Participatory Cooptation: Managing the Periphery in the Russian Federation

• In Event: New Concepts, New Classifications and New Data in China, Russia and Beyond

Abstract

Authoritarian governments primarily maintain control over their populations through coercion and cooptation. They exert force, threat, or violence to dispel or prevent opposition, and recent research has documented the many stabilizing and information-gathering purposes coopting opposition – via bribery, elections, material incentives – can serve non-democratic states. Authoritarian states, particularly those with communist legacies, have also increasingly turned to management of civil society in order to prevent independent opposition from manifesting. Russia, China, and Hungary are known to have initiated state-sponsored civil society movements to subvert independent opposition, which has been met with varying degrees of success. States like Russia have also begun organizing participatory events and state-sponsored conferences within their borders. Although a much less understood and observed strategy, what I am calling ‘participatory cooptation’, appears to be on the rise and is being used both as a way to directly engage otherwise passive populations and simultaneously solve a principle-agent problem between national governments and local or regional authorities. Using Russia as a case study, this paper will briefly define what ‘participatory cooptation’ is, why it is distinct from material inducements, and then seek to explain its patterns of usage, understanding under what conditions the state may employ such a strategy. Using a new data set of state-sponsored event initiatives by Russian Federal Ministries, preliminary results show that participatory cooptation is used alongside other cooptive strategies and most frequently occurs in peripheral regions, amongst minority groups, and within federal districts with less reliable regional governors. These findings are consistent with theoretical conceptions of cooptation as serving information gathering and regime stabilizing purposes. This paper hopes to demonstrate that large autocratic states like Russia may be more concerned with opposition not amongst elites, but within society itself, and that they draw from a large and creative menu of manipulation for keeping opposition within society at bay.

Author

• Melissa Samarin