The Domestic Political Economy of War: Evidence from Russia

Wars are often framed as responses to external threats or shifts in the regional balance of power. Yet they can also serve domestic political ends. This paper studies how Russia’s escalations against Ukraine reshaped support for the regime and redistributed the burdens of war across the population. Combining ethnic Russian shares with election and independent polling data, we exploit two sharp geopolitical shocks, the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 full-scale invasion, in a difference-in-differences event-study design. We find that provinces with larger ethnic Russian populations exhibit sharp increases in support for President Putin following both episodes. At the same time, battlefield casualties fall disproportionately on regions with lower ethnic Russian shares, and attitudes toward the US and EU deteriorate sharply. On the Ukrainian side, Russian attacks are concentrated in areas with higher ethnic Russian shares rather than in resource-rich provinces. Explanations based on material extraction, Soviet symbolism, or differential exposure to external threats do not account for these patterns. Instead, the evidence is more consistent with ethnic identity playing a central role in the domestic political economy of the war. Our conclusions remain similar in fraud-adjusted electoral outcomes, with alternative ethnicity measures, under bounded departures from parallel trends, and after accounting for several baseline regional differences.