Protests and the political capital of anti-systemic opposition in Russia, using the example of Aleksey Navalny’s 2017 anti-regime protests
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to identify the extent to which anti-regime protests in Russia aid the anti-systemic opposition in building its political capital. The Russian authoritarian system limits participation in the political life for genuine opponents of the Kremlin, thus one way to present their objections to those in power is to organise protests and to attempt to mobilise as many citizens as possible around political slogans. Our example will be the protests organised by Aleksey Navalny and his associates in March, June and October of 2017. Protests from March and June are against corruption while the October protest concerns support for Alexey Navalny as a presidential candidate. This diversification of the subject of the protests allows to specify to what extent the protests’ slogans initiated by the same organizer determine public support for street action and influence the political capital of the leader of the protests. It should be remembered that due to the difficulties in precisely defining the level of the political capital of a particular politician, it seems essential to capture the trend of it, i.e. whether a given decision, policy action increased or decreased his political capital. Evaluation of the political capital of Alexei Navalny was based on such parameters as knowledge, skills, attitudes, closeness to those in power and personal resources.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/we.2020.6.1.91-111
Date of publication: 2020-07-20 13:55:55
Date of submission: 2020-01-29 14:43:10
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