Staging Democracy: Political Performance in Ukraine, Russia, and Beyond
Cornell University Press, 2022

Книга про політичну діяльність в Україні, на росії та за її межами, яка аналізує політичну та економічну систему, яка підтримує Кремль і яку наслідують деякі політики в Україні та Сполучених Штатах.

“Jessica Pisano, however, offers a new way to think about politics. Staging Democracy is a must read for anyone interested in Ukraine and Russia. But it’s also required reading for anyone interested in the evolution of politics in the 21st century.”
—Democracy Paradox

“Pisano incisively pulls back the curtain of Eastern European political theater to expose how political and economic pressures lead to public command performances that both drive political outcomes and shape state influence on contemporary capitalism. Outstanding.”
–Andrew G. McCabe, former FBI Deputy Director and author of The Threat

“Staging Democracy advances a provocative interpretation of post-Communist politics and of contemporary democracy as well. A profound challenge to conventional understandings of democracy emerges.” 
–Paul D’Anieri, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of California, Riverside, author of Ukraine and Russia

What happens to democracy when supply chains rupture and prices soar? With lessons for the west, Staging Democracy shows how local political responses to economic precarity in Russia and Ukraine at the end of the 20th century changed how people thought about the meaning of political participation for the following decades. Drawing on long-term field research in rural communities and in factory towns in both countries, the book analyzes how local political and business leaders, seeking favor from incumbent politicians, came to use salaries, benefits, and even public infrastructure to pressure citizens to participate in command performances of democratic institutions. Staging Democracy goes backstage at elections whose outcome was known in advance, stage-managed protests for hire, and mises en scène at smaller scales to explain why people came to participate in such performances, what made them different from spectacle in totalitarian societies, and how they reshaped popular understandings of the role of politics in the region. It shows that although twenty-first century command performances borrow their stagecraft and dramaturgy from Soviet-era repertoires, the political economies that pull actors onto the stage express core features of contemporary capitalism.

Much analysis of politics in Eastern Europe focuses on national political leaders or the people who oppose them, while scholarship on populism emphasizes resentment and anger in the face of economic pain to explain the rise of authoritarian leaders. But these accounts miss a key piece of the puzzle of contemporary democracy’s worldwide decline. Focusing on the experiences of people who support Kremlin-aligned parties of power, Staging Democracy shows how national leaders’ seeming popularity can rest on economic compacts at the local level. It argues that even as command performances erode public trust and polarize society to incumbents’ advantage, they also disguise the nature of apparent support for national politicians.

The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth
Cambridge University Press, 2008
Harvard University Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies

“In this profound analysis of superficial property rights, Jessica Pisano transforms our understanding of post-communist economic development and the primacy of informal practices over formal institutions.”
–Anna Grzymala-Busse, Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies and Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University; author of Nations Under God and Rebuilding Leviathan

The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village, based on the author’s long-term field research in villages along Ukraine’s border with the Russian Federation, received the 2009 Harvard University Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies for best book published on Russia, Eurasia, or Eastern Europe in anthropology, political science, sociology, or geography.

In the 1990s, as the Soviet Empire lay in ruins, both the Russian and the Ukrainian governments undertook projects to dismantle the collective farm system that was created under Stalin and in the process privatize an expanse of farmland larger than Australia. Everyday people were supposed to benefit from the reform, but local government leaders quietly rebelled against it. The end result was the dispossession of millions of rural people. This is the first book to explain why and how this happened through the perspective of a firsthand observer in the Black Earth region.

The book opens with an account of a conflict over fields that surrounded the Saltivka housing development in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and goes on to analyze local processes by which land changed hands in villages near Kharkiv and, across the border in Russia, in villages of nearby Voronezh region.

For more information about the book see here, and for more on the Davis Center Book Prize see here.