Abstract
Under what conditions do nation-wide mass protests in authoritarian regimes produce new local activist organizations? Based on sixty-five interviews and over 1,000 media reports, internal documents, and social media posts, I compare the organization-building process in the “For Fair Elections” (FFE) protests of 2011–2012 across four Russian regions. I argue that mass protests are more likely to leave behind new social movement organizations (SMOs) when the local and the national interact, i.e., when long-standing activists on the ground perceive an opportunity to use the protests for their ongoing local struggles. Where new SMOs are established, their composition, activity pattern, and inner structure follow the tactical and organizational repertoires of veteran activists that were shaped by their local political environments. This argument illuminates the functioning of electoral authoritarian regimes from a subnational perspective and identifies conditions under which a bottom-up challenge to an authoritarian political system can drive local civil society development.
Highlights
Under what conditions do nation-wide mass protests in authoritarian regimes produce new local activist organizations? Based on sixty-five interviews and over 1,000 media reports, internal documents, and social media posts, I compare the organization-building process in the “For Fair Elections” (FFE) protests of 2011–2012 across four Russian regions
The “For Fair Elections” (FFE) movement fractured: numerous leaders and activists emigrated, others undertook fruitless attempts at entering the tightly controlled political arena (Lasnier 2018), and many retracted from the public sphere
While classical social movement scholarship assumes that protest cycles produce new organizations (McAdam 1999) that can form the backbone of renewed mobilization (Taylor 1989), Robertson (2011) argues that in hybrid regimes, there may be much protest without accompanying civil society
Summary
In defining the dependent variable, I make use of Ahrne and Brunsson’s (2011) concept of “partial organizing,” since it adequately captures the varieties of meaningful formalization for SMOs that do not officially register as judicial entities. I define organization building as the founding of a new SMO that is visible to the outside and entails clear decisions on membership (Ahrne and Brunsson 2011, 85–87).. The argument proposed later will be embedded in an analytical framework that treats protests as critical junctures (Blee 2012; della Porta 2018).
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