When Does Diffusing Protest Lead to Local Organization Building? Evidence from a Comparative Subnational Study of Russia’s “For Fair Elections” Movement

Abstract

Under what conditions do nation-wide mass protests in authoritarian regimes produce new local activist organizations? Based on sixty-five interviews and over 1,000 media reports, internal documents, and social media posts, I compare the organization-building process in the “For Fair Elections” (FFE) protests of 2011–2012 across four Russian regions. I argue that mass protests are more likely to leave behind new social movement organizations (SMOs) when the local and the national interact, i.e., when long-standing activists on the ground perceive an opportunity to use the protests for their ongoing local struggles. Where new SMOs are established, their composition, activity pattern, and inner structure follow the tactical and organizational repertoires of veteran activists that were shaped by their local political environments. This argument illuminates the functioning of electoral authoritarian regimes from a subnational perspective and identifies conditions under which a bottom-up challenge to an authoritarian political system can drive local civil society development.

Navalny’s Digital Dissidents: A New Dataset on a Russian Opposition Movement

“…As shown above, the majority of activists had no experience with any form of political or social activism. The data suggest, therefore, that the campaign constituted an important, perhaps even life-changing episode (Fillieule 2012), much like the "For Fair Elections" protests of 2011-2012 that also brought many newcomers into activism (Dollbaum 2020;Gabowitsch 2016;Zhuravlev, Savelyeva, and Erpyleva 2020).…”

“…This, however, does not mean that supporters of institutionalized opposition are a demographic that one can safely ignore. Even in cases of seemingly spontaneous and decentralized mass mobilization that spreads via social media, small groups of organized opposition are crucial for preparation and coordination (Greene 2013) but also for the institutionalization of postprotest activism (Dollbaum 2020;Dollbaum, Semenov, and Sirotkina 2018).…”

Influential allies and grassroots movement mobilization: Ukraine’s Maidan, 2013–2014

“…For example, Vanhanen (2000: 253) used the smaller parties’ share of all votes cast in elections to measure the degree of Competition, as a part of his Index of Democratization. Scholars across the region have used a similar index (Dollbaum, 2020). I created the ‘Prominent politicians’ with the following formula (1):…”

“…In this mixed-methods study, I combine administrative and protest event data to generalize across cases, and I use in-depth interviews that I conducted with activists, party members, and knowledgeable observers in Ukraine’s localities for conceptual and theoretical insights. By investigating the role of influential allies in the emergence of Euromaidan this article contributes to a growing literature on mobilization in post-Communist states (Císař, 2017; Dollbaum, 2020; Mateo, 2022; Nikolayenko, 2022) and existing literature on protest and mobilization patterns in Ukraine (Kowal et al, 2019; Nikolayenko, 2020; Onuch, 2014a, 2015; Reznik, 2016 to name a few) with a closer look at the 2013–2014 mobilization beyond Kyiv (Gladun, 2019; Onuch and Sasse, 2016; Zelinska, 2015; Zubar and Ovcharenko, 2017).…”

Protest Event Analysis Under Conditions of Limited Press Freedom: Comparing Data Sources

“…Reporters thus needed (and still need) to navigate a complex set of intentionally vague, unwritten rules which may result in self-censorship on sensitive topics such as protest. Moreover, there was considerable subnational variation of repression against activists and media (Dollbaum, 2020a;Petrov & Titkov, 2013). The Russian case can thus also be helpful to derive more general hypotheses on the interplay of press freedom, political activism, and the quality of protest event data.…”