Anna Schwenck’s research lies at the intersection of cultural and political sociology. She is particularly interested in how cultural understandings, be they transnational or locally specific, shape political behaviour.

Her monograph Flexible Authoritarianism. Cultivating Ambition and Loyalty in Russia
(published by Oxford University Press) shows how winners of globalization come to support authoritarianism.
It received the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture in 2024
(American Sociological Association) and an honorable mention in connection with the Council for European Studies’ European Studies Book Award in 2026. It was further shortlisted for the 2025 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award in Political Sociology
(American Sociological Association).

Anna Schwenck’s more recent work investigates how musics, visuals and performances lend political claims plausibility. It inquires into the connection between culture and politics, going beyond a narrow focus on transatlantic societies that characterizes much sociological theorizing to date.

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Her latest project interrogates the hypothesis that growing skepticism of open societies anchors in rising inequality and a lack of social recognition. Zooming in on structurally disadvantaged regions, it brings into view the cultural vehicles and actors that popularize a neotraditional moral compass in these places. How is misrecognition produced and reproduced in online and offline spaces? And what are the cultural and historical processes that explain inhabitants’ increasingly divergent views on how a good society should look and feel? While the political commitments of many inhabitants in disadvantaged regions radically changed over the past decade, those of others, who were equally subject to rising inequality, did not. Explaining this variation in a thick, conjunctural way is the aim of the project.