Political foundations of state support for civil society: analysis of the distribution of presidential grants in Russia

ABSTRACT

We argue that limited authoritarian regimes like Putin’s Russia have to work out a delicate balance between suppressing civil society and buying its loyalty by allocating funds to the organizations willing to cooperate with the regime. Using the data on the distribution of presidential grants among civil society organizations working on human rights projects in 2017–2018, we show that organizations whose leaders take part in consultative bodies and pro-governmental organizations such as the All-Russian People’s Front receive larger amounts of money on average. Organizations with links to the parliamentary parties also have some premium in grant disbursement, while affiliation with the ruling party does not increase the amount of funding. These findings imply some degree of political bias in state funding for the third sector in Russia. We also found that professionalism matters, and seasoned civil society organizations have considerably more funding than less experienced organizations in the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil society
• civic associations
• autocracy
• political regime
• co-optation

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the European University at St. Petersburg’s Department of Development Partnership Program for the financial support of the Center for Comparative History and Politics. The authors are also grateful to Vyacheslav Loginov and Ulyana Chadova for help in collecting the data, and to Lidya Borodina for her help with translation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These numbers come from the Ministry for Economic Development reports “On Activity and Development of Socially Oriented Non-profit Organizations.” The annual estimates differ from one report to another, and we have used the latest. No data for total public expenditures at the sub-national level exist.

2. Since 2017, a single operator – the Presidential Grants for Civil Society Development Foundation (PGCSDF) – has administered the competition among CSOs for presidential grants. Prior to 2017 there were several operators, seven of which became the founders of PGCSDF.

3. See the full list on the Foundation’s website: https://xn–80afcdbalict6afooklqi5o.xn–p1ai/public/contest/index.

4. CSOs may apply for several thematic areas in each round; hence, the unit of observation is organization-project.

5. Thirty-seven (37) observations were excluded from the analysis, as the size of the grant that these organizations received is equal to the sum of the requested amount and co-financing.

6. The age category and the indicator for the number of PCBs the CSO’s leadership is a part of are mildly correlated at 0.26 [0.12:0.39], p-value = 0.0002.

7. We thank one of the reviewers for suggesting this term.