Under Vladimir Putin, the Russian state turned out to be pretty adept at authoritarianism, and the voters have appreciated it. That, at any rate, is the broad upshot of these three articles.

Following what has seemed the dominant tendency in the Anglophone political science literature on contemporary Russia, Henry E. Hale and Timothy J. Colton examine not governance but elections. The two scholars confirm “arguments that Putin draws a great deal of vote-winning power from how people view his performance and that the economy is a large part of this.” Readers may have believed this before encountering this article (I did), but Hale and Colton demonstrate the point marshaling evidence.