Project Details
Projekt
Biographical Footprints of Energy and Political Elites in Russia and Kazakhstan
Applicant
Professor Dr. Alexander Libman
Subject Area
Political Science
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543294515
Authoritarian states are characterized by a very strong role of personalist politics, which makes the values, the beliefs and the background of key political actors particularly important. Recent political science literature has paid significant attention to the role of agency in such contexts, using information on biographical paths of decision-makers as a key source of empirical data for understanding their belief formations, values and identities. In authoritarian states, military past of politicians, for example, was identified as an important predictor of their actions. In this proposal, I intend to look at a so far entirely overlooked biographical aspect, which, however, has the potential to strongly influence the behavior of political elites. In energy-rich autocracies, spending a particular part of one’s life in the energy sector (e.g., studying at a specialized university or occupying key position in an oil or gas corporation) is likely to be associated with strong socialization effects and thus influence politician’s behavior. The project looks at two large energy-rich authoritarian states (Kazakhstan and Russia) to identify the role of political elites with ‘biographical footprints’ of the energy sector in their development. Focusing on large-N research techniques (both regression analysis and text-as-data methods), the project will focus on how energy past affects the rhetoric and the policy outcomes of elites. From this point of view, it is deeply embedded in the interdisciplinary design of the research group, particularly profiting from the interaction with humanities’ projects looking at political rhetoric.
DFG Programme
Research Units
