Stratification and Migration Dynamics in Russia, 1985-2002: The Impact of Market Transition

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Theodore GerberSES- 0096607This study examines the impact of dramatic changes in economic and political institutions on several key aspects of social stratification. Having undergone a massive and rapid transition from state socialism since early 1992, contemporary Russia provides an especially suitable setting in which to test and develop theories regarding the impact of institutional change on stratification processes. General theories of stratification, the nature of market institutions, and market behavior have been deployed by sociologists analyzing how market transition reshapes the social order and the life chances of different groups in former state socialist societies. But these theories remain provisional because they have not yet been put to adequate test in Russia, despite Russia's central importance as a proving ground for theories of post-Socialist stratification. Because Russia was the oldest, purest, and most geo-politically powerful state socialist system, the market transition there has been the most dramatic case of radical institutional change.The first phase of the study involves collecting new, multi-level survey data to analyze stratification dynamics. In September 2001-January 2002 a nationally -representative survey of Stratification and Migration Dynamics in Russia (SMDR) will collect employment/activity, job, residential, and household composition histories for 7,200 respondents from the end of 1985 through the present, as well as the work histories of their spouses/partners. The survey will also include sociodemographic variables, measures of current earnings, wage arrears, and alternative sources of income, and information on affiliation with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The survey data will be matched with newly available data on annual regional economic conditions, such as unemployment rates, mean real wages, and relative size of the service sector, during most of the years covered in the study.In the second phase of the study, dynamic multivariate methods will be used to model the effects of individual, household, and contextual variables on individual-level exposure to different types of employment change, job mobility, and migration using the SMDR data. Special attention will be devoted to testing 22 hypotheses derived from theories of the impact of market transition and general theories of stratification originally formulated in studies of democratic capitalist societies. The statistical results will provide an empirical basis for assessing, reformulating, and expanding, these theories. They will thereby advance the broader agenda of research on how institutions shape and re-shape stratification processes.