When do political parties join protests? A comparative analysis of party involvement in “for fair elections” movement

ABSTRACT

Why do some political parties join popular protests, whereas others abstain or even oppose them? Using a paired case-study comparison between the Russian regions, we examine political parties’ strategies towards the “For Fair Elections” movement in 2011–2012 and explain these choices through two jointly operating mechanisms: level of party institutionalisation; and co-optation. We show that despite the symbiosis of the state and political parties and overall parties’ loyalty to the regime, they differ in strategy and degree of involvement in social movements on an organisational level. We argue that the mechanism of party institutionalisation explains the switch between involvement and abstention, while co-optation does a better job in explaining the “support/counteract” choice.

KEYWORDS:

• Political parties
• social movements
• contentious politics
• sub-national politics
• political mobilisation
• Russia

Acknowledgments

We thank participants of “(Dis)Satisfaction with Democracy and Citizens’ Involvement in Post-Communist Europe” workshop at CBEES Södertörn University for comments and questions, Nicholas Aylott, Sergiu Gherghina, and Olena Podolyan for valuable help with article, and Igor Skulkin for the data on electoral forensics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Andrey Semenov is Candidate of Political Science, Senior Researcher, Center for Comparative History and Politics Studies, Perm State University.

Olesya Lobanova is Junior Researcher, Russian Academy of Sciences, Ph.D. Candidate, Perm State University.

Margarita Zavadskaya is Senior lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Higher School of Economics, Research fellow, Centre for Comparative History and Politics Studies, Perm State University.

ORCID

Andrey Semenov http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5127-4314

Margarita Zavadskaya http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3728-4073

Notes

1. The coding procedure and measurement details are available in the Appendix.

2. For instance, politics in Perm prior to 2011 was characterised by the confrontation of the Governor's clientele with other interest groups gathered under the “United Russia” umbrella (Kynev and Lyubarev 2006; Alexandrov 2010).

3. We use this indicator instead of the simple incumbent's vote share, because the vote share increases with the turnout if ballot stuffing takes place. Therefore, it is not a reliable measure. Beta coefficients bigger than one (i.e. the trend line's slope is more than 45°) likely indicate that some ballots had been shuffled from one pile to another during the vote count.

4. ONF is a hand-picked ‘umbrella’ organisation founded in 2011 as an electoral vehicle before the electoral campaign of 2011–2012.