Competitive authoritarian regime: tactics of opposition actors

Varieties of modern nondemocratic electoral political regimes is determined by institutional, structural, actor-oriented (procedural) differences between «the new autocracies». The trajectories of political transformation and regime changes in these hybrids depend largely on the specifi c political decisions and actions of key political actors in the process of democratization. This article analyzes the actions of the opposition from the angle of mobilization and cooperation as «winning» tactics in the electoral competitive nondemocratic regimes. The empirical part of the article includes: 1) forming a public protests database in the electoral cycle of 2015 (January-September) in the Central Federal District of Russia, which includes the regional authority elections, members of regional and local legislatures; 2) statistical processing of data of opposition’s participation / nonparticipation in public protests, number of protesters, opposition cooperative actions, issues of protests; 3) designing and measuring empirically observable features of protests make it possible to segment the public protest activity into 2 basic parts: civic activity and mobilization activity – and then to analyze the scope of cooperation of various opposition parties in mobilization actions. These results make it possible to answer the following questions: to what extent Russian opposition actors use public protest activity as mobilization resource and to what extent they are prepared for cooperation in a public protest fi eld?

democratization, electoral regime, competitive authoritarian regime, opposition, civil society

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