Papers by Marharyta Fabrykant
How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predict... more How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on social media, and gender-career and racial bias. Following provision of historical trend data on the domain, social scientists submitted pre-registered monthly forecasts for a year (Tournament 1; N=86 teams/359 forecasts), with an opportunity to update forecasts based on new data six months later (Tournament 2; N=120 teams/546 forecasts). Benchmarking forecasting accuracy revealed that social scientists’ forecasts were on average no more accurate than simple statistical models (historical means, random walk, or linear regressions) or the aggregate forecasts of a sample from the general public (N=802). However, scientists were more accurate ...
International Journal of Comparative Sociology
This article examines cross-country differences in the strength of individuals’ belief that their... more This article examines cross-country differences in the strength of individuals’ belief that their country is better than most others and the dependence of this belief on their country’s performance in various spheres. The research design consists of a series of multilevel ordinal logistic regression models estimated using the data of the most recent thematic wave of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)—National Identity module. Our research finds that these effects are mostly nonlinear U-shaped: people from both high- and low-performing countries express a strong belief in their country’s superiority, while people from average-performing countries do not. These findings suggest a bifurcated nature of belief in national superiority—an interplay between a grounded estimation of a country’s actual achievements and the social norms and individual motivations that prescribe holding one’s own country in high esteem regardless of its actual performance. These norms are found to...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2015
The objective of this paper is to describe crosscountry similarities and differences in national ... more The objective of this paper is to describe crosscountry similarities and differences in national pride and to explain national pride variations on the individual and country levels. The analysis in this paper is applied to different measures of national pride, with some of them being relatively complex cognitively and the others more elementary. The paper presents the results of crosscountry comparison of national pride based on empirical evidence from the ISSP-2003 database which included data from 45993 respondents from 36 countries and regions. The survey participants estimated their overall level of national pride by responding to the direct one-item question and, separately, they estimated pride of each of ten specific achievements of their countries in various domains. Factor analysis of these ten items yielded two dimensions of domain-based national pride, one of them being the factor of general pride of various country achievements and the other reflects the inverse relations between the prides of elitist and mass achievements of the nation. The multilevel regression models estimated for the three indicators of national pride confirm the feasibility of dividing these indicators into cognitively processed and normatively imposed national pride. Cognitively processed national pride measured by the domain-based estimates have been affected by objective country achievements and by the level of standards which the achievements are compared against. The normatively imposed national pride measured by direct one-item question has been influenced by the country level of religiosity that indicates the individual willingness to accept normative messages from the state uncritically. Rational national pride requires some objective grounds to believe in a nation's perfection, and normative national pride is not so strongly related to objective achievements and therefore can be more easily manipulated. The practical implication of this difference stems from the fact that in their search for objectively grounded national pride people would be eager to foster country achievements and their maintenance of normatively imposed pride requires in many cases just reliably protected wishful thinking. JEL Classification: A13.
Laughter and Humor in the Slavic and Jewish Cultural Traditions
The paper is dedicated to the representations of Jewish humor as a space of developing an underst... more The paper is dedicated to the representations of Jewish humor as a space of developing an understanding of the social experiments of the social change of the 1920s as depicted in a satirical novel “Samson Samasuy’s Notes” written by a Belarusian writer A. Mryi in 1929. The novel’s main character, an ambitious civil servant, simultaneously naïve and unscrupulous, struggles to grasp the ever elusive spirit of the times and discerns its clearest shile also the most painful manifestations in the humor expressed by his Jewish neighbors as a reaction to his endeavors. The novel shows how the Jewish humor is intuitively understood by Jews and Slavs alike, even to those who are being laughed at and who are otherwise immune to any kind of critique directed at them. In this regard, the Jewish humor appears simultaneously a mode of mutual understanding between the Jewish and Slavic parts of the population and shared understanding of the social transformation, because it unmasks the often inva...
The article compares the heuristic potential of two contexts for empirical studies of studies and... more The article compares the heuristic potential of two contexts for empirical studies of studies and theoretical analysis of the public opinion on migrants in the contemporary Russia. It states that in the contemporary Russian, same as in European, migration studies this issue appears primarily in the context of nation-building. As a result, the research on representa- tions of migrants in mass consciousness is often reduced to studies of attitudes to- wards migrants as more or less tolerant. Attitudes towards migrants therefore appear not so much as an independent research subject of its own interest as an indicator of the degree of success of the Russian modernization. In the author’s opinion, such an approach to studying attitudes towards migrants from the supply side re- ferring to various models of nation-building considers only the cognitive side of nation- al identity while disregarding its emotional and motivational resources. It should be therefore augmented with an approach f...
The paper focuses on discursive strategies that are used by authors of history textbooks to const... more The paper focuses on discursive strategies that are used by authors of history textbooks to construct Belarusian collective memory of Chernobyl disaster within the more general narrative framework of the historical legacy of “perestroika”. Discourse and narrative analysis of the relevant chapters of five secondary school and nine university textbooks of the time period between 1995 and 2011 has revealed two distinct discursive strategies within a common narrative framework. First, the “organicist” discourse positions Chernobyl disaster as a threat to the Belarusian gene pool and thus invokes the sociobiological version of ethnic nationalism within biopower and biopolitics discourse. This strategy emphasizes the preserver of collective memory as a passive sufferer. The second, opposing strategy presents the Chernobyl disaster as one of the initial conditions, rather than the consequence of the preceding historical period, and offers a role of active struggler. Both strategies constru...
Humanities and social sciences, 2013
The aim of the research is empirical testing of the most prominent modernist theories of national... more The aim of the research is empirical testing of the most prominent modernist theories of nationalism. These theories view nation-building and national identities as an outcome of transfer from traditional to modern societies and differ with regard to what spheres of modernity are considered the most relevant to nationalism. The study uses the integrated database of the third, fourth and fifth waves of the World Values Survey to test hypotheses derived from major modernist theories of nationalism. Results of country-level regression analysis show that nationalism is closer related to general value sets, such as tolerance of deviant behaviour than political attitudes. Regionally specific theories of nationalism are revealed to have the highest predictive power for a country average level of nationalism. Theories posing nationalism as challenged by local and cosmopolitan identities are rejected by empirical evidence of their positive interrelation. The results imply that contemporary n...
Slavic Review
representations in which wives and children anxiously waited for them to return home. Although Mc... more representations in which wives and children anxiously waited for them to return home. Although McCallum questions the year 1953 as the “great watershed moment” (9), this year remains crucial in her reading of this period: only after the father-figure Stalin had died was there space for understanding men as fathers of their families, liberated from competing with Stalin as the father of the nation. In interpreting fatherhood, McCallum to a certain extent conflates the pictorial representation of fathers and their actual role in the household, claiming a much greater responsibility for men in households since 1950s, a claim that is derived from her reading of visual representations. Nevertheless, the ideological turn in itself is striking, particularly when compared with representations of men in the west, which would take another fifteen to twenty years for the radical new male fate: that of the father.
SSRN Electronic Journal
The paper is dedicated to comparing gender and family attitudes in Russian speakers in Estonia an... more The paper is dedicated to comparing gender and family attitudes in Russian speakers in Estonia and Latvia to ethnic majority members in their respective countries and to Russians. The obtained results demonstrate that at least gender and family related attitude in Latvia and Estonia follow the logic not of marginalization, but of polarization. Instead of developing relatively moderate views – more traditionalist than in Estonians and Latvians yet more modern than in Russians, Russian speaking minority members in the Baltics overshoot the Russian majority living in Russia by the degree of their traditionalism. These results have important practical implications demonstrating a potential obstacle in the way of integration of ethnic minorities – their opposing their own attitudes to the attitudes held by the majority even in the spheres not directly related to ethnonational issues and for this reasons are usually overlooked when discussing integration of ethnic minority members.
SSRN Electronic Journal
The purpose of the present research is to compared gendered work attitudes held by Russian speake... more The purpose of the present research is to compared gendered work attitudes held by Russian speakers in Estonia and Latvia to the attitudes of ethnic majorities in these countries. The empirical research is based on the European Value Study data from the wave of 2008. The results demonstrate that ethnolinguistic identity may have, as in the Baltic case, an important effect on attitudes apparently unrelated to ethnonational issues. Yet this effect differentiating an ethnolinguistic minority from an ethic majority is counteracted with the impact of objective factors shared to a large extent by a minority and a majority within a given country and working in the opposite direction to the ethnolinguistic identity – by bringing the two groups’ attitudes closer to each other. The relative liberalism or conservatism of the expressed attitudes, as we discovered, strongly depend on priming. Ethnolinguistic identities (in the Baltic case, shifting Russian speakers’ views towards the more conservative Russia) have relatively stronger effect when dealing with subjective phenomena such as feelings and norms, while economic situation comes to the forefront for attitude towards objective, directly observable factors with direct and obvious consequences for an individual’s material well-being.
Современная зарубежная психология
The article presents a review of quantitative comparative cross-cultural studies on national iden... more The article presents a review of quantitative comparative cross-cultural studies on national identity conducted by psychologists during the last two decades. It considers the relation of theoretical and methodological grounds of these studies with the general agenda of the contemporary social psychology, interdisciplinary studies on nations and nationalism, and empirical resources of cross-national surveys. The relevant publications demonstrate the prevalence of descriptive approach in psychological studies, while sociology and political science mostly use the explanatory research approach on factors affecting the national identity. Nevertheless, the explanatory research results reveal the underestimated cross-cultural variability of correlations between national identity components and the correspondence of these components to essentially different cognitive mechanisms. To fulfil the potential of their discipline, cross-cultural psychologists studying national identity should explo...
The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of narratives of the Вlack Death (the ... more The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of narratives of the Вlack Death (the epidemic of plague that struck Western Europe in the mid-1300s) in six contemporary history textbooks in the Russian language published in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Structural narrative analysis provides an answer to the research question about the interplay of external circumstances (structure) and individual choices (agency) in depicting the causes of the Black Death, its course of events, and attribution of its developments and consequences. Findings demonstrate that structure prevails over agency. The textbooks offer no behavioral patterns to internalize and implicitly conceptualize behavior in an epidemic as a mass phenomenon, not as a product of many individual choices. This perception of agency blatantly contradicts the two prerequisites for an effective epidemic response elaborated during the COVID-19 pandemic: quality of governance and population’s willingness to...
Slavic Review
The article presents the results of narrative analysis of contemporary European history textbooks... more The article presents the results of narrative analysis of contemporary European history textbooks’ coverage of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The sample consists of 101 textbooks from 22 European states, published between 2000 and 2015 and currently in use in secondary and high schools. The results show that the Russian Revolution, unlike most other events in Russia's history, is narrated as a story not about Russianness, but about shared European historical experiences and social issues. The article discusses the implications of this way of narrating the Russian Revolution for the perceived logic of European history.
Journal of Baltic Studies
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persi... more Stereotypes are ideological and justify the existing social structure. Although stereotypes persist, they can change when the context changes. Communism’s rise in Eastern Europe and Asia in the 20th century provides a natural experiment examining social-structural effects on social class stereotypes. Nine samples from postcommunist countries ( N = 2,241), compared with 38 capitalist countries ( N = 4,344), support the historical, sociocultural rootedness of stereotypes. More positive stereotypes of the working class appear in postcommunist countries, both compared with other social groups in the country and compared with working-class stereotypes in capitalist countries; postcommunist countries also show more negative stereotypes of the upper class. We further explore whether communism’s ideological legacy reflects how societies infer groups’ stereotypic competence and warmth from structural status and competition. Postcommunist societies show weaker status–competence relations and ...
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ABSTRACT Using original and secondary survey data, the authors study the interaction of ethnic an... more ABSTRACT Using original and secondary survey data, the authors study the interaction of ethnic and civic factors that Lithuanians consider salient to their national identity. Factor analysis of the original survey data indicates that there are at least three coherent versions of Lithuanian national identity adhered to by young Lithuanians; two of these are ethnic in nature, while the third is civic. These findings challenge the broader scholarly discussion regarding so-called Eastern and Western nationalism. The analysis also indicates that the version of national identity demonstrated by an individual respondent is related to how that individual views Lithuanian national institutions, history, and character.
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Papers by Marharyta Fabrykant
Does your book take into account the role of middle range actors, such as intellectuals, in nation building processes? Intriguing question by Peter Rutland during the conference “Nationalism and the Market” at Universita La Sapienza, CERU
Time to reflect and give a more complex answer was short so I am uploading it here
Studies on nation building have extensively examined statist perspectives on nation building, which is what we initially tried to move away from with Isaacs and our “New tools and approaches” and that include the work of some middle actors.
However, intellectuals, civil society and other actors can still sign petitions, suggest interpretations and narratives on national identities that eventually make it to the headlines or national narratives.
With the current books we put at the centre of our inquiry events that will not make any noise and remain, in other words, invisible. Think of when a product becomes popular - Gangnam style in Korea or Turkish Cola some years ago, or unpopular - such as boycott of Russian products in Ukraine after the 2014 events. Even if they can be considered expression of national sentiments, their impact on a society will not be easy to grasp.
Companies will have figures and can estimate how much they have gained, or lost but they are not passive actors. Based on these figures they will have to decide on whether to stop, or keep on, selling a product. They might want to rebrand it or replace with some other product that suits the market better at some point.
But these choices can also embed a symbolic choice. Ethnic rebranding (see Zsombor Csaba’s paper) can contribute to reinforce a sense of national pride and thus, eventually, have a macro effect on identity construction. The message, in such case, would not use state official channels or middle actors but commercial ones. However, a simple marketing strategy might end up affecting the perception of national identity and various ethnic groups in a country might choose to consume, or not, a given product based on whether they support a given idea or not, on whether they try to integrate, or reject a national idea by ideologically consuming (or not) the nation (see Fox 2007).
We believe that it is worth paying attention at these phenomena, at the agency of common citizens and the way it creates synergies with market forces broadly defined (consumption, the culture industry, tourism) to be able to better understand some nuances in the construction of national identity in an era when these forces have become, symbolically or economically, as powerful as a state, at least in some cases.