Grievances and political action in Russia during Putin’s rise to power

Abstract

Under conditions of electoral authoritarianism, in what ways do individuals’ dissatisfaction with democracy influence their probability of political action? In the early 2000s, President Vladimir Putin consolidated his power and Russia descended into electoral authoritarianism. In this closed political opportunity structure, through which the government worked to silence political opposition and the global financial crisis caused an economic decline, the conditions for political and economic grievances to arise were plentiful. At the same time, political action by ordinary citizens was possible, though not prevalent. To examine the association between political and economic grievances and ordinary Russians’ political action, I use the five available waves of the European Social Survey 2006 to 2016. Results suggest that political grievance was a driving force of political action in Russia. Dissatisfaction with democracy in Russia motivates non-electoral participation (NEP) but alienates citizens from voting. Models with the interaction between political grievances and the conditions of economic grievance were insightful: when economically advantaged citizens are satisfied with the current regime, they tend to support it through the ballot box. The disconnect between NEP and voting with regard to political grievance suggests the need to better understand how ordinary Russians define and appreciate democracy.

Keywords:

• Russia
• electoral authoritarianism
• grievances
• political participation

Acknowledgements

I thank Joshua K. Dubrow, Ilona Wysmułek and Michał Kotnarowski for their comments on versions of this paper. This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Centre, Poland, “Political Voice and Economic Inequality across Nations and Time” (2016/23/B/HS6/03916).

Notes

1 The percentage of “don’t know” answers for satisfaction with democracy varies from 8.5% in 2012 to 16.5% in 2006. This high percentage means that respondents either do not know what democracy is and how it should work, or they may not thought enough about it to give a definite opinion. Further research needs to investigate how do Russians perceive and understand democracy.