4.5.12, Bottom-Up and Top-Down, Main Hall: Role of social media in political mobilization in Russia (Anna Litvinenko) #CeDEM12

1. Role of social media in political
mobilization in Russia
(on the example of parliamentary
elections 2011)
Dr. Anna Litvinenko,
St. Petersburg State University

2. „The Web That Failed“ (Fossato, 2010)
“despite the presence of the internet,
Russia has remained a relatively
authoritarian state in which political
parties and grass-roots organizations
have had little role to play” (Oates,
S., 2008, p.2).

3. Social mobilization in Russia
 “Organization leaders and political judgments are
an important way in which the soviet experience
continues to shape post/soviet state/society
interactions. … more specifically, activists redeploy
their preexisting beliefs, networks and resources in
the post-soviet context to construct organizations
and build relationships. … (Henry 2010)
 Started 2008 with local cases, solving practical
problems; has increased enormously since 2010.

4. Movement „For Fair Elections“

5. Portrait of protesters
 most of the registered people for the rallies
were from 18 to 28 years old with the peak
figures in the age group from 23 to 24
 31 percent of protesters in Moscow were
between 25 and 39 years old, and 25
percent between 18 and 24. They were
mostly well-educated, middle-class people;
the urban elite. (poll during the second big
rally in Moscow, on the 24th December,
Levada-centre, 2011)

6. “Digital natives” in Russia
 “Generation Z” (Hawkins P., Schmidt L.
2008) – young people who don’t
remember life without Internet and who
were media-socialized already in the
digital age, have come into their own
 historic “switch” of generations in Russia

7. “Modern Performers” and “Post-
Materialists” (classification of
the Sinus-Institute).

8. Participation divide
 50 million Internet users in September 2011
 it is still only one-third of the Russian population.
 But even if people are online or using blogs, most of
them are hardly interested in politics (Etling, Alexanyan,
Kelly, Faris, Palfrey, Gasser 2010), which correlates with
the international patterns of internet usage (Castells 2007).
 Russian Facebook, which can be considered as a core
“meeting point” political opposition has 9 million users.

9. Two information „worlds“
 it is challenging for acute political topics to
make a spill-over from the blogosphere to
traditional media, especially to state-
controlled TV-channels
 if they do manage it, then these topics get
a certain political spin that matches with
the usual news framing of these TV-
channels.
 Still no ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick
2011) in Russia

10. Role of social media:
 Thanks to the ease of political participation via
the Internet, political activism is facilitated
 The spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann 1993)
works as well in the social networking sites,
facilitates spill-over from online-
communication to offline-activism

11. New role of traditional media
 Journalists as activists and
opinion leaders
 Content providers for discussion
in social media

12. Conclusion
There are significant changes going on in the Russia
public sphere due to the usage of social media in
political communication. It is not appropriate to talk
about “a revolution,” because only a relatively small
part of the population takes part in the oppositional
discourse, but there are definitely some signs of an
evolution towards democratization to be seen,
although a more exact prognosis of the future
development can be given only after the evaluation of
the evolution of the protest movement after the
presidential elections in March 2012.

13. Thank you for
your attention!
Anna Litvinenko, PhD
litvinanna@mail.ru