Margarita Zavadskaya holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute (Fiesole, Italy, 2017). She has worked at the Electoral Integrity Project (Universities of Harvard and Sydney, 2015), the European University at St. Petersburg (2016-2022), and the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki (2018-2022) as a researcher and lecturer. From 2019 to 2022, Margarita served as PI for the research project ‘Electoral Malpractice, Cybersecurity and its Political Consequences in Russian and Beyond (ElMaRB)’.
Margarita has broadly published on the role of elections in authoritarian states, mass protests and public opinion in journals such as Democratization, East European Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Russian Politics, Europe-Asia Studies and many others. She is the editor of the book Politics of the Pandemic: Blame Game and Governance in Russian and Central-Eastern Europe (forthcoming) and co-editor of Electoral Integrity and Political Regimes: Actors, Strategies and Consequences (Routledge, 2018) and co-author of the articles When the party’s over: political blame attribution under an electoral authoritarian regime (Post-Soviet Affairs, 2020) and Rise and fall: social science in Russia before and after the war (Post-Soviet Affairs, 2023). Currently, Margarita focuses on the political impact of Russian emigration in receiving countries, including EU member states, under the auspices of the OutRush research project.
Expertise
Authoritarian states, mass protests and public opinion
Degrees
Social and Political Science, Ph.D., European University Institute
Political Science, MA degree, European University at Saint Petersburg
Language skills
English, Russian, French, Polish (working languages), Finnish, Ukrainian, German, Italian, Spanish (receptive skills)