https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9018-4701
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ABSTRACT
Scholars of contentious politics understand the critical role of opposition protests and the elite in influencing regime outcomes. What is less understood, however, is how opposition protest can impact the “hearts and minds” of elites in authoritarian settings. Using the timing of the Survey of Russian Elites and a 2016 protest in Moscow to commemorate the death of a Russian opposition figure, we show that elites initially responded with sympathy to the peaceful and well-attended protest, but those feelings faded in the weeks following the event. We attribute the ephemeral nature of the protest’s impact to a successful strategy by the Kremlin to acknowledge the event and then promptly ignore it in the following weeks. We posit this allowed the event to leave the consciousness of most elites and their feelings returned to pre-protest levels. Our findings suggest that certain opposition protests can garner sympathy among the elite in authoritarian settings, but also highlight the passive tools of authoritarian regimes in minimizing the impact of protest movements. Opposition movements, thus, not only have to cue sympathetic feelings among the elite, but also have to sustain that persuasion in subsequent news cycles.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Carl LeVan, Sharon Werning Rivera, Frieder Dengler, Ian Reynolds, Ivan Kurilla, Megan Stewart, Susanna Campbell, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research repository at https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR03724.v6.
Notes
2 Tarrow, Power in Movement; Sato and Wahman, “Elite Coordination and Popular Protest.”
3 Buckley and Tucker, “Staring at the West through Kremlin-Tinted Glasses.”
4 Gel’man, “Political Opposition in Russia”; Koesel and Bunce, “Putin, Popular Protests, and Political Trajectories in Russia”; Radnitz, “The Real or Imagined Infiltration of Fifth Columns.”
5 Wouters and Walgrave, “Demonstrating Powers.”
6 Tertytchnaya and Lankina, “Electoral Protests and Political Attitudes.”
7 Frye and Borisova, “Elections, Protest, and Trust in Government.”
8 Robertson, The Politics of Protest in Hybrid Regimes, 187.
9 Greene and Robertson, Putin v. the People.
10 Gel’man, “Political Opposition in Russia”, 182.
11 Ibid.
12 Koesel and Bunce, “Putin, Popular Protests, and Political Trajectories.”
13 Greene and Robertson, Putin v. the People.
14 See also Horvath, Robert. “Putin’s Preventive Counter-Revolution.”
15 Aleksashenko, Putin’s Counterrevolution. The protest environment, however, was reinvigorated with several highly attended protests in 2017 and 2018, with an even larger uptick in protest activity in 2019. See https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/11/08/number-protests-russia-spikes-in-2018-researchers-say-a63428 ; https://www.csis.org/analysis/protests-moscow-whats-different-time.
16 Stanovaya, “Unconsolidated.”
17 Zimmerman et al., Russian Elite-2020, 14.
18 Rivera and Bryan, “Understanding the Sources of Anti-Americanism.”
19 Buckley and Tucker, “Staring at the West through Kremlin-Tinted Glasses.”
20 Schock, Unarmed Insurrections.
21 Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
22 Tarrow, Power in Movement, 168.
23 e.g. Chenoweth and Stepan, Why Civil Resistance Works; Tilly, Social Movements.
24 Wouters and Walgrave, “Demonstrating Power.”
25 Frye and Borisova, “Elections, Protest, and Trust in Government.”
27 https://www.dw.com/en/thousands-take-to-streets-across-russia-to-remember-boris-nemtsov/a-19079958
29 https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2926052. The police reported 7,500 people, while independent observers estimated around 25,000. See https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-nemtsov/thousands-march-in-moscow-to-honor-slain-kremlin-critic-nemtsov-idUSKCN0W00M4.
30 https://www.mk.ru/politics/2016/02/27/policiya-ogorodila-kreml-pered-marshem-pamyati-nemcova.html
31 Knobel, “‘The Great Game’”, 349.
32 https://www.ntv.ru/video/1264065/ ; https://www.1tv.ru/news/2016-02-27/4200-v_stolitse_proshel_marsh_pamyati_ubitogo_god_nazad_politika_borisa_nemtsova
34 Based on our analysis of TV news segments of the main, state-controlled “Channel One”, “NTV”, and “Russia-1” news channels from their respective websites (1tv.ru, NTV.ru, Russiatv.ru). The next mention of Nemtsov was months after the protests. For example, for Channel One (1tv.ru), the next mentioning of Nemtsov after the protest report appears on April 15th and was related to his inheritance (1tv.ru).
35 Our keyword search in Factiva for Nemtsov’s last name (“Немцов”) among headlines in Russian reveals 23 headlines for the date 02/27/206. Only 20 sources that are generated for the date range of 02/28/2016-03/05/2016, or within the first week after the protests.
36 See Chenoweth and Stepan, Why Civil Resistance Works; Tilly, Social Movements.
37 Zimmerman, Rivera, and Kalinin. Survey of Russian Elites.
38 Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy, 21. For a more detailed description of the Survey of Russian Elites, see Rivera and Zimmerman, “Introduction.” For further information on the 2016 survey and a complete methodological description of the project, see Rivera et al., “The Russian Elite 2016,” and Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy, respectively.
39 The exact question wording was: “Please look at this card. It lists various types of political protest activity in which people can engage. Rate each of these activities on a ten-point scale according to how justifiable they are, where 10 means ‘completely justifiable’ and 1 means ‘completely unjustifiable.’”
40 Of these 18, 15 of the respondents only refused to answer one of the six questions. As a robustness check, we re-ran all of our models while assigning these 15 respondents the mean response for the one question they refused to answer. Across all of the models, the results were not meaningfully impacted.
41 Correlation coefficients and the Cronbach’s Alpha score were calculated after removing respondents who refused to answer at least one of the six questions in the index.
42 We had to drop an additional two respondents who refused to disclose their birth year. Prior research controlled for a few variables that, when included in our models, were insignificant and did not meaningfully impact the results. We excluded the following controls for the sake of parsimony that were used by either Rivera and Bryan, “Understanding the Sources of Anti-Americanism,” or Buckley and Tucker “Staring at the West Through Kremlin Tinted Glasses,”: those who are ethnically non-Russian and who watched state-controlled news regularly and those who regularly used the internet.
43 Gerber, “Foreign Policy and the United States.”
44 Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy; Gerber, “Foreign Policy and the United States”; Buckley and Tucker, “Staring at the West through Kremlin-Tinted Glasses”; Rivera and Bryan “Understanding the Sources of Anti-Americanism.”
45 Buckley and Tucker, “Staring at the West through Kremlin-Tinted Glasses.” In a robustness check, Buckley and Tucker added elites in state-owned enterprises to the group and found no significant statistical change.
46 Rivera and Bryan “Understanding the Sources of Anti-Americanism.” Rivera and Bryan also controlled for those currently in the military, which was an insignificant predictor of anti-American sentiment in the 2016 survey. For a more detailed discussion of the views of those that serve in the Russian force structures, see Rivera and Rivera, “Are Siloviki Still Undemocratic.” For their hegemony (or lack thereof) within the elite, see Rivera and Rivera, “The Militarization of the Russian Elite.”
47 Zimmerman, The Russian People and Foreign Policy; Rivera “Elites and the Diffusion of Foreign Models”; Zimmerman, “Slavophiles and Westernizers Redux”; Rivera, “Is Russia Too Unique to Learn from Abroad?”; Hale, “The Surprising Connection”; Rivera and Bryan, “Understanding the Sources of Anti-Americanism.” Five respondents who refused to answer the question are coded as zeros, but when they are excluded from the models, the results are largely unchanged.
48 Hale, “The Surprising Connection.”
49 To examine which of the items in the protest index drove the positive coefficient, the authors re-ran the model with the individual items as the dependent variable. Only “submitting petitions” had a negative coefficient, which was quite miniscule. The coefficient on the After Protest variable was positive when changing the dependent variable to the other five items, but was the largest for: participating in a boycott, participating in a strike, and protests on social media. These items, notably, were also the items with the most variation in responses (see ), likely leading to the protest cue being more visible in these survey questions.
50 In an additional robustness check, the authors included dummy variables for each individual week relative to the protest. Reinforcing the current results, the week directly following the protest (those interviewed from 27 February to 4 March) were the most likely, accounting for the other relevant controls, to support the battery of protest activity. The week directly following (5 March to 11 March) had the second highest coefficient of the weekly variables. The third week after the protest, however, had an almost identical coefficient to the week preceding the Nemtsov protest, offering further support that the impact of the protest significantly waned in the weeks following the event.
51 Rosenfeld, “Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm.”
52 Gel’man “Velvet Gloves Versus Iron Fist.”
53 Rosenfeld, “Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm.”
54 Ibid.
55 Zimmerman, Rivera, and Kalinin. Survey of Russian Elites.
56 Ochkina. How Russians Protest.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
James D. Bryan
James D. Bryan is a PhD student at the American University School of International Service. James' research primarily focuses on democracy, protests, and citizen attitudes. You can follow him on twitter @james_bryan7.
Anastassiya Perevezentseva
Anastassiya Perevezentseva is a PhD student at the American University School of International Service. Anastassiya's research focuses on contentious politics and populism. Her twitter is @annastassiya_.