Effectiveness of Protest Group's Activity: Indicators and Their Testing

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of contemporary protest in Russia. The authors attempt to identify key indicators of the effectiveness of the activities of protest groups, carrying out the operationalization of indicators that affect the success of the functioning of protest groups. The key indicators were: the number of participants, the number of protest actions, the number of media references, coverage of the conflict, duration of existence, involvement (internal and external), activity in communities in social networks, the degree of solving of the problem. Authors analyze activities in 4 protest campaigns: the public movement “For the Park Torfianka!”, “All-Russia movement of foreign currency borrowers”, protests of miners from the city of Gukovo and protest actions in support of the film “He’s not Dimon”. For the analysis we used Google Trends data and Yandex statistics, the software product Popsters for analyzing protesters` activity in social networks. The article concludes that the practice of protest campaigns in modern Russia demonstrates that the activity of citizens can be successful and bring results in solving those problems that have caused their self-organization. The analysis of protest campaigns in modern Russia has shown that each movement has its own unique tools, there is no single organizational model, each movement operates in accordance with internal resources and specifics, determining its own ways and methods of achieving the objectives. Features of the functioning and management of protest groups were demonstrated in the paper. In the process of analysis, it was possible to identify the advantages (high mobilization component, duration of protest activities, broad geography of the conflict, a large number of protest actions, high level of operational communication, etc.) and shortcomings (lack of broad support from political parties, lack of proper support from the state and local authorities, the lack of coverage of the conflict in reports on federal news channels, etc.) organization of these protest campaigns.

Acknowledgements

The study was carried out through the financial support of the Russian Fund of Fundamental Research (RFFR), project No. 17-33-01022 (a2) "Modeling and indexing of protest activity in the subjects of the Russian Federation".