Geography of Anti-Corruption Protests in Russia

• In Event: Youth Activism, Attitudes and Ideology in Russia and China

Abstract

In March 2017 thousands of people in nearly one hundred Russian cities participated in anti-corruption protests spearheaded by the opposition politician Alexey Navalny. It was one of the largest protests since post-election mass mobilization in the winter of 2011. A salient feature of these protests was a conspicuous presence of a fraction of the Putin generation, born in the early 2000s and socialized during Vladmir Putin’s presidency. Yet, despite widespread dissatisfaction with corruption, the size of protest events varied across the country. As many as 4,000 people gathered near the monument to Vladimir Vysotsky in Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city situated in Siberia. In contrast, less than a hundred people joined the protest in Velikii Novgorod and Ulan-Ude. This behavioral pattern is consistent with prior research, showing that some Russia’s regions are “consistently over-represented in protest activism” (Lankina and Voznaya 2015, p. 340). Scholars estimated how press freedom, socioeconomic inequality, pre-existing social networks, and social media affect the level of mass mobilization (Greene 2014; Robertson 2013; Sanovich, Stukal, and Tucker 2018; Sobolev 2018). Unlike most previous research, the study focuses on the political significance of young people in contemporary Russia. Using city-level data, this study investigates how the size of youth population interacts with local political and socioeconomic conditions to affect the size of protests. The study contributes to comparative politics literature by analyzing sub-national variations in the level of protest behavior in a repressive political regime. The proposed research speaks to the 2019 APSA Theme of populism and privilege, illustrating how grand corruption brews discontent and triggers protests against the ruling elite.

Author

• Olena Nikolayenko, Fordham University