Divide and Rule: Permits, Protest, and the Opposition in Autocracies

• In Event: Repression and Censorship

Abstract

With the costs of coercion rising, non-democratic governments around the world increasingly rely on nonviolent, legal strategies of protest repression. In recent decades, a restrictive protest permit system has been used to dampen dissent all the way from Hong Kong and Singapore to Russia and Kazakhstan. Yet, due to a lack of appropriate data, we still know very little about the effect of protest permit requirements on the opposition’s ability to forge broad coalitions in electoral autocracies. Do legal strategies of repression bolster coordination between different opposition groups, or do they trigger a sorting effect instead, with opposition groups of the ‘toughest’ sort and highest resolve becoming more likely to take to the streets despite repression? And, how does the decision to protest without a permit influence voters' assessments of the opposition in these regimes? To gain traction on these questions I rely on unusually detailed, subnational data on the organizers of protest in Russia from 2017 to 2020, combining them with novel survey evidence. Findings, which suggest that legal repression may trigger splits among opposition groups of higher and lower resolve and dampen voter support for the ‘extremist’, or ‘defiant’ protest organizers, have implications for debates on the changing character of repression and authoritarian resilience.

Author

• Katerina Tertytchnaya, University College London