Social Movements in Russian Politics: Changing Menu of Electoral Manipulations

This paper seeks to investigate the influence of the civil society actors on the political institutions in a non-democratic environment. As one of the most important parts of civil society, social movements' activism brought significant changes to the political institutions in countries of the Eastern Europe. This study in particular addresses the issues of electoral observation in Russia and changes in fraud strategies caused by the civic monitoring of electoral processes. The research on the role of observers in non-democratic states indicates that electoral monitoring cannot stop manipulations but makes incumbents change their toolkit or reallocate fraud. The evidence for the previous studies in this field comes predominantly from the hybrid regimes, which allow domestic and international monitoring to demonstrate their commitment to the democratic norms (for example, because of their interest in foreign donations). In Russia, on the other hand, foreign democracy promotion missions have minimal influence on the national and foreign politics. The mobilization wave that had spread across different regions of the world had echoed in Russian society, but failed to bring democratic changes. Moreover, as a respond, the regime has gradually rolled back to authoritarianism. Nonetheless, some large cities retain relatively high levels of civic participation and active electoral monitoring movements and organizations. At the same time, the limited influence of the foreign players and relative isolation of civil society actors crystallizes the patterns of interactions between the social movements and authoritarian state. Looking at the 'Observers for Fair Elections' Movement in Saint Petersburg and data from the electoral cycle 2012-2016 I compare the strategies of electoral manipulations reported by the activists and document their evolution since the social movement started. Through the means of structured analysis, I show that the presence of local electoral monitors has a significant impact on the menu of electoral manipulations: partly preventing fraud, partly reallocating it. I claim that one of the explanations for this phenomenon is rooted in the movement's strategies of monitoring and levels of its institutionalization. Thus, the present research is aimed at studying outcomes of social movements' efforts to influence electoral institutions in autocratic states.