Projets de recherche

• Russian society under war conditions (SNF)

  This project (start in January 2026) financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, asks how Russia’s aggression against Ukraine transforms Russian society. Building on a mixed-methods approach including surveys and survey experiments, in depth-interviews, ethnographic data, and text data, this project provides a comprehensive understanding of social relations and public views of state power under the conditions of an increasing militarization of the public sphere. To this end, we structure the project along three tensions that the Russian authoritarian regime displays in its strategy towards society at large: (1) Repression versus pacification, (2) mobilization and social cohesion versus demobilization and atomization of society, and (3) sowing confusion versus attracting people’s trust. Based on these tensions, we present an innovative and cross-fertilizing research design to study Russian society under war conditions along three densely connected dimensions: Violence, Solidarity, and Truth. Through these dimensions, we ask when and why citizens tolerate, support or reject repression, how the war affects collective action by various affected social groups and patterns of solidarity in society as a whole, and how changing state narratives and truth claims are perceived, reworked, and challenged in the population.

  Co-PI:Ulrich Schmid (St. Gallen)

• Party politics in Central and Eastern Europe (Elitenetzwerk Bayern)

  This project, financed by the Elitenetzwerk Bayern and situated at LMU Munich, studies programmatic change and representation of political parties across wide range of regimes in Central and Eastern Europe.

  
  Current publications and working papers:

  
  Combining the best of two worlds: Integrating existing models and domain-specific data to enhance political text classification
  Jan Matti Dollbaum, Christoph Ivanusch, Jan Goedeking, Polina Klochko, Svitlana Kononchuk, working paper

  
  Strategic voting under Autocracy: The Changing Electorate of Russia’s Communist Party
  Jan Matti Dollbaum, Margarita Zavadskaya, working paper

  
  Going jingo: a classification of the wartime positions of Russia’s “systemic opposition” parties 
  Jan Matti Dollbaum, Seongcheol Kim, Post-Soviet Affairs (2024)

• Oligarchs in public opinion

  When asked in the abstract, most people are critical of close connections between big money and big politics. At the same time, super-rich candidates with major economic or media assets regularly compete in elections. Despite obvious conflicts between a candidate's private economic interests and their public political role, such candidates, which we term oligarchs, regularly attract substantial support of voters. This project addresses this puzzle with experimental and observational evidence from surveys in five countries: Germany, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic, and Ukraine.

  Current publications:

  Who likes oligarchs? Jan Matti Dollbaum, Jan Fabian Dollbaum, OSF preregistration

  Who likes oligarchs? (Experimental evidence) Jan Matti Dollbaum, Jan Fabian Dollbaum, OSF preregistration

  Co-PI: Jan Fabian Dollbaum (UCD Dublin)

• Protest and Opposition in Russia and Belarus

  Rather than a concise research project, this is an ongoing research agenda. Current publications:

  Political Intolerance in Authoritarian Regimes. Evidence from Belarus

  Jan Matti Dollbaum, Fabian Burkhardt, working paper

  Digital ballots, partisan bias: digital authoritarianism and support for internet voting in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine 
  Fabian Burkhardt, Jan Matti Dollbaum, Democratization (2026) 

  The Activist Personality: Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Opposition Activism in Authoritarian Regimes 
  Jan Matti Dollbaum, Graeme B. Robertson, Comparative Political Studies (2023)

  Lukashenka’s Constitutional Plebiscite and the Polarization of Belarusian Society
  Fabian Burkhardt, Jan Matti Dollbaum, Communist and Post-Communist Studies (2023)

  Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? 
  Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet, Ben Noble (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021)

  For older publications on this and other topics, see Publications