by Caroline Schlaufer & Dilyara Gafurova
Our article Narrative strategies in a nondemocratic setting: Moscow’s urban policy debates explored how narratives are strategically used in authoritarian contexts to promote or contest policy reforms. Focusing on three contentious urban policy debates in Moscow—housing renovation, public transport reforms, and waste management policies—we found stark differences in narrative strategies between government actors and their opponents. The Moscow government employed narratives that framed itself as a hero delivering widespread public benefits while avoiding acknowledgment of policy problems or villainizing opponents. In contrast, oppositional narratives depicted the government as a villain and emphasized the costs and exclusivity of governmental policies. The difference between the governmental and opposing narrative strategies, for example, between the angel and devil-shift scores of the two sides of the debates (see Table 2 of our article), is very large and much higher than in democratic contexts, indicating a strong polarization of the debate. A “debate” in an authoritarian context is less a dialogue but rather parallel monologues with governmental narratives dominating.
The research is based on a quantitative content analysis of online sources that were written between 2012 and 2020. Since conducting our research, Russia’s policy context has transformed dramatically. The ongoing war against Ukraine has accelerated autocratization and exacerbated repression in Russia. These developments have fundamentally altered the space for public policy discourse and almost obliterated oppositional voices. The majority of the actors whose online narratives we analyzed (see Appendix A of our article) are now silenced—whether by exile, imprisonment, death, organizational closure, or the inaccessibility of platforms like Facebook within Russia. This means that replicating our study is not possible anymore, as conducting the same research today would yield far fewer critical perspectives on Moscow’s urban policies.
The shrinking space for public debate has also been accompanied by increasing restrictions on academic freedom. Many scholars who worked on our research project on narratives in Moscow have since left Russia due to safety concerns and the hostile environment for empirical social research. The closure of HSE University’s Public Policy Department, where this research was conducted, epitomizes the growing difficulties faced by academics in the country.
Our findings demonstrated that the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), initially designed for democratic settings, is a robust tool for understanding discursive strategies in authoritarian contexts, even as genuine public debate disappears. While our research cannot be replicated in today’s Russia, the lessons it offers remain relevant—not only for autocracies but also for liberal democracies that increasingly experience polarization of public debates and attacks on academic freedom. However, our study and experience also raise critical questions about the boundaries of conducting policy process research in autocracies. Scholars must navigate significant ethical and safety concerns to protect team members and data sources, but at the same time meet high scientific standards and publish research even though access to data and possibilities to conduct research are extremely restricted.
You can read the original article in Policy Studies Journal at
Schlaufer, C., Gafurova, D., Zhiryakova, E., Shikhova, M. andBelyaeva, N. 2023. “Narrative strategies in a nondemocratic setting: Moscow’s urban policy debates.” Policy Studies Journal 51: 79–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.12445
About the Authors
Caroline Schlaufer is a senior researcher at the KPM Center for Public Management and head of the Ethics and Policy Lab of the Multidisciplinary Center of Infectious Diseases at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the role of narratives and of science in policy processes and on public policy in authoritarian contexts. She worked as a Professor at the Public Policy Department at HSE University in Moscow between 2017 and 2021.
Dilyara Gafurova heads the team of the Sphere foundation that focuses on fostering LGBTQ+ rights in Russia. She is a political scientist and worked on this research project on policy narratives in Moscow during her Master’s at HSE University in 2018-2020.
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