Local Officials’ Response to Local Socio-Economic Protest in Authoritarian

• In Event: The Urban Threat: Municipal Politics and Authoritarianism

Abstract

Theories of how autocratic governments use repression or concessions to respond to popular protest largely focus on the autocrat’s desire to avoid dangerous national protest movements. Governors and mayors—local agents of the autocrat--serve this goal by quashing local protests that directly threaten the regime or are overtly political. But governors regularly encounter local socio-economic protests that do not challenge the regime, cannot scale nationally and that concern policies of limited concern to autocrat. Although the governor has wide policy latitude to make concessions, the electorate’s inability to remove him from office reduces both the benefits of concessions and the negative impacts of repression, leaving his strategy unclear. I argue that, first, absent the intervention of the autocrat’s, governors should only respond to local protests that threaten their efforts at personal wealth extraction. Second, because repression has unpredictable effects on mobilization, I argue governors should be more likely to promise concessions as an immediate demobilization tactic. Because they lack an incentive to implement promised policy change in the future, we should expect governors to keep these promises only rarely. I test the implications of this theory using an original dataset of local socio-economic protests and their outcomes from Moscow, Russia, during Sergei Sobyanin’s 2013-2018 mayoral term. The majority of protests in this period were in opposition construction and development projects, which provided city officials an opportunity for extraction. Using leaked city planning commission documents, I demonstrate that Sobyanin’s government regularly offered concessions to these movements to demobilize protesters and then deliberately reneged on their promises. I further find that more disruptive protests are more likely to experience a combination of repression, the promising of concessions and reneging.

Author

• Sasha de Vogel, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor