Natalia Vasilenok

Natalia Vasilenok is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Stanford University, where she also earned an M.A. in economics in 2024. Her interdisciplinary research explores how informal institutions and ideas shape political and economic outcomes, with a particular focus on barriers to democratization and political development in historical and contemporary Eastern Europe. Methodologically, Vasilenok emphasizes the use of previously unexplored data sources, such as archival collections and texts. Before graduate school, she received a B.A. in Political Science from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia.

King Center Supported Research

2025 - 2026 Academic Year | Graduate Student Fellowship

The Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine and the Market for Political Ideas in Russia 

My dissertation examines how citizens in authoritarian regimes with tight ideological control respond to periods of political upheaval. Specifically, it focuses on book trade in Russia before and after the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Using natural language processing tools and combining novel data from book abstracts and internet searches, I explore how the invasion reshaped the space of political ideas in Russia, as reflected in the supply of and the demand for books in history and social sciences. Methodologically, the project develops a new approach to capturing trends in public opinion in data-sparse contexts.