Can pro-government rallies actually weaken autocrats? Survey evidence from Belarus and Russia

Modern-day autocracies often mobilize citizens and organize rallies to signal the regime’s strength. Oftentimes, such rallies take place around elections and function as a response to anti-regime protests. This paper seeks to answer the questions of whether and when pro-government rallies actually backfire and signal the regime’s lack of popular support. It relies on evidence collected in two survey experiments conducted in Belarus and Russia, which have experienced substantial waves of pro-regime and election-related mobilization. The results show that information that participants are coerced into attending pro-government rallies or receive material inducements for such participation may indeed diminish the perceived popularity of an authoritarian regime. Furthermore, coercion in the workplace has the strongest negative effect. However, the effects are heterogenous and mainly differ along the dimension of regime support. In the Russian experiment, regime opponents updated their priors about Putin’s popularity to a lesser degree than regime supporters, especially moderate ones, while in the Belarusian experiment those with neutral political views were the most susceptible to the treatments. The findings demonstrate that autocrats’ efforts to look popular can ironically weaken them, especially when taking into consideration that social media now make it easier to reveal the true nature of such efforts.