University of Michigan Professor, Ron Inglehart, established the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) in November 2010 after he was awarded a $3.6 million grant by the Russian Ministry of Education Science in order to bring leading scientists to Russia. The laboratory trains PhD-level students from throughout Russia and other ex-Soviet countries in empirical cross-national social research and maintains an international research network of scholars from around the world. The goal of the program is to produce findings that will be published in English in international peer-reviewed articles. Twenty such publications have already been produced to date.

The LCSR, based at the Higher School of Economics at Moscow and St. Petersburg held its third annual international conference in November, entitled “Cultural and Economic changes under cross-national perspective,” at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

In April 2011, the participants began meeting every four months at workshops in Moscow or St. Petersburg in order to present progress reports on their individual research projects and to get feedback both from their peers and from the five senior scholars on the project. To date, the LCSR has held a total of seven of these workshops and three international conferences. The latest international conference featured project reports as well as keynote addresses from nine international scholars.


Click here for more details about the conference.