From connective to collective action: internet elections as a digital tool to centralize and formalize protest in Russia

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, an extensive body of literature has emerged on the question of how new communication technologies can facilitate new modes of organizing protest. However, the extant research has tended to focus on how digitally enabled protest operates. By contrast, this study investigates why, how, and with what consequences a heavily digitally enabled ‘connective action network’ has transitioned over time to a more traditional ‘collective action network’ [Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A. (2013). The logic of connective action: Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 47]. Specifically, the article scrutinizes the trajectory of the Russian protests ‘For Fair Elections.’ This wave of street protests erupted after the allegedly fraudulent parliamentary elections of December 2011 and continued into 2013. As is argued, the protests were initially organized as an ‘organizationally enabled connective action network.’ However, after eight months of street protests, Russian activists reorganized the network into a more centralized, more formalized ‘organizationally brokered collective action network.’ In order to implement this transition, they deployed ‘Internet elections’ as a cardinally new digital tactic of collective action. Between 20 and 22 October 2012, more than 80,000 activists voted online in order to create a new leadership body for the entire protest movement, the ‘Coordination Council of the Opposition.’ As the study has found, activists implemented this transition because, within the specific Russian socio-political context, enduring engagement and stable networks appeared crucial to the movement’s long-term success. With regard to achieving these goals, the more formalized collective action network appeared superior to the connective action form.

KEYWORDS:

• Connective action
• collective action
• social movements
• authoritarianism
• Russia
• digital repertoires

Acknowledgements

I owe deep thanks to Andrei Zavadski, who organized and conducted the seven personal interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Florian Toepfl is a Junior Research Group Leader at Free University of Berlin, heading a five-year project entitled ‘Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism – The Power of the Internet in the Post-Soviet World.’ He received his Ph.D. from the University of Passau, Germany, in 2009. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute for Russian Studies at Columbia University, New York, a postdoctoral researcher at LMU University, Munich, and a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work has been published in major academic journals, including the Journal of Communication, the European Journal of Communication, Europe-Asia Studies, and New Media & Society [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Florian Toepfl http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5773-779X

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Emmy Noether grant sponsored by the German Research Foundation DFG.