Russian studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Experimentalist” does not mean that an experiment should be the only tool of social science investigation, but rather one should use experiments as a benchmark of quality against which other research methods are evaluated.

2. For certain topics, collaboration with other Russian polling agencies could have been attractive as well.

3. There is no empirical evidence whether it is an outcome of demand (journals publishing only a specific type of research) or supply (authors submitting only a specific type of research to these journals); but it appears plausible that demand factors play an important role. Given the intensive competition for publication in top journals, it seems implausible that researchers would not explore the possibilities of publishing associated with non-experimentalist research if they expected the latter to be potentially successful. Personal observations by the author also confirm that identification strategy is one of the key criticisms referees typically focus on in leading journals.

4. The role of top journals is greater in economics than in political science, and in the latter more pronounced in the US than in Europe.

5. This problem is, in fact, an important argument in favor of institutionalized area studies (Libman 2020).

6. One of the best-known examples is the Petrov/Titkov index of democratization, used in numerous studies to investigate sub-national regime variation in Russia. https://dumabingo.ru/.