Protest and Politics in Authoritarianism: Alexei Navalny's Presidential Campaign

• In Event: Government and Opposition in Russia: Activism, Protest and Social Media

Abstract

How do protest movements affect electoral politics in authoritarianism? Comparative research on protest in non-democracies usually focuses on immediate effects of popular mobilization on regime change. The more mundane interplay between institutional and non-institutional contention in competitive/electoral authoritarianism, however, remains under-researched. At the same time, social movement studies provide tools to trace long-term impacts of movements on electoral politics but remain focused on Western liberal democracies.
To address this double shortcoming, this paper explores the 2017/18 presidential campaign of the populist Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and asks whether and how it is connected to the nation-wide protest wave of 2011/12, which irritated the regime but largely failed to bring about short-term democratic change. Based on qualitative and quantitative data, I trace the links between the two episodes with regard to two aspects: First, I examine Navalny's emergence as a leader of oppositional politics, focusing on the evolution of his popularity among the citizenry and his supporters. Second, I analyze the political socialization of his core campaign activists. The study combines data from representative opinion polls of the general population, 23 semi-structured interviews with campaign staff in seven regional capitals, and an original online survey of Navalny's social media groups in Moscow and the Russian regions (N = 1182).
From the analysis I derive three conclusions. First, the protests of 2011/12 were instrumental for popularizing Navalny as a political challenger. Moreover, second, his campaign of 2017/18 critically depended in its organizational core on networks and individual motivations that date back to the protests of 2011/12 and later contentious episodes. At the same time, third, the innovative campaign mobilized a new generation of supporters and activists with little prior experience of politics or political engagement. These results underline the potentially large effects of creative campaigning in adverse circumstances - but they also stress the importance of observing longer time horizons when studying the impact of protest on politics, even in authoritarian political systems with a fragmented and marginalized opposition.

Author

• Jan Matti Dollbaum, Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen