Ekaterina Paustyan took part in the online international workshop ‘Electoral Integrity and Malpractice in Russia and Beyond: New Challenges and Responses’ that was organized by the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki on October 25-25, 2021. Ekaterina and her co-author Stas Gorelik discussed their paper ‘The use and effectiveness of ‘clone’ candidates in Russian and Ukrainian parliamentary elections’.

The workshop aimed to discuss questions of whether information about compromised electoral integrity affects citizens’ trust in political institutions in post-communist countries, how and why technologies of electoral malpractice travel from one country to another and how this affects political behaviors such as protesting, voting, or abstention from voting. The event also featured keynote presentations by Katalin Miklóssy, Vladimir Gel’man, Regina Smyth, Inga Saikkonen, Norbert Kersting and Ora John Reuter.