From Economic Crisis to Political Crisis?: Changing Middle Class Political Attitudes in Moscow and St. Petersburg, 2008-2012

This paper examines why the middle class of Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, suddenly began protesting in large numbers during the 2011-2012 electoral cycle by assessing longer-term changes in the political attitudes of the professional middle class. This study analyzes three interrelated hypotheses to address this question: the impact of the global financial crisis, attitudes about liberal-democratic concerns, and views on government effectiveness. These trends are examined using data of responses to the survey question “What is the most important problem for the country?”, in 9 surveys conducted between March 2008 and March 2012. Corruption and red tape, the standard of living, housing and utilities, healthcare and education were of increasing concern to middle class groups in this period. The concerns of the middle class were not significantly different from those of the general population, but the middle class and particularly residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg were more critical when assessing all problems. Comparison with additional data demonstrates that participants in the 2011-2012 protests in the major cities shared similar concerns with the general population, but for most, participation in the protests made them significantly more interested in democracy

Protest Mobilization, Concessions, and Policy Change in Autocracies

Concessions are the crucially important benefits that individuals seek when they decide to participate in collective action, yet they are poorly understood. In particular, it remains unclear why authoritarian governments, which rely on coercion to maintain control, promise concessions to protests that do not pose a revolutionary threat, despite the frequency with which this occurs. Even less is understood about the extent to which those promises are fulfilled once protest ends. I advance our understanding of when protest campaigns achieve the promise of concessions from autocratic governments and when those promises produce real-world policy change. To do so, I address three questions: (1) Under what conditions do autocratic governments concede to protesters' demands?; (2) How do concessions affect mobilization? and (3) How does reneging occur and how does it affect protest campaigns? In Chapter 2, I provide an original conceptualization of concessions that defines concessions as a response to collective action that occurs when an agent of authority makes a public commitment to initiate a policy change that will potentially yield some benefit to protesters. I establish concessions as a process of policy change, rather than an instantaneous event. The lags in this process can allow for the government to renege, or deliberately fail to implement the promised concession. Though previously overlooked, reneging is a key element of how authoritarian governments use concessions, particularly given the weakness of commitment mechanisms in these settings. To understand how concessions are used, I shift focus from commonly-studied revolutionary protest campaigns to what I call everyday protest campaigns, which driven by policy-specific demands. Chapter 3 covers my novel approach to collecting quantitative data on concessions. I also present my original database, the Protest Campaigns of Moscow database, which contains data about everyday protest campaigns operating in Moscow, Russia, from 2013-2018, that made demands of the local government. I present empirical analysis in chapters four through six. In Chapter 4, I consider the conditions under which the Moscow government responds to protest with concessions and repression. I find that when everyday protest campaigns convey new information about grievances to the government, repression is less severe, concessions are common and reneging is rare. In contrast, when the government has sufficient information to anticipate protest, it deploys more severe repression and reneging is common. I illustrate these campaign types with empirical examples, and use regression analysis to test hypotheses. In Chapter 5 I motivate new theories about the link between concessions and demobilization. I find strong evidence that these concessions are associated with an immediate decline in mobilization, and that concessions are more demobilizing than detentions. This association is stronger when concessions correspond more closely to the campaign's core demands. This demobilizing effect also appears conditioned on the campaign event history prior to the concession, which is in turn likely tied to the government's motivations in making concessionary promises. Chapter 6 focuses on reneging. In most cases, reneging is immediate and the concession is never implemented. To illuminate this dynamic, I present a case study of the protest campaign to prevent construction near a park. Last, I analyze interviews that I conducted with urban activists in Moscow in 2018 and 2019 to demonstrate that they largely distrust the Moscow government and see its promises as a manipulation, though they believe the general public feels differently.PHDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169838/1/sldv_1.pd

A Good Restaurant is No Longer Enough: Political Demand and Moscow’s Middle Class Opposition

The protests held in Moscow, Russia between the December 2011 Duma elections and the March 2012 Presidential elections attracted unprecedentedly large crowds (from 5,000-100,000 participants) that were in part the result of the emergence of a new set of organizers—a group of young, media-savvy, socially networked hipsters. These young people were able to employ social networking and extensive personal networks to organize and publicize the rallies. The first part of this paper traces the formation of this unlikely coalition by looking closely at the organization of the December 5 and December 10 rallies. Drawing on interviews conducted with key actors and published accounts of the protests, it will examine how young new political actors began to work with established opposition leaders, whose politics they did not support and who had not been successful at attracting an audience to their rallies. It highlights systemic factors that could have led to the cooperation of the liberal and left groups. It concludes with a brief summary of the establishment of the For Fair Elections in mid-December. The second part of this paper uses statistical data gathered at the December 24 and February 4 demonstrations to establish that the participants of the protest were members of the pro-modernization urban middle class. In an attempt to elucidate the motivations for thousands of formerly apolitical people attended rallies held by oppositionists they did not support, this section assesses the political position and rising significance of the Russia’s increasingly isolated middle class. Finally, conclusions are drawn as to how the fragile political coalition and the newly politically active urban middle class can move forward to effect political change in Russia

Reneging and the subversion of protest-driven policy change in autocracies

In autocracies, low-capacity protest campaigns that lack material and political resources are common, but these weaknesses make them vulnerable to reneging – the deliberate failure to implement concessions as promised. Reneging is critical to how and whether protests actually influence policy. Why are some autocratic concessions to low-capacity campaigns undermined by reneging? I argue concessions are most likely to be implemented when they matter least for meaningfully altering policy. Concessions that provide isolated conflict resolution without constraining state actors elsewhere are more likely to be implemented, while reneging affects concessions that would constrain state agents elsewhere. I find support for this argument using an original dataset of low-capacity protest campaigns in Moscow, Russia, from 2013 to 2018, which includes a novel approach to concessions data. Additionally, I show that reneging is less likely when the campaign demobilizes after the concession, though the effect on constraining concessions is limited. I also address why campaigns about some issues, like labour disputes, experience less reneging, and show that concessions from higher levels of government are just as prone to reneging as lower levels. This article advances scholarship on authoritarian responsiveness and non-violent political control by highlighting reneging as an overlooked response to protest.</p

Coronal Heating as Determined by the Solar Flare Frequency Distribution Obtained by Aggregating Case Studies

Flare frequency distributions represent a key approach to addressing one of the largest problems in solar and stellar physics: determining the mechanism that counter-intuitively heats coronae to temperatures that are orders of magnitude hotter than the corresponding photospheres. It is widely accepted that the magnetic field is responsible for the heating, but there are two competing mechanisms that could explain it: nanoflares or Alfv\'en waves. To date, neither can be directly observed. Nanoflares are, by definition, extremely small, but their aggregate energy release could represent a substantial heating mechanism, presuming they are sufficiently abundant. One way to test this presumption is via the flare frequency distribution, which describes how often flares of various energies occur. If the slope of the power law fitting the flare frequency distribution is above a critical threshold, $\alpha=2$ as established in prior literature, then there should be a sufficient abundance of nanoflares to explain coronal heating. We performed $>$600 case studies of solar flares, made possible by an unprecedented number of data analysts via three semesters of an undergraduate physics laboratory course. This allowed us to include two crucial, but nontrivial, analysis methods: pre-flare baseline subtraction and computation of the flare energy, which requires determining flare start and stop times. We aggregated the results of these analyses into a statistical study to determine that $\alpha = 1.63 \pm 0.03$. This is below the critical threshold, suggesting that Alfv\'en waves are an important driver of coronal heating.Comment: 1,002 authors, 14 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, published by The Astrophysical Journal on 2023-05-09, volume 948, page 7