Fragmented Protest and Electoral Fraud: A Spatial Theory of Competitive Authoritarian Regime Uncertainty

Paper submitted for panel: Getting elections right? New perspectives on explaining election integrity. Does mass protest mitigate or encourage electoral fraud? And does fraud have a constraining or enabling effect on post-electoral protest? Despite the known implications of fraud-inspired protests for competitive authoritarian regime uncertainty, there is a paucity of theorizing and empirical scholarship on the interaction between these two variables. We develop such a theory and test it by analysing author gathered data for 5,000 regional protests, and voting results for 95,415 precincts in Russia’s 2012 Presidential elections. We find that sub-national authorities moderated fraud in response to street rallies, while local fraud tended to encourage post-electoral protests.