New social movements in Russia: A challenge to the dominant model of power relationships?

Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics

Volumn 24, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 68-89

  Clément, Karine ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 39349085745     PISSN: 13523279     EISSN: 17439116     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13523270701840472     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Since the middle of the 1990s sociological polls show a constant high level of distrust towards other people in the society (at the end of 2006 about 74 per cent of respondents thought that 'with people you have to be careful' and only 22 per cent that 'people can be trusted', whereas in 1991 the corresponding proportions were 41 and 36 per cent):
2. see Civil Chamber of the Russian Federation, 'O sostoyanii grazhdanskogo obshchestva v rossiiskoi federatsii 2006 g.' (On Civil Society in the Russian Federation in 2006), available at , accessed 21 Nov. 2007.
3. By social movements we mean every kind of collective action provided by any kind of networks which have a certain regularity, are sustained by some co-ordinating or organizational bodies and advance some general claims about social and political issues. We have especially been paying attention to two mass movements: The movement of pensioners against the reform of the social benefits system, and the movement of 'housing activists' in connection with the so-called 'communal' reform.
4. The data provided by the monitoring of collective actions and their observation is both quantitative and qualitative. It includes weekly statistics of the number of collective actions and participation in them (arranged thematically according to the field of protest), observation reports on activists in action - in a meeting, conference, demonstration and so on (which can be matched with the activists' discourses), and self-reflection on experiences of participant observation by several sociologists who are at the same time activists (observer participants).
5. From summer 2002 to summer 2003 only 9 per cent of the respondents took part in any form of collective social actions, and from 1989 up to 2003 only 27 per cent. Figures are from FOM (Fondobshchestvennoe mnenie': Public Opinion Foundation), VTsIOM (Vserossiiskii Tsentr Izucheniya Obshchestvennogo Mneniya: Russian Public Opinion Research Center),
6. Levada Centre, cited by Vladimir Rimski, 'Tseli i motivy politicheskogo i obshchestvennogo uchastiya rossiiskikh grazhdan' (Purposes and Motivations for Russian Citizens' Political and Social Participation), Foundation INDEM (Information Science for Democracy), 2007, at , accessed 21 Nov. 2007.
7. See also monthly press releases of the Levada Centre about the social and political situation in Russia, at . However, in the past few years we can observe a growing number of participants in collective actions, especially in winter 2005.
8. In January-February 2005 some 500,000 people participated in massive demonstrations across Russia for the defence of the social benefits system. It was the most massive social upheaval in the past decade. Afterwards, protest actions and other non-institutional forms of citizens' mobilization happened more frequently, but at a micro-level. Monitoring of collective action conducted by IKD shows an average of about 10,000 participants per week in collective actions from the beginning of 2006 to March 2007. The problem is that except for the 'pensioners' upheaval', sociological polls are not able to fix such a microsociological phenomenon as the growth of scattered collective actions on a lesser scale.
9. Their data show a maximum of 1-3 per cent of the population being involved in protest actions. The only way to catch the trend is to choose activist networks as a preferential polling target. An attempt to do so can be found in Sergei Patrushev (ed.), 'Sotsial'nye seti doveriya, massovye dvizheniya i instituty politicheskogo predstavitel'stva: Opyt 'starykh' i 'novykh' demokratii v usloviyakh globalizatsii' (Social Networks of Trust, Mass Movements and Institutions of Political Representation: Experience of 'Old' and 'New' Democracies), research paper (Moscow, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2007).
10. See his introduction to the present collection, entitled 'Putting Administrative Reform in a Broader Context of Power'.
11. Levada Centre, 9 April 2007, 'Doverie institutam vlasti' (Trust in Power Institutions), at , accessed 21 Nov. 2007.
12. Sergei Patrushev (ed.), Institutsional'naya politologiya (Institutional Political Science) (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2006).
13. 13 Sept. 2006. 'Otnoshenie k presidentu V. Putinu' (The Relation to President V. Putin), in Social'no-politicheskaya situatsiya v Rossii v avguste 2006 goda, at , accessed 21 Nov. 2007.
14. Karine Clément, 'Formal'nye i neformal'nye pravila: Kakov optimum?' (Formal and Informal Rules: What is the Optimum?), in Vladimir Yadov (ed.), Stanovlenie trudovykh otnoshenii v postsovetskoi Rossii (Moscow: Academicheskii Proekt, 2004), pp.135-92.
15. Richard Rose, 'What Does Social Capital Add to Individual Welfare? An Empirical Analysis of Russia', Studies in Public Policy, No.318 (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 1999).
16. Aleksandr Khlopin, 'Grazhdanskoe obshchestvo ili sotsium klik: rossiiskaya dilemma' (Civil Society or Cliques: Russian Dilemma), Politiya, No.3 (1997), pp.5-26.
17. Rose, 'What Does Social Capital Add to Individual Welfare?'
18. For information on the European Social Survey, see , accessed 26 Oct. 2007.
19. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
20. For more factual information about these movements see Karine Clément, 'La contestation de gauche et les mouvements sociaux émergents' (Paris: CERI, 2006), at , accessed 27 Oct. 2007.
21. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency. 1930-1970 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
22. Charles Kurzman, 'Structural and Perceived Opportunity: The Iranian Revolution of 1979',
23. in Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper (eds.), The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp.38-48.
24. Ibid., p.112.
25. Pierre Bourdieu 'Le capital social. Notes provisoires', Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, Vol.31 (Jan. 1980), pp.2-3.
26. Russel Hardin, 'Conceptions and Explanations of Trust', in K.S. Cook (ed.), Trust in Society (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001), pp.3-39.
27. Piotr Sztompka, Trust: A Sociological Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
28. Ibid., p.22.
29. Ibid., p.69.
30. Eric M. Uslaner, 'Producing and Consuming Trust', Political Science Quarterly, Vol.115, No.4 (2000), pp.569-90.
31. Karine Clément, 'Poyavlenie novykh sotsial'nykh dvizhenii v Rossii' (The Emergence of New Social Movements in Russia), in Patrushev (ed.), Institutsional'naya politologiya, pp.229-64.
32. David Croteau, William Haynes and Charlotte Ryan (eds.), Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics and Social Movements (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005);
33. Richard Flacks, 'Knowledge for What? Thoughts on the State of Social Movement Studies', in Goodwin and Jasper (eds.), The Social Movements Reader, pp.135-53.