State Patriarchy: Forced Labor and the Making of Progressive Authoritarianism in Eurasia

Why do authoritarian regimes build progressive welfare institutions? How do they affect development and political participation in authoritarian states? I explore these questions in Eurasia where the communist developmental policy incorporated new territories differently depending on their perceived “cultural backwardness.” In “backward”-coded places with a potential for mass commodity agriculture, the regime targeted women's labor by delivering progressive public goods such as universal childcare, workplace protections, social welfare, and public education. As I show, these goods were not provided for ideological reasons, but to mobilize women’s labor to work on cotton and similar labor-intensive crops. The combined institutionalization of agricultural forced labor with an authoritarian “progressive” regime created what I call the state patriarchy. Distinct national growth strategies emerged, leading to path dependencies in how state institutions treated women and their labor. I find that progressive authoritarian regimes that use public goods provision to mobilize workforce brought limited and even negative effects on development but increased political participation in authoritarian institutions.

I test my original theory using original socioeconomic data from 9,000 micro-districts, surveys of district mayor assistants (n=7,000) and households (n=1,200) in Uzbekistan; statistical data from 10 countries; the quantitative content analysis of 12,000 communist party files; and 190 original interviews with older adults in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Based on my original archival research of two years in three countries, I introduce two communist institutions to the scholarly literature for the first time. I explain how the state patriarchy shaped public goods infrastructure and provider incentives, gender and social norms, and political behavior in favor of authoritarianism. My findings based on mixed methods research contribute to political science, public policy, sociology, history and economics, crossing disciplinary boundaries.

My fieldwork in 2021-2023 included extensive and immersive research in multiple archives (using the communist term--over 500 in-person human days in the archives), fielding original surveys, obtaining quantitative data through governmental agencies that will be presented in academic literature for the first time, and conducting original field research.