Dmitrii Serebrennikov
Computational social science · Legal culture · Culture & cognition · Criminology
Positions
Research director, Kazakhstan Sociology Lab, Astana
Research fellow, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg
Based in Astana, Kazakhstan
Contact
Legitimacy research, in most of its empirical forms, assumes a shared referent: that “the law,” “the rule,” “the right” mean roughly the same thing to everyone being asked whether it is legitimate. My work tests the alternative — that these terms are organised into distinct cultural schemas, unevenly distributed across a population, and that which schema a person holds predicts what they do (report to the police, file a complaint, comply, stay silent) at least as well as their attitudes do.
Kazakhstan is a methodologically useful place to ask this. Russian- and Kazakh-speaking citizens live under one legal system; cohorts who came of age under different legal orders sit side by side. That gives the question empirical traction it wouldn’t have in a more homogeneous setting.
Empirically, I work across NLP and embeddings, silicon sampling, survey design, spatial statistics and GIS, and explainable machine learning — in R, Python, SQL and QGIS — grounded in more than a hundred in-depth interviews.
How this fits together? My first publication, in 2020, was a review of Eugen Ehrlich on living law — the question behind it was where law exists outside the statute book. The several years of work that followed, on policing, surveillance and victimization, were not driven by an interest in crime as such: crime is where classification is dense, consequential and recorded, which makes it observable. That work produced a methodological objection. Research on legal legitimacy explains compliance through attitudes toward law while assuming the referent is the same for everyone asked; if “law” means different things to different people, measured variation in legitimacy conflates variation in attitude with variation in referent. The current programme follows from that: cognitive sociology supplies the theory of what differs — schemas, unevenly distributed — and computational methods supply the means to measure it.
Education
Professional Certificate Programme, Applied Data Science, European University at Saint Petersburg with Yandex School of Data Analysis — Sep 2020 – Jul 2021 Full-tuition merit scholarship, awarded to top-performing admitted students. Final project: an application recognising text in photographs of archival Jewish gravestones, built for historical research; project manager of the team and ML-developer.
M.A., Sociology, European University at Saint Petersburg — Sep 2018 – Aug 2020 Full-tuition merit scholarship, awarded to top-performing admitted students. Thesis: “Street-Level Security: Managerial Logics of Safety and Urban Video Surveillance Systems in Small Cities and Megacities.” Qualitative study of camera monitoring centres, combined with an analysis of Moscow placement patterns using LASSO regularization and complementary log-log regression.
B.A., Russian History, Novosibirsk State University — Sep 2013 – Aug 2017 Admission on a fully state-funded place, awarded competitively by entrance-examination results. Capstone: “The Political Activity of Regional Soviets of People’s Deputies in Western Siberia, 1991–1993.”
Career
Research Director, Kazakhstan Sociology Lab, Astana — 2023 – present
Research Fellow, Institute for the Rule of Law, European University at Saint Petersburg — 2020 – present Remote since 2022; research assistant, 2019–2020.
Research Fellow, then Research Director, MIND, Maqsut Narikbayev University, Astana — 2024–2025
Visiting Researcher, Nazarbayev University, Astana — 2022–2023
Grants & awards
Research grant no. BR28713139, Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan — 2025–2027 “Computational Social Science: New Horizons in Methodology and Evidence-Based Policy.” Core team member.
Vladimir Potanin Scholarship — 2019–2020 Competitive national scholarship for master’s students.
Other
EUSP R-meetup group — 2020–2022. Organiser.
President, University Student Council, European University at Saint Petersburg — 2018–2019.
Currently working on
- Schemas of law and order — testing whether “law,” “rule” and “right” function as separate cognitive schemas, using European Social Survey data and the text of citizens’ complaints to government bodies.
- Prosody and the structure of talk about crime — an automated pipeline (WhisperX, forced alignment, pyannote diarisation, instrumental prosody in Praat, LLM-assisted sequence coding) for conversation-analytic transcription of calls about crime.
- Open-ended questions in silicon sampling surveys — with Daniil Lebedev and Sanzhar Kalkanbay, a factorial field experiment (Astana, N ≈ 1,000) testing whether open-ended items reduce the uniformity bias LLM-simulated respondents show on closed questions.
I am open to collaborations, fellowships and PhD positions.