Nonviolent Repression in Electoral Autocracies

Contemporary autocrats, such as Russia's Vladimir Putin, and Turkey's Tayyip Erdogan are said to rule by 'velvet fist'. Instead of relying on Stalinist methods of brutal repression, they use the law to manage protests. Understanding how nonviolent strategies of repression influence authoritarian stability and democratic retrenchment constitutes one of the most pressing and policy relevant challenges facing political science today. Yet, comparative politics research remains focused on authoritarianism's variants from several decades ago. While studies of authoritarian politics are beholden to analyses of repression that examine brutal force and coercion, nonviolent repression strategies remain poorly understood. To date, for example, researchers (and policy makers) know little about the effect of draconian protest laws on opposition and voter coordination in nondemocratic regimes.

This project studies how one commonly used, yet poorly understood strategy of nonviolent repression - the use of protest notifications - influences coordination between different types of opposition parties and voters in electoral autocracies. Electoral autocracies are regimes that combine authoritarian practices with multiparty elections and the dominant form of nondemocracy today. This is the first study to empirically tackle the effect of nonviolent repression on opposition parties and voters in these regimes. I propose that while opposition and voter coordination is an important component of successful collective action, the ability to form coalitions in electoral autocracies is strongly shaped by the ruling regime. Protest notifications are a powerful and insidious tool that allows autocrats to divide their opponents. Under certain conditions, I argue, protest notifications can prevent coordination between 'extremist' and 'moderate' opposition groups, dampening popular support for the organisers of unauthorised protests, those that go ahead without a permit. The argument helps us better understand how repression operates in contemporary autocracies, and why, in order to prevent opposition and voter coordination, governments with the capacity to prevent protests often commit to repression strategies that create weak deterrence incentives.

The project's theoretical focus allows me to discuss the preferences and constraints of key groups in authoritarian politics - those of the authorities, 'extremist' and 'moderate' opposition groups, and voters. To test the effect of protest notifications on opposition and voter coordination, I will leverage empirical evidence from contemporary Russia. Russia is a country of great importance for British and EU foreign policy, and of the world's largest and most influential electoral autocracies. Building on two successful pilot studies, I will produce two new datasets. The first dataset will collect information on protest notifications submitted to city authorities, and match this information to news about authorised and unauthorised protests taking place in Russia from January 2019 to March 2024. Using this dataset, I will test whether the probability of two or more 'moderate' and 'extremist' opposition groups (i) co-signing a protest notification, and (ii) participating in the same protest changes as a function of prior levels of nonviolent repression. I will also collect original survey data that allow me to study voters' views of 'extremist' and 'moderate' opposition parties and activists, and their propensity to participate in protests with groups and activists perceived as either 'extremists' or 'moderates'.

The project is interdisciplinary in nature. It builds on, and impacts research on comparative politics and sociology; social psychology and political behaviour; and survey methodology. Beyond academia, findings will be of interest to institutions and organisations that monitory human rights' violations and changes in civic spaces around the world - such as Civicus and Human Rights Watch.