How do autocrats use formally democratic institutions to guard against challenges to their rule? Recent research has shown that parliaments play a role in stabilizing authoritarian regimes. Two broad mechanisms can be distinguished: first, parliaments allow part of the opposition to represent their constituents, thus providing the regime with greater legitimacy. Second, parliaments help to distribute spoils to regime outsiders. The personal benefits of being a deputy incentivises opposition elites to keep their supporters off the streets, reducing the risk of overthrow by popular protests. While plausible in theory, both mechanisms are difficult to test empirically. The case of the 83 Russian regions, however, presents an excellent opportunity to overcome this challenge. Building upon an innovative combination of two new data sets, this study investigates co-optation schemes in Russia’s regional parliaments and their effect on anti-regime protest conducted by three parliamentary opposition parties.
While the literature holds that these parties (the Communists, the Liberal Democrats and the social democratic party Just Russia) are incorporated in the regime through clientelist networks and personal relations with the ruling elite, their actual behaviour has seldom been studied systematically - much less so in the regions. On the basis of over 1500 detailed accounts of more than 500 protest events between December 2011 and March 2012, the study investigates the relationship between co-optation of party elites and their protest mobilization. Co-optation is measured by the number of lucrative posts (committee chairs or vice speakerships) that a party holds in the regional legislature. Protest mobilization is captured by three separate variables: 1) the number of protest events organized by the party, 2) the number of protest events that party activists actually attend, and 3) the aggregate number of party activists present at protest events in a region. This new approach allows first tentative inference on what exactly elite co-optation is able to achieve: does it only prevent a party from organizing its own demonstrations or does it really keep the rank and file off the streets?
Interestingly, the three parties show different patterns. Concerning the Communists, the investigation finds that co-optation has an effect on the number of protest events organized by the party, yet it has little bearing on the behaviour of the rank and file. By contrast, where regional elites of the Liberal Democrats and Just Russia are co-opted, this partially affects the number of organized events and the number of party activists showing up at demonstrations. This lends evidence to the hypothesis that Communist party activists are more autonomous from their party leadership than the activists of the other parties under study. Furthermore, it illuminates the limits of stabilizing effects of authoritarian institutions.
