Tomila Lankina’s early works are dedicated to subnational governance and the diffusion of democratic and authoritarian institutions, the colonial legacy for regional development, and protest in electoral autocracies. Her articles on post-communist regions analyse how geographical proximity to the West and European Union aid shape democratic trajectories in Russia’s regions [4] and explain institutional choices in local government, including the survival of elected mayors, [5] through competing democratic and authoritarian diffusion pressures. [6] In studies on colonial India, she examines how Christian missionaries and patterns of religious competition affected female education [7] and left long-term human capital and democratic legacies at the subnational level. [8] In later works on contentious politics in Russia, she develops and employs protest-event datasets to document regional variation in civic activism, explore the political and institutional conditions underpinning protest, [9] and found that during the 2011–12 electoral protests in Russia national media coverage and regime-led repression mitigated public support for protest movements and their demands. [10]
The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia
Her recent works [11] [12] and the latest book The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (2021) explore the topic of historical legacies and persistence in political development. The book examines how the Tsarist estate (soslovie) system—dividing society into nobility, clergy, merchants, meshchane, and peasants—created social hierarchies that endured through the Soviet era and continue to shape Russia’s contemporary middle class and political landscape. Challenging the view of communism as an equalising project, it traces how pre-revolutionary elites adapted and survived, contributing to the formation of a two-tiered middle class and to long-lasting social cleavages that influence democratic attitudes and patterns of political mobilisation. [13]
In 2023 the book was awarded "Honorable Mention" for the Sartori Book Award of the American Political Science Association, [14] Davis Center Book Prize, [15] and J. David Greenstone Prize for the best book in the Politics and History section of the American Political Science Association. [16]
In 2025, Tomila Lankina was awarded an Einstein Visiting Fellowship for the project “The Hidden Resilience of the Liberal Tradition in the Long-Term Perspective: Russian and Ukrainian Experience" to establish a research group at Freie Universität Berlin jointly with Alexander Libman. [17] The project investigates whether historically embedded communities preserved liberal value orientations despite periods of repression, and to what extent these legacies shaped patterns of civic engagement and protest behaviour over the long term. [17]
