Regional protest and electoral fraud: evidence from analysis of new data on Russian protest

Does electoral fraud encourage citizen post-electoral political protest? Much of the scholarship on electoral protests has focused on nationally-prominent street rallies occurring in national capitals. By contrast, the proclivity of citizens to pick up on fraud perpetrated in the sub-national region in which they reside and vote, and to challenge it by engaging in street rallies in provincial towns, has remained under-researched. To nuance existing scholarship, we analyse the likelihood that local citizens would pick up on electoral irregularities perpetrated in their locality / region and engage in post-electoral protest. Specifically, we analyse author-gathered data for some 5,000 regional protests, and voting results for 95,415 precincts in Russia’s 2012 Presidential elections. These data, which we aggregate at the level of the regions, cover virtually all of the eighty-five constituent subjects (regions) of the Russian Federation. We find that local fraud is associated with post-electoral protests. Our analysis has important theoretical and policy implications. Protests that not only target specific issues like fraud, but show awareness of specific precincts in which it had been perpetrated, and can name and shame its concrete perpetrators, can be much more effective than those where blame attribution is vague and generic.