Responding to the Covid Crisis in Authoritarian Environments: Russian Think Tanks as Agents of Epistemic Polarization?

In existing literatures on policy advice and analytical communities in democratic settings, think tanks are often assumed to be “carriers of new ideas”, who serve “as an informed and independent voice in policy debates”. Yet, how much intellectual independence do think tanks have in authoritarian environments? This paper tackles this question in a case study of Russian think tanks’ discursive responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Methodologically, the paper employs content analysis of think tanks’ publications, identifying their discursive frames used to emphasize different dimensions of the crisis and the state’s crisis response strategies. Findings suggest that there is a considerable variance in how think tanks approach the crisis. In some cases, they openly endorse national authorities’ crisis response and discursively normalize the critical situation in Russia. Simultaneously, they overemphasize problematic developments elsewhere in the world and thus shift attention in the public discourse away from domestic emergencies. In other cases, think tankers engage in more objective analyses of the pandemic and concentrate more on the domestic challenges. This variance is rooted in the intraorganizational dynamics of think tanks, which largely determine whether they become agents of epistemic polarization and legitimizers of state actions or try to remain more neutral policy knowledge producers and communicators.