Yana Gorokhovskaia, Ph.D.
gorokhovskaia@gmail.com
Columbia University
About Me:
I do qualitative and quantitative research on civil society and elections in Russia.
Research Interests
Comparative Democratization
Non-Democratic Regimes
Post-Communist Politics
Comparative Political Institutions
Publications:
Journal Articles:
This paper examines how the political opposition innovated strategies to overcome obstacles presented by Russia’s uneven electoral playing field. Using evidence from two municipal elections in Moscow, I argue that members of the opposition have coordinated around local contests in response to political opportunities created by the Kremlin, including the anti-electoral fraud protests of the winter of 2011–2012 and the resurrection of gubernatorial elections in 2012. Following these openings, grassroots electoral initiatives recruited and trained opposition-minded individuals, first focusing on established activists and then on politicized individuals, to run for municipal council seats. The campaigns provided training using ad hoc educational seminars and later developed electronic tools that lowered barriers to political participation. As a result of these campaigns, electoral competition has boomed at the local level in Moscow even as regional and national contests have become less competitive. The campaigns demonstrate the continued vulnerability of authoritarian regimes that rely on elections for political legitimacy. Furthermore, the development of highly portable online tools for campaigning has potentially longterm democratizing consequences.
Conventional wisdom holds that civil society is a sphere of activity separate from the state and the private realm. Due to a combination of historical, developmental and institutional factors, Russian civil society today is dominated by the state. While not all interactions with the state are seen as harmful, scholars acknowledge that most politically oriented or oppositional non-governmental organizations today face difficult conditions in Russia. In response to the restrictions on civil society and the unresponsive nature of Russia’s hybrid authoritarian regime, some civil society actors in Moscow have made the transition into organized politics at the local level. This transition was motivated by their desire to solve local problems and was facilitated by independent electoral initiatives which provided timely training and support for opposition political candidates running in municipal elections. Once elected, these activists turned municipal deputies are able to perform some of the functions traditionally ascribed to civil society, including enforcing greater accountability and transparency from the state and defending the interest of citizens.
What drives electoral competition in competitive authoritarian regimes? Most scholarship has assumed that the outcome of these elections is decided by regime manipulation alone. Using three rounds of newly reinstated gubernatorial elections in Russia’s regions, I test this assumption. I identify three distinct measures of competition calibrated to authoritarian elections and assess whether voter preferences or regime manipulation best explain the degree of electoral competition. Relying on new data on protests across Russia’s regions, I find that regions with high protest activity have more contested elections with narrower margins of victory. The results also confirm recent scholarship highlighting the importance of voter turnout for delivering pro-regime victories.
Other:
New independent municipal deputies embody the new face of Russian politics and confirm the vibrancy of Russian society at the grassroots level, helping to make up for the failure of state structures to come up with innovative solutions.
On Monday, President Donald Trump will meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. This summit ― their first bilateral meeting ― is unlikely to produce a significant shift in U.S.-Russia relations, but it will be symbolically important for both leaders.
Scholarly attention to Russia’s civil society is often driven by headlines. Cycles of protest and repression energize debate over whether Russian civil society is dormant, qualitatively different in form from its Western counterparts, or a possible threat to the regime. Policy debates, meanwhile, are dominated by concerns over Russian laws restricting the activity and funding of nongovernmental organizations and what the future of democracy aid will look like when democracy promotion is no longer a foreign policy priority for the United States. Meanwhile, in Moscow, opposition-minded individuals are quietly working to get elected to municipal government with the help of civic initiatives. Over the last five years, seats held by opposition deputies on Moscow’s district councils have increased almost four-fold and the number of opposition candidates running in municipal elections has increased from two hundred in 2012 to over a thousand in 2017. Moscow’s well-organized and local-issue-focused opposition municipal deputies are developing effective electoral strategies. Their experience is an example of the possibilities for democratization in an electoral authoritarian regime and may have a lasting impact on Russia’s political system.
An analysis of why opposition participation in local elections in Russia matters.
How will Vladimir Putin compete in the 2018 presidential election?