Communicating Crisis in Illiberal Environments: Russian Think Tanks between Policy Evaluation and State Endorsement

Much of what we learn through the media and other sources about politics, economics, history, environmental and health issues originates in specialized expert knowledge. While it is often taken for granted, in times of crisis, such as the present pandemic, the power of expert knowledge in shaping (and challenging) public policies and public opinions becomes most tangible. In the context of West European and North American democratic societies, the questions of how crisis-related expert knowledge is produced and communicated have been studied extensively. However, we still know exceptionally little about the origins and contents of such knowledge, its communication channels, and effects in non-democratic political environments. This study addresses this gap by focusing on a specific group of expert knowledge producers and communicators, namely Russian think tanks established under the auspices of the presidential administration and the government. Centered on Russia as a case of consolidated autocracy, the paper compares state-linked think tanks’ discursive responses to two protracted crises with different degrees of salience in the Russian public space: the Covid-19 pandemic and the climate change crisis. The study specifically examines what kind of messages state-linked think tanks try to convey to policymakers and to the public; what strategies and channels they use to communicate these messages to their audiences; and whether different channels are used to convey different information. Methodologically, the paper employs semi-structured expert interviews with selected think tankers and a subsequent content analysis of these interviews as well as of publications available on the think tanks’ websites. The interviews are used to reveal the think tanks’ communication channels and strategies as well as messages they are trying to convey to policy-makers in the non-public domain of their activities. The content analysis serves for identifying discursive frames used by think tankers to emphasize different dimensions of the Covid-19 and the climate crises. To “capture” the crisis frames, the study operationalizes them as the combination of four elements, suggested by Entman (1993): problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and response recommendation. Preliminary findings suggest that there is a considerable variance in how think tanks discursively approach the Covid-19 and the climate crises. In some cases, Russian state-linked think tanks have openly endorsed national authorities’ crisis response and discursively normalized the critical situation in Russia, while overemphasizing problematic developments elsewhere in the world and thus shifting attention in the public discourse away from domestic emergencies. In others, think tankers attempted objective analyses of the pandemic and climate change, concentrating more on the domestic challenges and policy evaluation. This variance is rooted in the intraorganizational dynamics of the think tanks, which largely determines whether they become legitimizers of state actions or remain neutral crisis communicators.