Shooting for the Tsars: Heterogeneous Political Volatility and Institutional Change in Russia

Can deliberate political instability, including terrorism and/or political violence, have an effect on changing formal political institutions? This paper offers two major contributions toward answering this question, one focused on data and one focused on methodology. In the first instance, this paper introduces a brand-new dataset of monthly political instability in Russia from 1788 to 1914; Czarist Russia was a country plagued by informal instability and political violence throughout the nineteenth century, and which saw waves of reform and reaction. As such, it makes an excellent test case for examining the relationship between informal political instability and formal political change. Secondly, in order to trace the evolution of Russia’s political institutions in the presence of various forms of instability, I utilize non-traditional estimation in the form of Poisson, IV-Poisson-GMM, and logistic regressions to account for the slow-moving nature of political regime change. The results of these estimations show that some forms of instability did indeed “work” in forcing a modicum of liberalization. On the other hand, large-scale unrest or external conflict had no correlation with political regime change and actually appeared to be counterproductive.