The Long-Term Effects of Protest on Opposition Politics in Autocracies

• In Event: Elections and Protests

Abstract

Mass protest in authoritarian contexts is studied chiefly with an interest in its capacity to overthrow regimes. Countless studies investigate the conditions under which street action can threaten regime stability and analyze the precautions that autocrats take against the risk of being unseated in a popular uprising. Although, due to such measures, even large protest campaigns often fail to bring about short-term political change, it has been argued that failed protests can nurture civil society and inspire follow-up activism, which, in the long run, may undermine autocracy. This hypothesis of a long-term mobilizing effect of protest, however, has seldom been tested. This paper takes a step in that direction, using qualitative and quantitative data to investigate the effects of large, political protests on subsequent local opposition action in Russia, an electoral authoritarian regime. Using the largest political protest wave in Russia’s post-Soviet history as a treatment, I examine whether the protests were followed by a net increase in the number of opposition candidates in regional and local elections. To this end, the paper leverages official data on over 140,000 candidates in elections to regional and municipal parliaments over a period of ten years. It shows that, compared to the previous electoral cycle, after the protest wave there were substantially more opposition candidates on the ballots. These were, moreover, significantly younger than the previous average candidate, indicating an influx of first-time activists mobilized through the protests – a mechanism that is backed up with interview data from four regional capital cities. Finally, combined with event count and participant data from 120 Russian cities, the paper shows that in places with more and larger protest events the net increase in opposition candidates was significantly larger, even controlled for the regional level of democracy. These findings suggest that failed political protests in an authoritarian regime can have mobilizing effects and shape opposition politics years after the last demonstrator has left the streets.

Author

• Jan Matti Dollbaum, University of Bremen