Pre-emptive Repression and Protests in Electoral Autocracies

• In Event: Protest and Regimes

Abstract

Contemporary autocrats increasingly deny opposition parties and activists the right to occupy central urban spaces and stage protests. How does pre-emptive repression – such as prohibitions on assembly – affect dissent in electoral autocracies? Does information that rallies have been unsanctioned undermine, or bolster protest mobilization in these regimes? Leveraging empirical evidence from regional media sources and an original protest-event dataset of approximately 6,000 protest entries from 2006 to 2017 (Lankina 2018), this paper identifies, for the first time, subnational variation in cycles of pre-emptive repression in contemporary Russia. Results suggest an inverse relationship between prohibitions of assembly and protest frequency, and a positive correlation between unauthorized protests and the use of police violence against protesters in these events. Moreover, an original framing experiment, embedded in a face-to-face, nationally representative survey of Russian voters, allows us to provide causal evidence of how information that rallies are unsanctioned influences the propensity to engage in protests and shapes support for mobilization. Findings add to recent studies on the observational challenges of studying repression and protests in electoral autocracies and have implications for the literatures on protests and authoritarian resilience.

Author

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University College London