Protest in electoral autocracies: a new dataset

Abstract

A growing literature explores the causes and consequences of dramatic political protests in autocracies. Yet, we know comparatively little about other forms of protests in these regimes. The Lankina Russian Protest-Event Dataset (LAruPED) facilitates the investigation of protest in Russia, a classic example of an electoral authoritarian regime. The data, which are human-coded, identify, in wave one, protests across Russia from March 2007 until 2016. Unlike other datasets, which focus on political protests, LAruPED covers a wide range of social and economic protests and imposes no limitations on the minimum number of protesters involved in events as a prerequisite for inclusion in the dataset. We introduce LAruPED and discuss how it differs from other data. We also present examples from work that leverages the dataset to show how the data could be used to explore questions of authoritarian politics, highlighting variation in the type of suppressed protests in electoral autocracies.