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Anti-Corruption Protests and University Students: Evidence from Russian Cities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2021

Olena Nikolayenko Open the ORCID record for Olena Nikolayenko [Opens in a new window]
Olena Nikolayenko*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Fordham University, New York, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: onikolayenko@fordham.edu
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Abstract

There are conflicting theoretical expectations regarding students' protest behaviour in contemporary autocracies. On the one hand, in line with a resource model of political participation, university students are more likely to protest than their peers without higher education. On the other hand, university students in autocracies might refrain from high-risk activism in exchange for their own financial well-being and career advancement. To address this debate, the article leverages data on anti-corruption protests organized by the opposition politician Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Results show that anti-corruption protests were larger in Russian cities with a larger university student population. Next, employing individual-level data from the fifth wave of the European Values Survey, multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrates that university students participated in demonstrations at a higher rate than non-students of the same age. More broadly, these findings yield insights into subnational variation in mass mobilization in a repressive political regime.

Keywords

autocracycontentious politicscorruptionprotestsuniversity studentsRussia

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Article
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Government and Opposition , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , April 2023 , pp. 207 - 226
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Government and Opposition Limited

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