At the beginning of September, the American Political Science Associate (APSA) awards ceremony took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the ceremony, two awards were given to the work Misperceiving Inequality* by Vladimir Gimpelson and Daniel Treisman for the best research project presented at the 2015 APSA congress. The comparative public policy section gave one award, while the comparative political research section gave out the other.
Research & Expertise
Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, Professor of Cultural Sociology at the University of Leipzig in Germany, began her involvement with HSE when she started working with two young scholars – Christian Fröhlich, an Assistant Professor at HSE and a former PhD student of hers, and Rafael Mrowczynski, who has served as a DAAD-lecturer at HSE. Ahead of her upcoming visit to Moscow, where she will present her work on ‘Multiple Secularities’ and give a seminar on Qualitative Methods, Professor Wohlrab-Sahr spoke with the HSE news service about her work, her academic interests, and her views on the key attributes researchers need today.
EU MPs are increasingly negative on Russia, and their positions are largely defined by their national interests – rather than by their ideological affiliation to any particular political grouping in the European parliament. The researchers believe that this indicates that national interests trump ideological stance for EU MPs. Their research was presented in the article: National or European Politicians? Gauging MEPs Polarity when Russia is Concerned.
On August 31 – September 2, 2016, a conference on ‘The Future of Chemical Physics’, organized by the Journal of Chemical Physics, was held in Oxford, England.
Normally, parents help shape their children's attitudes towards money. In their study "Adults' Perceptions of Pocket Money and Cash Rewards as Tools of Children's Economic Socialization," Alina Pishnyak and Natalia Khalina compare parental attitudes towards pocket money in the U.K., Germany, and Moscow, Russia. Their findings concerning Moscow are based on data from the Moscow and Muscovitessurvey of 3,109 adult respondents, of whom 75% were parents, conducted by the Institute of Humanitarian Megacity Development in 2014. According to the study's authors, most parents begin educating their children about money at the age of six.
How can cooperation among BRICS countries be built in the modern era? What can contribute to the economic growth of China and Russia? These are the key issues of the Summer School on ‘Economics and Business in BRICS: Perspectives for Russia and China’ that took place in Saint Petersburg in August 2016.

In recent years in Russia, female smoking has increased, while the opposite holds true for men; in addition to this, smoking has increased at higher rates among those with lower levels of education compared to more educated Russians.
This is the conclusion reached by researchers from the HSE’s Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK), based on a survey of people aiming to establish the level of trust members of the general public have in science and technology.
This summer Helsinki hosted the large annual conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions. Iliyana Angelova (University of Oxford / University of Tuebingen) and Ksenia Medvedeva (HSE) share their impressions from the event and reflect on their experiences of having convened a session at an international conference of such a scale.
