| This is a study of collective action in an electoral authoritarian regime. I show how a combination of weak institutions, the absence of the rule of law, and an inherited institutional architecture in which leaders of popular sector organizations share common interests with local elites can generate elite manipulation of popular protest for narrow ends. In general this leads to demobilization of protest and great difficulties in building autonomous social movements. However, under specifiable circumstances, regional elites have incentives to help solve collective action problems, and so facilitate high levels of popular mobilization. I develop and test a theory of elite manipulation that sees political relations between the center and the regions, political competition and strategic bargaining power as key determinants of levels of protest mobilization. Using original data on protest in the Russian Federation in the 1990s, I show that protest is heavily concentrated in a small number of politically weak regions whose governors have poor relations with the center. By placing the events into their institutional context, and looking more closely at particular local and regional political instantiations, I trace the process in action. These findings have important consequences for interest representation in electoral authoritarian regime, as well as for literatures on collective action, contentious politics, democratization, post-Communism and the study of Russian politics. |
