A top-down movement with grass-roots effects? Alexei Navalny’s electoral campaign

ABSTRACT

Today’s Russia is a hostile environment for genuine political activity, and especially for movements that aim at changing the current power structure. This is due to the factually limited manoeuvre space of oppositional actors who face obstacles in the form of repression, surveillance and restricted access to the public sphere. Moreover, society is largely apolitical, with political activity often considered futile, immoral, or dangerous. In this profile, we portray the electoral campaign of the opposition politician and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who built a popular movement around his bid to participate in the 2018 presidential elections. Although the campaign failed to build up sufficient pressure for Navalny to be granted access to the elections, and despite the strong hierarchy inside his campaign, we argue that it contributed to the politicization of parts of the younger generation in the country’s provinces – which may have greater long-term effects than any concrete projects envisioned or controlled by the campaign’s strategists.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• political movement
• protest
• framing
• politicization

Acknowledgments

Jan Matti Dollbaum acknowledges that his part of this publication has been produced as part of the research project “Comparing protest actions in Soviet and post-Soviet spaces”, which is organized by the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen with financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation, which is not affiliated to the car maker of the same name.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research University Higher School of Economics; Elena Sirotkina's part of the article was prepared within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and supported within the framework of a subsidy by the Russian Academic Excellence Project '5-100'; Volkswagen Foundation;

Notes on contributors

Jan Matti Dollbaum

Jan Matti Dollbaum is a PhD candidate at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen. His research focuses on the consequences of social and political movements in hybrid and authoritarian contexts and the stability of authoritarian regimes.

Andrey Semenov

Andrei Semenov is currently the director of the Center for Comparative History and Politics at Perm State University. His research interests encompass comparative politics, political mobilization, social movements, parties, and elections in authoritarian regimes.

Elena Sirotkina

Elena Sirotkina is junior research fellow in the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR) at the Higher School of Economics. Among her research interests are blame attribution in authoritarian regimes, research methodology within an authoritarian framework, and problems of collective action organization.