Kirill Kalinin

About

Kirill Kalinin was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at the Hoover Institution during the academic year 2017–18.  He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan (2017). His research focuses on election studies, election forensics, survey methodology, and Russian politics and has been published in Political Studies, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations. One of his dissertation chapters, “Signaling Games of Election Fraud,” won the 2016 International IDEA/EIP graduate essay competition.  

Kirill also coauthored several papers with Walter Mebane that focused on the development and application of election forensics indicators using Russian electoral data, many of which are widely cited by scholars both within and outside the field.  He has also conducted multiple survey experiments in Russia on presidential electoral and approval ratings; some of his findings have been published in the Russian scholarly journals.

Kirill is one of the creators of the Election Forensics Toolkit website with funding from USAID, a prototype that implements election forensics methods that have been proposed as useful accuracy diagnostics for detecting election fraud. He coauthored or assisted on several pieces that appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage concerning forensic analyses of Turkey’s, Austria’s, and Russia’s elections. 

Currently Kirill is also engaged in data management and data analysis of the survey of Russian elites: 1993–2016. 

At Hoover he plans to develop his dissertation into a book manuscript tentatively titled “Applied Election Forensics Analysis." The book will focus on methodological and theoretical aspects of the statistical detection of election fraud, as well as the development and testing of theories designed to facilitate our understanding of election fraud and its origin in authoritarian regimes.